Year: 2012

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Hackthelaw: Piratebox meets Free Law

There are few “down” times in the CALIverse, but the Christmas through New Year holiday break is one of them. I use the time to do updates and upgrades and installs that would be disruptive at other times of the year. I also use the quiet stretches to try out new things. One of the new things I took a shot at this break is building a PirateBox.  A PirateBox is:

 Inspired by pirate radio and the free culture movements, PirateBox utilizes Free, Libre and Open Source software (FLOSS) to create mobile wireless communications and file sharing networks where users can anonymously chat and share images, video, audio, documents, and other digital content.

— http://wiki.daviddarts.com/PirateBox

I grabbed an old Asus Eee PC net book that runs Debian Linux and followed the instructions on the wiki. The setup was pretty straightforward, but it is important to remember that you are disconnecting the wireless on the pc from the Internet and using it to create an access point of its own so once you launch the PirateBox script you no longer have Internet access via wireless. I decided to call my version hackthelaw.

Once I had it up and running there was the matter of content. As it happens I have a lot of free law laying around (occupational hazard). I was casting about for a USB thumb drive to load stuff onto when I remember the great Free Law Reporter thumb drive that we did for CALIcon11. It contains LOTS of court opinions in EPUB format and seemed like a perfect starting point for downloads. I took one of the FLR drives and added all of the eLangdell ebooks (all formats), some choice gov docs from FDsys including the US Code, and the EPUB version of the Delaware state code. I plugged this into hackthelaw and had a very nice collection of law that could be downloaded to anyone who connects to hackthelaw.

If you’re still with me, you’re probably asking yourself, “So, what does all this mean to me?” Well, that’s a good question. The hackthelaw box is an open, anonymous network stocked with primary and secondary legal materials that are freely available for download.  People can connect to the network and download any of the materials as well as chat with others connected to the network. All this is in a closed network space separate from the Internet.  I can easily imagine setting this up in a library as a way for folks to access legal materials and even ask basic questions about the resources.  Any device that has WiFi can connect to the network, so folks could download materials directly to their phones or tablets as well as laptops. Consider hackthelaw as another Free Law access point.

Beyond being a distribution node for Free Law, devices like hackthelaw have potential uses in legal education and practice. A closed private network could be used to distribute and receive law school exams. A professor could launch a network at the beginning of a class to provide students with that day’s material. In practice such a device could be used for gather initial client intake information. In conferences or negotiations a private network could handle the exchange of documents between parties. There are lots of possibilities here, and, as time becomes available, I hope to be looking into some of them in the not too distant future.

If you’re interested, I’ll be running some sort of hackthelaw device at the CALI booth in the AALS exhibit hall in New Orleans, January 4 -6, 2013.

 

 

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Dewald On Blending the First-Year Contracts Classroom At Utah

We wanted the students to watch the videos prior to class. Instead of spending 30 minutes lecturing about the Restatements and then discussing them, the students came to class prepared to do the discussion. This reduced the time necessary in class and also facilitated a deeper discussion.  The time savings was used throughout the semester for more in-class group work. In class time was constructed assuming the students had watched the videos.

via Law School Ed Tech – Blending the First-Year Legal Classroom.

This is a great article and information is carries should serve as an example to law schools on how things should be done. Aaron provides great detail on the background in setting up the contracts course, how the videos were created, and the results from surveying the students who took the course.

The playlist of videos is on YouTube.

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Analysts Sound Death Knell For Dedicated E-Readers, So Multi-Purpose Tablets Win

Selburn said that 2011 appears to have been the peak of the e-reader market, when IHS said that 23.2 million e-readers shipped, compared to 14.9 million shipped for all of 2012. By 2016, Selburn said that just 7.1million e-readers will ship, equal to a loss of more than 66% since 2011.

via Last chapter for e-readers? – Computerworld.

This shouldn’t really surprise anyone. Single use tech devices have a more limited audience especially when they must compete against more feature rich multi-purpose devices. Why have just a reader when for just a few dollars more you can get all the features of the reader plus all the features of a tablet. You can read the latest best seller AND check your email, update Facebook, chat with friends and so on. Of course e-readers aren’t going away, but they won’t be dominating the market for hand held devices either.

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Some Quick Drupal Troubleshooting Tips

You don’t have to use Drupal (or any other user configurable software package for that matter) for very long before you do something that causes it to do something unpleasant. While answering one of those “why is it doing that ” type of questions this afternoon it occurred to me that there are a number of rules/tips I follow when working with Drupal.

Following these little tips makes life easier will help you maintain some sanity while getting some work done.

  •  Always use the admin or user 1 account (the first one you created when you installed the site) when turning modules on and off. Sometimes modules have odd permissions settings that require the super user to do the install but they don’t bother to tell you that or give any useful error when it goes wrong.
  • Always clear the cache when you install modules, change/add content types, create/edit views or panels, make any theme changes or do any sort of updates. Drupal caches lots of stuff and it’s easier to clear to the cache manually then it is to try and guess if what you just did is cached or not. I usually don’t worry about the warnings about clearing the cache affecting performance because most sites are small and lightly used enough for it to not make that much of a difference.
  • Install and test modules one at a time. Don’t install a bunch of stuff and then go back and start testing because if things go wrong troubleshooting is easier if you’ve only just changed one thing. Of course some modules require others, so you’ll have to install groups of modules at some point, but remember to turn them all off if something goes amiss.
  • Don’t monkey with the Drupal database unless you REALLY know what you’re doing. Something as simple as saving a blog post in Drupal can touch a lot of tables. Even if you are seeing database errors, it’s usually a better idea to try everything you can to clear them up from the Drupal admin pages first.
  • Keep a second  (or third) browser handy so that you can have an anonymous view of your Drupal site while you’re developing. This is really handy when those pesky caching problems pop up. Also helps avoid those “I can see it, why can’t you” problems that crop up when someone actually tries to visit your site.

I’m sure there are more so feel free to add them in the comments.

 

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Because MOOCs Needed A Yelp, Here’s CourseTalk

Today, CourseTalk is what you might expect — a Yelp for MOOCs — a place for students to share their experiences with these courses and a way to discover new courses they’d enjoy. Still nascent, the platform’s design is simple and its user experience is straightforward. Visitors can sift through courses by “Top Rated,” “Popular” and “Upcoming” or by category, like Business, Computer Science, and so on.
When a space gets its own Yelp, it’s generally an indicator of the fact that a bunch of content or businesses came online at once (or at least it seems that way when viewed from 5 miles up) and end users have no way to make sense of that noise. Sure, there are a lot of schools and programs rushing to take advantage of MOOCs because it’s perceived as a novel technology (even though the MOOC concept has been developing for more than a few months) and because of the scale MOOCs afford.

via CourseTalk Launches A Yelp For Open Online Courses And What This Means For Higher Education | TechCrunch.

Short term this site will help potential students sort through the loud, seemingly crowded MOOC field. Longer term the site or other like it may be in a position to be clearinghouses for quality on line courses.

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Stallman Points Out Problems With CC-BY-NC, CC-BY-NC-SA Licenses For Edu Works

Prominent universities are using a nonfree license for their digital educational works. That is bad already, but even worse, the license they are using has a serious inherent problem.

When a work is made for doing a practical job, the users must have control over the job, so they need to have control over the work. This applies to software, and to educational works too. For the users to have this control, they need certain freedoms (see gnu.org), and we say the work is “free” (or “libre”, to emphasize we are not talking about price). For works that might be used in commercial contexts, the requisite freedom includes commercial use, redistribution and modification.

Creative Commons publishes six principal licenses. Two are free/libre licenses: the Sharealike license CC-BY-SA is a free/libre license with copyleft, and the Attribution license (CC-BY) is a free/libre license without copyleft. The other four are nonfree, either because they don’t allow modification (ND, Noderivs) or because they don’t allow commercial use (NC, Nocommercial).

In my view, nonfree licenses are ok for works of art/entertainment, or that present personal viewpoints (such as this article itself). Those works aren’t meant for doing a practical job, so the argument about the users’ control does not apply. Thus, I do not object if they are published with the CC-BY-NC-ND license, which allows only noncommercial redistribution of exact copies.

Use of this license for a work does not mean that you can’t possibly publish that work commercially or with modifications. The license doesn’t give permission for that, but you could ask the copyright holder for permission, perhaps offering a quid pro quo, and you might get it. It isn’t automatic, but it isn’t impossible.

However, two of the nonfree CC licenses lead to the creation of works that can’t in practice be published commercially, because there is no feasible way to ask for permission. These are CC-BY-NC and CC-BY-NC-SA, the two CC licenses that permit modification but not commercial use.

The problem arises because, with the Internet, people can easily (and lawfully) pile one noncommercial modification on another. Over decades this will result in works with contributions from hundreds or even thousands of people.

via On-line education is using a flawed Creative Commons license.

This is a larger quote than I usually use, but Richard Stallman has a very important point here. By attaching the NC (No Commercial) attribute to a Creative Commons license you preclude the possibility of a commercial use ever, even in the future because once the work has been modified a few times it will become too burdensome, if not down right impossible to track down all of the rights holders to get agreement on a commercial use of the work.

To be honest it never occurred to me that  using the NC attribute could ever have such an effect. I saw it as a way to require someone who wanted to use a work commercially to come forward to the rights holder and ask specific permission for a commercial license. That remains true only so long as the work hasn’t been modified. Once the work is modified and shared as required by the use of the Share-Alike (SA) attribute then anyone wanting to make a commercial use of the work would need to trace back the chain of rights holders to get the necessary permissions.

In the educational world it is easy to imagine CC licensed works being modified and used over and over again as they pass through the hands of hundred or thousands of teachers and students. Getting permission for commercial use of work that has been authored by hundreds of people over a span of years would be pretty much impossible. As Stallman points out “[f]or works that might be used in commercial contexts, the requisite freedom includes commercial use, redistribution and modification.” Here this means that the NC attribute should not be used because it removes the freedom to make a commercial use of the work because even though commercial use is technically possible, it is practically impossible.

If the goal of creators of open education resources is to create free/libre resources that are available to all, to make education better and more widely available, then the NC attribute should be avoided in setting Creating Commons licenses for education works. Does this mean that someone could take a work and sell it rather than providing it for free? Yes it does, but it isn’t likely since it is hard to compete with free. Does it mean that someone could take a work, modify it, and sell it? Again yes, but then it is up to the market to decide if the modifications represent an added value that makes it worth more than the freely available version. No matter what I think having free/libre and open educational resources out weighs the need to lock them up in restrictive licensing.

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Finally! MSFT Surface Windows 8 Pro Arrives In January, 2013

There was no word on the Surface Pro though, until now. Tami Reller, Windows and Windows Live Division chief marketing officer, reveals at the Credit Suisse Annual Technology Conference 2012 that Surface Pro will launch in January 2013. Today, Microsoft also revealed pricing: $899 (64GB); $999 (128GB).

via Microsoft Surface with Windows 8 Pro arrives in January.

This version of the Surface will be a fully powered Windows tablet and should make it a popular choice in the business market since it run legacy x86 applications as well as apps from the Windows Store.

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Ars Technica Reviews a New Developer Focused Dell Linux Ultrabook and They Like It

Earlier this year, [Dell] announced a pilot program, “Project Sputnik,” intended to produce a bona fide, developer-focused Linux laptop using their popular XPS-13 Ultrabook as base hardware. The program turned out to be a rousing success, and this morning Dell officially unveiled the results of that pilot project: the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition.
The XPS 13 used in the Developer Edition features a number of upgrades over the pilot Project Sputnik hardware, including an Intel i5 or i7 Ivy Bridge CPU and 8GB of RAM the pilot hardware used Sandy Bridge CPUs and had 4GB of RAM. The Developer Edition also comes with a 256 GB SATA III SSD, and retains the pilot versions 1366×768 display resolution. The launch hardware costs $1,549 and includes one year of Dells “ProSupport.” Additional phone support options arent yet available.
The laptop comes with Ubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS plus a few additions. Dell worked closely with Canonical and the various peripheral manufacturers to ensure that well-written, feature-complete drivers are available for all of the laptops hardware. Out of the box the laptop will just work. They also have their own PPA if you want to pull down the patches separately, either to reload the laptop or to use on a different machine.

via Dell releases powerful, well-supported Linux Ultrabook | Ars Technica.

Important additions to the pre-installed Ubuntu 12.04 include to new Dell sponsored open source projects, Profile Tool and Cloud Launcher, designed to make life easier for developers. Overall this sounds like an excellent machine for serious developers, especially those looking for an alternative to the Apple world.