Law, games, and context
From CyberOne Wiki
Law, Games, and Context
Like all games, the Law encapsulates a set of rules which dictate how the players within its bounds must operate. Whether moving a piece on a Monopoly board or navigating a vehicle down a busy city street, when evaluating the next move people naturally have a set of statements in the background implicitly dictating the optimal next step. In some settings these statements are rigid: do not pass go, do not proceed when the light is red. However, many times, especially in the context of the law, these statements are vague and subject to interpretation.
Upon recognizing that rules are subject to interpretation, one realizes the importance of context not only when interpreting an individual law, but also when grasping the possibility that a given understanding of the law - or the system at large - is open to change.
This semester in our Open Education seminar at HLS, we were encouraged to participate in a variety of non classroom settings including Second Life, Full Tilt, Scratch, and Twitter. Each time we stepped outside our comfort zone, we were forced to find our bearings in an uncertain context. Even our classroom interactions lacked a typical law school structure. There was no 'Professor' standing at the front of the room behind a podium, dictating the rules as we should later regurgitate them. Instead, both in our electronic interactions and our in room discussions, Professor Nesson became 'Eon' and 'Charlie', and we were left with the unsettling feeling that comes from recognizing that even the simple background rules to which we had grown accustomed in our previous twenty years of schooling could be called into question.
The seminar was focused on reforming 'Education,' and implicitly the transformation of our preconceptions of what rules apply in the context of a law school classroom served as a common sense reminder that even on a Monopoly board, rules only gain their meaning and power by our submission to their force. When I was a kid, we often modified the rules of games like Monopoly at my urging, but it is often difficult to return to this childhood flexibility after years of being away. Conforming to the stated law - accepting the authority as dictated - is unfortunately the status quo for a large majority of people, myself included, most of the time.
However, the reality of the inadequacy of our current educational system is glaring, and thus, we should do everything we can to challenge our preconceived notions of how this game must be played.
Context is everything
Today, unlike in previous generations, we can easily convert our thoughts into digital bits which can subsequently be transmitted across the globe to be shared with other human hearts and minds. The power of the Internet is at once staggering and underwhelming. The potential for creative interaction and sharing has never before been as great as it is today. However, although we have found ways to share music and art with one another, we have barely modified traditional structures of social interaction - like our classrooms - since the ubiquity of the Internet has become part of our daily lives.
Through the use of tools like this "wiki" in the context of courses like Open Education, Harvard Law School has begun to demonstrate to other universities that its students have the potential to bring technology into the "classroom" to supplement current educational forms. When 'Eon' brings students to a level playing field with him in the context of a digital environment, the potential for a different kind of learning is surely present. However, this is simply an example of using different tools to operate within the same set of external rules or laws which govern the system of legal education. Essays like this one must satisfy the 'requirement' of a 'final exam' so that the 'student' can fulfill the necessary components of a 'transcript' indicating the completion of a 'degree'. Perhaps such rigid requirements are necessary in the context of a professional legal education especially given the monopoly power that the state bar associations wield over the practice of the law.
However, in our Nation's preschools, elementary, middle and high schools such a rigid set of rules need not exist nor apply.
Early in this semester, we were introduced to the Free Rice project. This simple website was developed by a father in his free time to help his daughter learn vocabulary in a more efficient and entertaining way. Today over 2 million people visit the website every month, and as a result kids around the world receive food for free. Prior to the creation of this site there was potential in the world for such an alignment of resources (games + education = free food for kids), but it took the intervention of one creative mind for this potential to become a reality.
As our semester progressed and we sat in the unstructured environment with 'Charlie' at the front of his office, the founder of Free Rice and its new owners at the United Nations World Food Programme reached out to our class to see if we could help them to "save" Free Rice from being shut down in November when the current resources are slated to be depleted. This request: that a group of Harvard Law students taking a seminar on Open Education help to develop a business plan to save a website dedicated to helping kids get free rice by teaching other kids vocabulary seemed perfectly appropriate in the context of the undefined set of rules within which we were operating, but such a confluence of events would not have been possible in the rule-bound system of a traditional classroom setting.
In other words, by modifying the set of rules guiding our classroom interactions, the potential for a different set of creative outcomes was enabled. Or put differently, by not only showing us that the rules to which we were previously submitting were optional, but also by encouraging us to interact with each other outside their bounds, Professor Nesson was implicitly teaching us that we have the power to operate in a different manner with each other inside and outside the classroom.
