Tuesday, September 21, 12:00 pm
**Please note earlier start time for this week only**
Berkman Center, 23 Everett
Street, second floor
RSVP required for those
attending in person (rsvp@cyber.law.harvard.edu)
Traditional law school casebooks are expensive, bulky and stagnant. With the support of the HLS Library, Berkman has been updating our suite of classroom tools, H2O, to create an online alternative to casebooks that are free, online and remixable. H2O includes our new tool Collage for editing down and annotating cases, Playlists for aggregating materials, the Question Tool for in-classroom back channel, and the Rotisserie for out-of-class discussion. In this lunch we'll demo some of the tools (all still in alpha) and show how Jonathan Zittrain's Torts class is using them this term.
About H20
H2O is an open source, educational exchange platform that explores
powerful ways to connect professors, students, and researchers online.
There are four tools within the H2O platform: the Question tool, the
Rotisserie, Playlists and Collage.
The question tool is an organized backchannel for conferences and classes that allows
participants to submit, answer, and vote on questions. It’s an effective
way to keep feedback focused, direct speakers to audience interests,
and potentially prevent the mic from being hijacked by that weirdo.
Rotisserie discussions represent an innovative approach to online
discussion that encourages measured, thoughtful discourse in a way
that that traditional threaded messaging systems do not, in the
process solving some of the universal complaints about online
discussion boards: that the substance of discussions is poor, that
participants post quickly rather than thoughtfully, that
participation is uneven (most people lurk, and a few posters
dominate the rest), and that discussion forums are segregated into
balkanized communities of people with similar thoughts and
beliefs.
An
H2O playlist is a shared list of readings (links to books and articles)
and other content about a topic of intellectual interest. It is a
simple yet powerful way to group and exchange useful links to
information -- online and offline. It can be used as a syllabus or
reading list for a class. The playlist items can then be remixed by
other authors, lending influence to the items themselves and their
original contributors.
Finally, Collage is the newest tool being added to the H2O
platform. Collage is an annotation engine for online materials. It
allows for tagging text, annotating it, and hiding portions of text
without changing the original document.
Links
Last updated September 22, 2010