11 Aug 2009

On Wikis in Teaching Law

Over the last two years I have built the wiki-based platform for teaching law school courses that I, as one particular teacher, need. Because it was built out of free software tools that are simple, general and flexible, anyone could at no cost adopt mine as is, change them to suit her own needs, or start again to build something more appropriate to different styles of instruction. But I’m intentionally not talking about technology choices now. Anyone who looks at the courses herself can learn all she wants to about that in a click. Here I want to talk only about teaching and learning.

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permalink | teaching | 2009.08.11-02:00.00

10 Aug 2009

On Returning to Blogging – At Fifty

I pretty much gave up writing personal essays for the web after I founded SFLC; just when RMS & I were getting ready for the making of GPLv3. It seemed to me then that everything I thought about from day to day was subject to attorney-client privilege, or was the internal business of SFLC, or was a diplomatic statement that shouldn’t be anticipated by a personal blog. I think institutional blogging is invaluable, and I love what my colleagues do at softwarefreedom.org, including the podcast. My course wikis at Columbia are experiments in teaching conducted whth my students & former students that are teaching me every day. I live in the web. But writing about the various things that matter to me, in real time, in the constant process of trying to hope efficiently that all of us could have more freedom? That’s a habit I had gotten out of.

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permalink | personal | 2009.08.10-15:55.00