The Faculty Lounge

Facebook and the Law Professor

Continuing my series of posts on professors and social media, I thought I would write a few words about Facebook. I have less to say about Facebook than Twitter, in part because I don't have data and in part because I think that most professors use Facebook like any other such user, to connect with family and friends, share photos, etc.

There are, of course, a few professors who use Facebook to only share their own work or other information specifically related to their areas of interest. I tend to tune those users out, for the same reason I tune out much of my Twitter feed. I just don't have time to absorb all of it.

So, what is there to say about Facebook and Academia, then? I think there are a few relevant points, which I categorize into "everyone" and "career sensitive" (e.g. junior) professors.

Everyone

1.  I find that academic life can be very insular. Facebook can fight this tendency to the extent that Facebook friends are not part of the academy. For example, my high school classmates are a diverse group and the stuff they talk about and articles they share give me a sense of what's happening outside of my own social group and outside media portrayal of particular events and debates. Indeed, the list of "trending" shared news stories that Facebook provides is interesting, if only because I almost never see those news stories being shared by my Facebook friends. This serves as a good reminder that what's important to me is not important to everyone.

2. I've found that stories shared by friends on Facebook are more diverse than stories shared on Twitter, even by those same folks. I'm not sure if this is really true, and if so, why.  I know it is for how I use the two platforms. My guess is that people see their Facebook viewers as a more diverse group, which is a bit ironic considering that Twitter is public. But it may be the limited audience that makes a difference - by not sharing with the world, you can be free to share information outside of your normal professional zone.

Career Sensitive Users

But it may be that not everyone should share outside their professional zone. Career sensitive users might want to consider whether Facebook use harms them in any way, and if there is a way to manage it. Note that I offer these thoughts as an observer and not a practitioner. I don't separate sharing lists, so my professional colleagues get pictures of my kids and groans about football losses. Similarly, family and non-academic friends are treated to my wonky ramblings about policy issues. It turns out that there's some overlap in each group, so YMMV.

So, what are some career sensitive concerns? I discuss a few below; some are more cynical than others, but while I'm plumbing the depths of social media by law professors, even the cynical views deserve an airing.

1. Your true personality may shine through. Now, ordinarily this is a good thing, but we all have flaws. I've heard more than one person (in academia and otherwise) say that an interesting thing about Facebook is you often find things out about people that you really wish you hadn't known.  And, so, this can affect how people think about you.

2. Your true political leanings may shine through. Similarly, the things one says and posts on Facebook will help others form a more complete picture of where you stand politically. Indeed, this is one reason why I hate election cycles on Facebook. But if you are career sensitive, then (I am sad to say) your political leanings might make a difference to others who read your posts.

3. Your work habits may be misinterpreted. To the extent that professors use Facebook often, but only post about non-professor things, there is a chance that others might wonder whether you are actually doing any work. This, of course, is a cruel judgment. After all, shameless marketing is frowned upon, but it is so prevalent that when you are not doing it, it stands out.

4. You might just rub some people the wrong way. It happens, and there's nothing you can do about it, but it's a risk to consider. I'll give a couple of my own examples. First, on more than one occasion I've offended senior colleagues/mentors with snarky comments about the academy. These were comments I'd never make seriously or "publicly," but that I stupidly felt appropriate as a Facebook comment. Second, I had a colleague - one I communicate with regularly in other ways - unfriend me after one too many poopy diaper stories. I haven't told a poopy diaper story in years, but I tell plenty of other stories about things my kids say and do and to this day we still aren't Facebook friends.

Those are just a few thoughts; most of them are probably obvious, but I thought it might be helpful to put them in one place.

Census of Law Professor Twitter Users Version 3.1

Below the fold is Version 3.1 of the census of law prof Twitter users. Of the 672 faculty members included on this list, 415 are male; 257 are female. By way of comparison, Version 3.0 (here) from January 2015 had counted 553 faculty members -- 330 male, 223 female.  Version 2.0 (here) from July 2012 had counted 204 faculty members -- 142 male, 62 female.  The beta version (here) had counted 93 users.

All additions and corrections very welcome for future versions (at this time, there is no specific planned future publication date).  Feel free to use the comments or email me directly at bcrawford *at* law *dot* pace *dot* edu. Responsive signed comments with full names and email addresses only; all other comments will be deleted.  I compile the list based on information sent to me or that I happen to stumble across.  The list notably lacks law professors from non-U.S. jurisdictions, so please share info as you have it.  I welcome all additions and corrections.

As before, the list covers individual law professor tweeters only (not accounts of groups, programs, law schools, publications, students, practitioners, staff).  To be included, one must be a full-time law school faculty member (not, say, a law-trained prof working in a business school).

Lisa Larrimore Ouellette (Stanford) (@PatentScholar) has created a Twitter list that makes it easier to follow all of the professors listed in the census.  You can subscribe to the list at Professor Ouellette's Twitter page here.

For folks interested in the raw data, my spreadsheet is available for download here: Download LawProfessorTwitterCensus3.0Published

View Census of Law Professor Twitter Users Version 3.1

Ryan Whalen's "Law Prof Twitter Network"

Over at his eponymous blog (here), Northwestern JD/PhD candidate Ryan Whalen has some interesting visuals and data based on the Census of Law Professor Twitter Users 3.0. One sample is below.  View Mr. Whalen's full post here.

Census of Law Professor Twitter Users Version 3.0

Below the fold is Version 3.0 of the census of law prof Twitter users.  Of the 553 faculty members included on this list, 330 are male; 223 are female. By way of comparison, Version 2.0 (here) from July 2012 had counted 204 faculty members -- 142 male, 62 female.  The beta version (here) had counted 93 users. 

Version 3.0 was developed over a period of approximately 2 weeks from comments received from readers, Twitter handles sent to me via email by faculty or law school staff members, and my own efforts to locate law faculty on Twitter.

All additions and corrections very welcome for future versions (at this time, there is no specific planned future publication date, however).  Feel free to use the comments or email me directly at bcrawford *at* law *dot* pace *dot* edu. Responsive signed comments with full names and email addresses only; all other comments will be deleted.

The list is meant to cover individual law professor tweeters only (not accounts of groups, programs, law schools, publications, students, practitioners, staff).  To be included, one must be a full-time law school faculty member (not, say, a law-trained prof working in a business school).

For folks interested in the raw data, my spreadsheet is available for download here: Download LawProfessorTwitterCensus3.0Published

View Census of Law Professor Twitter Users Version 3.0

Facebook Announces New Research Policies

A WSJ reporter just tipped me off to this news release by Facebook regarding the changes it has made in its research practices in response to public outrage about its emotional contagion experiment, published in PNAS. I had a brief window of time in which to respond with my comments, so these are rushed and a first reaction, but for what they're worth, here's what I told her (plus links and less a couple of typos):

There’s a lot to like in this announcement. I’m delighted that, despite the backlash it received, Facebook will continue to publish at least some of their research in peer-reviewed journals and to post reprints of that research on their website, where everyone can benefit from it. It’s also encouraging that the company acknowledges the importance of user trust and that it has expressed a commitment to better communicate its research goals and results.

As for Facebook’s promise to subject future research to more extensive review by a wider and more senior group of people within the company, with an enhanced review process for research that concerns, say, minors or sensitive topics, it’s impossible to assess whether this is ethically good or bad without knowing a lot more about both the people who comprise the panel and their review process (including but not limited to Facebook's policy on when, if ever, the default requirements of informed consent may be modified or waived). It’s tempting to conclude that more review is always better. But research ethics committees (IRBs) can and do make mistakes in both directions – by approving research that should not have gone forward and by unreasonably thwarting important research. Do Facebook’s law, privacy, and policy people have any training in research ethics? Is there any sort of appeal process for Facebook’s data scientists if the panel arbitrarily rejects their proposal? These are the tip of the iceberg of challenges that the academic IRBs continue to face, and I fear that we are unthinkingly exporting an unhealthy system into the corporate world. Discussion is just beginning among academic scientists, corporate data scientists, and ethicists about the ethics of mass-scale digital experimentation (see, ahem, here and here). It’s theoretically possible, but unlikely, that in its new, but unclear, guidelines and review process Facebook has struck the optimal balance among the competing values and interests that this work involves.

Most alarming is Facebook’s suggestion that it retreat from experimental methods in favor of what are often second-best methods resorted to only when randomized, controlled studies are impossible. Academics, including those Facebook’s statement references in its announcement, often have to resort to non-experimental methods in studying social media because they lack access to corporate data and algorithms. “Manipulation” has a negative connotation outside of science but it is the heart of the scientific method and the best way of inferring causation. Studies have found that people perceive research to be more risky when it is described by words like “experiment” or “manipulation” rather than “study,” but it’s not always the case that randomized, controlled studies pose more risk than do observational studies. The incremental risk that a study — of whatever type — imposes on users is clearly ethically relevant, and that's what we should focus on, not this crude proxy for risk. I would rather see Facebook and other companies engage in ethical experiments than retreat from the scientific method.

It’s also unclear to me why guidelines require more extensive review if the work involves a collaboration with someone in the academic community.

Fall Facebook/OKCupid & the Future of Research Tour

I’m participating in several public events this fall pertaining to research ethics and regulation, most of them arising out of my recent work (in Wired and in Nature and elsewhere) on how to think about corporations conducting behavioral testing (in collaboration with academic researchers or not) on users and their online environments (think the recent Facebook and OKCupid experiments). These issues raise legal and ethical questions at the intersection of research, business, informational privacy, and innovation policy, and the mix of speakers in most of these events reflect that.

The first, and most accessible, is a “tweet chat” today, from 1-2 p.m. EST, on “Research Ethics in a Modern World.” It’s being sponsored by the Milken Institute’s FasterCures, “an action tank driven by a singular goal — to save lives by speeding up and improving the medical research system.” Other participants are Susannah Fox (RWJF's first Entrepreneur in Residence), John Wilbanks (a very interesting guy whose work, largely on empowering patients and research participants to share their data in ways that are consistent with their values, and bio defy concise description), and Margaret Anderson (FasterCures’s Executive Director).

Likely discussion topics include the impact of social media on research and research ethics; the ethics of A/B testing and similar behavioral testing of user environments (i.e., websites) by corporations, and who should be empowered to conduct research risk-benefit analysis (patients/participants? scientists? legal systems?). You don’t need to have a Twitter account to read the conversation, either as it unfolds in real time or at any time thereafter. Just point your web browser to this URL. But to ask a question or otherwise participate in the discussion (which is encouraged!), you do need a Twitter account.

On October 22, I’ll be at Harvard Law participating in a panel discussion of the Petrie-Flom Center’s latest anthology, “Human Subjects Research Regulation: Perspectives on the Future,” with Glenn Cohen, Holly Fernandez Lynch, and Barbara Bierer.

On December 4, I’ll be at Colorado Law participating in a day-long conference, “When Companies Study Their Customers: The Changing Face of Science, Research, and Ethics,” sponsored by the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship and the Tech Policy Lab at the University of Washington. Other participants include law profs Paul Ohm, Ryan Calo, and James Grimmelman, Princeton Center for Internet Technology Policy Director Edward Felten, FTC Commissioner Julie Brill, and UT-Austin psychologist Tal Yarkoni.

On December 5, I’ll be in Baltimore participating in a Meet the Authors lunch event at the annual PRIM&R conference with the editors and several other contributors to the aforementioned book.

And on December 6, I’ll be participating in a PRIM&R session on “Manipulating Emotions on the Internet: The Cases of Facebook, OkCupid,” with OHRP Director Jerry Menikoff, privacy and Internet research ethics scholar Michael Zimmer, and Berkeley Director of Research Subject Protection Rebecca Armstrong.

On April 13, I’ll be giving a seminar at Wharton in the Legal Studies and Business Ethics Speaker Series, in which I may present something related to these themes.

Many thanks to the organizers for including me in these very interesting events (interesting least of all due to my inclusion, needless to say), and I hope to see some readers at some of them.

Technology in the Courts

    Much of my scholarship addresses cyberlaw. In order to keep up in this field, I have to follow the developments in two fields: law (obviously) and computer science. For this second area, it helps that I am trained in computer science and spent several decades programming for a variety of businesses. As part of the process of keeping up with computer technology, I maintain my membership with the Association for Computing Machinery, the primary academic society for computer science.

    In this month’s Communications of the ACM, there was an interesting commentary entitled, “Technology Confounds the Courts.” It was written by Keith Kirkpatrick, apparently a non-lawyer. Comm. of the ACM, May, 2014, at 27. In the article, Mr. Kirkpatrick attempts to identify the reasons why our courts often do a poor job of understanding the computer technology that is involved in many modern cases. I found this commentary interesting as it examined a commonly identified problem within cyberlaw from the perspective of a technologist. Two of his points — the age of judges and the narrowness of decision-making — miss the mark. His underlying point — that judges need to understand technology — is sound although achieving the goal may be more difficult than he realizes.

The Misses

    Several times the author raises the average age of judges as a cause of their technological ignorance. See id. at 27 & 28. He also raises a somewhat related issue: the fact that our federal judges are appointed for life. See id. at 29. On these issues being a significant source of technological ignorance in the judiciary, I assert that Mr. Kirkpatrick is just plain wrong. A lot of us grey hairs have comprehensive knowledge of the current technology and how it is used. I could choose many examples, but I will highlight one of the professors I have always held in high regard, Frederick Brooks of the UNC Computer Science Department. According to his biography, Dr. Brooks is 83 years old. He has been a very important leader in the computer science field since the 1950s when helped develop the most famous line of mainframe computers ever, the IBM 360 series. He founded the computer science department at UNC where he is actively involved in researching virtual reality, hardly a backwater area of computer science. Similarly, most judges of my experience are not monk-like. They read the paper (probably online) and even Reddit. They serf the Web. Their exposure to technology is similar to others with busy lives. Mr. Kirkpatrick: age is irrelevant.

    The author also complains about the narrowness of many technological-related decisions. See id. at 28–29. Here, he needs to better understand our legal system. Because we live in a common law country, a fundamental aspect of the system is that the courts render as narrow of a decision as the facts allow. Rather than being a fault, seeking the narrowest grounds for decision has kept the common law functioning for centuries.

The Hit (Well, Mostly)

    Judicial ignorance of technology may not be complete, but its existence is impossible to deny. See, e.g., St. Clair v. Johnny's Oyster & Shrimp, Inc., 76 F. Supp. 2d 773 (S.D. Tex. 1999). The harder question is deciding how this can be changed. Mr. Kirkpatrick advocates for a more specialized court using both the EU’s Court of Justice and the Japanese Intellectual Property High Court as examples. Kirkpatrick, Technology Confounds at 29. For the EU court, “the more complex selection and appointment process involving a disparate group of EU members ... are more likely [to result in judges who are] current on a greater variety of technologies.” Id. For the Japanese court, he suggests that its use of full-time technical advisors will result in more competence. See id. Of course, he did not need to go overseas for examples as the U.S. Federal Circuit with its patent expertise would also seem to qualify (although far from all of the judges appointed to the Circuit have technological backgrounds).

    Personally, I’m not sure how well a specialized, technology court would work. In the U.S., at least, we would still run into the “one supreme Court” language in Article III of the Constitution. Even if a technology court decided a case, it would be subject to an appeal the Supreme Court; indeed, this is the pattern with the Federal Circuit and the Supreme Court. In my area of cyberlaw, for example, the Federal Circuit often has a better understanding of the technology even though the Circuit might forget the broader purposes of the patent act. Ultimately, though, it is the Supreme Court’s often mistaken understanding of the technology that rules the day.

    More importantly, it is not clear that a technology court is practical. To start with, which technology? As Mr. Kirkpatrick’s article correctly points out, our court system has done a horrible job articulating a functional system of laws for computer software. Part of the reason for this is that even our more techno-centric court lacks any members with the relevant computer science training. The Federal Circuit has numerous judges trained in chemistry and other traditional scientific areas — as well as some trained in history and other liberal arts — but it does not have computer scientists. This is problematic as it has become impractical to be the technological Jack-of-all-trades that it was possible to be through the late 1800s or early 1900s.

    What that leaves is a suggestion in the article that our judges no longer pretend that they can understand all forms of technology without assistance. So, if a court recognizes that it needs help, where does it turn? One source that Mr. Kirkpatrick does not discuss is the lawyers who are representing the parties. There are numerous examples of case where the parties prepared a joint technology statement to help the court understand the issues. Of course, this only works where the parties agree about the technology — something that is less true in intellectual property litigation where defining the technology “your way” is often equivalent to winning. Further, it assumes that the legal team is sophisticated enough about the technology to be able to competently articulate it.

    The other possibility, of course, as Mr. Kirkpatrick suggests, is to encourage the judges to recognize their technological shortcomings and to appoint masters under Rule 53 to help the court determine the technologically based facts. Unfortunately, the limited nature of the rule and the requirements of the Constitution may interfere. Rule 53 only allows masters if both parties consent, Fed. R. Civ. P. 53(a)(1)(A), or if the case is a non-jury case and is “exceptional,” id. 53(a)(1)(B). The Constitution imposes two limitations on the use of masters: each parties right to have the case ultimately decided by a Judge appointed under Article III and to demand a jury trial in many cases.

    Even with the constitutional limitations, however, it would seem to be time to revisit the use of masters in technology cases within the federal system. For non-jury cases, the rule could be easily amended to make it clear that complicated technology underlying a case is an “exceptional condition” that the rule requires. Id. Obviously, the rule has to recognize the jury trial right provided by the Seventh Amendment. It would seem that a master’s report on the technology could be submitted to the jury to assist it in its decision-making in the same way that the report would be submitted to the judge in a non-jury matter. In both cases, the Article III or Amendment Seven decision-maker would be preserved while providing them with technological expertise from a neutral source.

Social Media and the Law School Constituents

Upon accepting the appointment as Dean, I immediately ceased posting to my personal Facebook account and opened a new account using my decanal title. I did the same thing with my Twitter account, which I had really only started as a vehicle for keeping up with my teenage children. I kept the Linkedin account as it was since these connections and the use of the platform is more business focused. I'm learning Instagram, Pinterest and Google + now. Why? Because my students and alumni use these tools more often than email as a form of modern communication. We can debate the value of face-to-face communication and traditional memos and letters, but the bottom line is that if we want to capture attention and convey information, then understanding how each of these tools can be most effectively used is an important part of the job. I believe this wholeheartedly and prioritized resources to hire a
social media staff member who works with both our IT and Communications departments, as well as with individual faculty.

On the positive side of social media, I have used Twitter to find students in the building needed for a meeting or event. Funny, it has sometimes been easier to get a response from a tweet than from an email. At times, especially during Superstorm Sandy when our region was in chaos, Facebook proved to be the best method to communicate with masses of students. Alumni tend to read announcements of events on their Facebook news feed more often than opening up email blasts from the Law School that may be perceived to be "junk mail." In fact, the positive feedback about "the Facebook Dean" has been great. Countless alumni and current students stop me regularly to comment that appreciate
knowing what is going on at the Law Center "real time." I also use Facebook as a forum to share an interesting article about trends in legal education.  This sometimes generates discussion through comments – engaging students, alumni and faculty in on on-line conversation.  Using Linkedin has
enabled alumni to connect for referrals and to discuss upcoming networking opportunities, and it can be fertile ground for students to identify potential mentors.  In addition to my use of these tools (and on these I do all of my own posting), the Law Center and many departments/offices maintain their own Facebook pages as a means of communicating with students and alumni (e.g., Career Services, Student
Services, Alumni Affairs and the Library). The Alumni Office also set up a group on Linkedin where announcements can be posted and information can be shared with those in the alumni community who choose to join.

There are some drawbacks however. For example, this week at our adjunct faculty meeting, one faculty member commented on how she observed a student tweeting in class. She was tech savvy enough to "call him out" using his own game by sending him a tweet letting him know she was on to him and could read what he was doing. It stopped.  There have been times students have been “called out” by classmates because of comments made about peers and faculty on Facebook…sometimes while they were in class.  At first year orientation we include a session on social media ethics and professionalism.  It is possible that on law school sponsored social media sites, a participant may feel compelled to make a negative comment about the institution.  For private schools, they may have a choice of whether to allow the comment to be posted and/or whether to delete.  For public schools, however, it is possible that the sites could be considered a public forum, thereby implicating First Amendment issues.  Further, public schools may have to develop and administer record retention policies for postings on these sites to ensure compliance with state access to records laws.  It is a good idea to develop a social media policy.

In my opinion, the benefits outweigh the cautionary tales, and I urge my colleagues who are not engaged in this form of communication to experiment with one or more of the tools discussed.  I also invite you to send a friend request to me at Dean Patricia Salkin, to follow me on Twitter @DeanSalkin, or invite me
(Patricia Salkin) to connect on Linkedin.  

An Open Letter From a Genomic Altruist to a Genomic Extrovert

This post is part of Bill of Health's symposium on the Law, Ethics, and Science of Re-Identification Demonstrations. You can call up all of the symposium contributions here. We’ll continue to post contributions throughout the week. 

Dear Misha:

In your open letter to me, you write:

No one is asking you to be silent, blasé or happy about being cloned (your clone, however, tells me she is “totally psyched”).

First things first: I have an ever-growing list of things I wish I had done differently in life, so let me know when my clone has learned how to read, and I’ll send it on over; perhaps her path in life will be sufficiently similar to mine that she’ll benefit from at least a few items on the list.

Moving on to substance, here's the thing: some people did say that PGP participants have no right to complain about being re-identified (and, by logical extension, about any of the other risks we assumed, including the risk of being cloned). It was my intention, in that post, to articulate and respond to three arguments that I’ve encountered, each of which suggests that re-identification demonstrations raise few or no ethical issues, at least in certain cases. To review, those arguments are:

1. Participants who are warned by data holders of the risk of re-identification thereby consent to be re-identified by third parties.
2. Participants who agree to provide data in an open access format for anyone to do with it whatever they like thereby gave blanket consent that necessarily included consent to using their data (combined with other data) to re-identify them.
3. Re-identification is benign in the hands of scholars, as opposed to commercial or criminal actors.

I feel confident in rejecting the first and third arguments. (As you’ll see from the comments I left on your post, however, I struggled, and continue to struggle, with how to respond to the second argument; Madeleine also has some great thoughts.) Note, however, two things. First, none of my responses to these arguments was meant to suggest that I or anyone else had been “sold a bill of goods” by the PGP. I’m sorry that I must have written my post in such a way that it leant itself to that interpretation. All I intended to say was that, in acknowledging the PGP’s warning that re-identification by third parties is possible, participants did not give third parties permission to re-identify them. I was addressing the relationship between re-identification researchers and data providers more than that between data providers and data holders.

Second, even as to re-identification researchers, it doesn’t follow from my rejection of these three arguments that re-identification demonstrations are necessarily unethical, even when conducted without participant consent. Exploring that question is the aim, in part, of my next post. What I tried to do in the first post was clear some brush and push back against the idea that under the PGP model — a model that I think we both would like to see expand — participants have given permission to be re-identified, “end of [ethical] story.”

Reflections of a Re-Identification Target, Part I: Some Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free

[This post is part of the online symposium I've organized over at Bill of Health on the Law, Ethics, and Science of Re-Identification Demonstrations. Background on the symposium is here, and you can call up all of the symposium contributions here. We'll have more contributions into next week.]

I wear several hats for purposes of this symposium, in addition to organizer. First, I’m trained as a lawyer and an ethicist, and one of my areas of scholarly focus is research regulation and ethics, so I see re-identification demonstrations through that lens. Second, as a member of the advisory board of the Social Science Genetics Association Consortium (SSGAC), I advise data holders about ethical and regulatory aspects of their research, including issues of re-identification. I may have occasion to reflect on this role later in the symposium. For now, however, I want to put on my third hat: that of data provider to (a.k.a. research participant in) the Personal Genome Project (PGP), the most recent target of a pair of re-identification “attacks,” as even re-identification researchers themselves seem to call them.

In this first post, I’ll briefly discuss my experience as a target of a re-identification attack. In my discussions elsewhere about the PGP demonstrations, some have suggested that re-identification requires little or no ethical justification where (1) participants have been warned about the risk of re-identification; (2) participants have given blanket consent to all research uses of the data they make publicly available; and/or (3) the re-identification researchers are scholars rather than commercial or criminal actors.

In explaining below why I think each of these arguments is mistaken, I focus on the PGP re-identification demonstrations. I choose the PGP demonstrations not to single them out, but rather for several other reasons. First, the PGP attacks are the case studies with which, for obvious reasons, I’m most familiar, and I’m fortunate to have convinced so many other stakeholders involved in those demonstrations to participate in the symposium and help me fill out the picture with their perspectives. I also focus on the PGP because some view it as an “easy” case for re-identification work, given the features I just described. Therefore, if nonconsensual re-identification attacks on PGP participants are ethically problematic, then much other nonconsensual re-identification work is likely to be as well. Finally, although today the PGP may be somewhat unusual in being so frank with participants about the risk of re-identification and in engaging in such open access data sharing, both of these features, and especially the first, shouldn’t be unusual in research. To the extent that we move towards greater frankness about re-identification risk and broader data sharing, trying to achieve clarity about what these features of a research project do — and do not — mean for the appropriateness of re-identification demonstrations will be important.

Having argued here about how not to think about the ethics of re-identification studies, in a later post, I plan to provide some affirmative thoughts about an ethical framework for how we should think about this work.

Online Symposium on the Law, Ethics & Science of Re-identification Demonstrations

Over the course of the last fifteen or so years, the belief that “de-identification” of personally identifiable information preserves the anonymity of those individuals has been repeatedly called up short by scholars and journalists. It would be difficult to overstate the importance, for privacy law and policy, of the early work of “re-identification scholars,” as I’ll call them. In the mid-1990s, the Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission (GIC) released data on individual hospital visits by state employees in order to aid important research. As Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld assured employees, their data had been “anonymized,” with all obvious identifiers, such as name, address, and Social Security number, removed. But Latanya Sweeney, then an MIT graduate student, wasn’t buying it. When, in 1996, Weld collapsed at a local event and was admitted to the hospital, she set out to show that she could re-identify his GIC entry. For twenty dollars, she purchased the full roll of Cambridge voter-registration records, and by linking the two data sets, which individually were innocuous enough, she was able to re-identify his GIC entry. As privacy law scholar Paul Ohm put it, “In a theatrical flourish, Dr. Sweeney sent the Governor’s health records (which included diagnoses and prescriptions) to his office.”

Sweeney's demonstration led to important changes in privacy law, especially under HIPAA. But that demonstration was just the beginning. In 2006, the New York Times was able to re-identify one individual (and only one individual)  in a publicly available research dataset of the three-month AOL search history of over 600,000 users. The Times demonstration led to a class-action lawsuit (which settled out of court), an FTC complaint, and soul-searching in Congress. That same year, Netflix began a three-year contest, offering a $1 million prize to whomever could most improve the algorithm by which the company predicts how much a particular user will enjoy a particular movie. To enable the contest, Netflix made publicly available a dataset of the movie ratings of 500,000 of its customers, whose names it replaced with numerical identifiers. In a 2008 paper, Arvind Narayanan, then a graduate student at UT-Austin, along with his advisor, showed that by linking the “anonymized” Netflix prize dataset to the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), in which viewers review movies, often under their own names, many Netflix users could be re-identified, revealing information that was suggestive of their political preferences and other potentially sensitive information. (Remarkably, notwithstanding the re-identification demonstration, after awarding the prize in 2009 to a team from AT&T, in 2010, Netflix announced plans for a second contest, which it cancelled only after tussling with a class-action lawsuit (again, settled out of court) and the FTC.) Earlier this year, Yaniv Erlich and colleagues, using a novel technique involving surnames and the Y chromosome, re-identified five men who had participated in the 1000 Genomes Project — an international consortium to place, in an open online database, the sequenced genomes of (as it turns out, 2500) “unidentified” people — who had also participated in a study of Mormon families in Utah.

Most recently, Sweeney and colleagues re-identified participants in Harvard’s Personal Genome Project (PGP), who are warned of this risk, using the same technique she used to re-identify Weld in 1997. As a scholar of research ethics and regulation — and also a PGP participant — this latest demonstration piqued my interest. Although much has been said about the appropriate legal and policy responses to these demonstrations (my own thoughts are here), there has been very little discussion about the legal and ethical aspects of the demonstrations themselves. As a modest step in filling that gap, I’m pleased to announce an online symposium, to take place the week of May 20^th, that will address both the scientific and policy value of these demonstrations and the legal and ethical issues they raise. I’ll cross-post my own contribution here, but the full symposium will be hosted over at Bill of Health. Participants fill diverse stakeholder roles (data holder, data provider — i.e., research participant, re-identification researcher, privacy scholar, research ethicist) and will, I expect, have a range of perspectives on these questions:

Misha Angrist

Madeleine Ball

Daniel Barth-Jones

Yaniv Erlich

Beau Gunderson

Stephen Wilson

Michelle Meyer

Arvind Narayanan

Paul Ohm

Latanya Sweeney

Jennifer Wagner

I hope readers will join us on May 20.

Virtual versus Physical Class Discussions

It's been a while since I've blogged about virtual classrooms, and lately I've been wondering about the class participation levels in online versus offline spaces.

I've taken some non-law courses lately both in the virtual space and in real life classrooms - yes, they still exist even outside law schools.

In my recent experiences in classes that have a participation component, I've noticed that in the virtual classroom, more students seem to post on every thread of a discussion, while in the real space classroom (due to physical and temporal constraints), not everyone weighs in on every discussion point.  I'm wondering it that's a good or a bad thing.  Allowing people a whole week to weigh in on each discussion point and give them all the time and space to provide a lengthy response certainly encourages individual thinking about a problem.  However, it can lose the spontenaity and detailed interaction of in-class discussions, and can end up with a bunch of individual students writing mini-essays on an issue without paying much attention to what others have contributed.

In cases where students are geographically dispersed, the online interactions are necessarily the main discussion forum, although they can be augmented with real time online chat sessions.  But I'm wondering what is lost if more educational initiatives are moved partly or wholly online.  I love the flexibility of online learning and the ability to interact with students around the country and around the world.  But I wonder what we lose in the absence of face-to-face discussions.

In-Class Student Response System

This is a request for one of my colleagues.  She is wondering if anyone has successfully (or not!) used an in-class student response system - clicker technology or something like that.  A bit of poking around turned up this information, but she isn't satisfied with what she's found:

Someone suggested a website called yorn.com but I spent about 10 minutes on the site and was completely lost. I simply couldn't figure out how to set up questions. I may try again to figure it out after a break. A few people suggested that TWEN's polling feature could be used for this (though nobody actually uses it for that). The TWEN platform isn't really great in my opinion as it doesn't let you show individual questions one by one and it also requires students to bring laptops. I found one website (polleverywhere.com) that does what I want - but only allows up to 40 student responses with free access. This would work for a lot of classes but not for a large first year class. It's quite expensive to get a subscription for more than 40 responses.

Anyone have experience with this type of technology and want to share their experience?  Thanks!

What's the Business Model for MOOC's?

A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education discussed the questions surrounding how major universities hope to profit from participating in Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOC's, run by for-profit ventures like Coursera.   The article describes a contract between Coursera and the University of Michigan that lists several methods for turning the MOOC's into money.  The following passage expresses some skepticism:

When I showed the Coursera contract to Trace A. Urdan, an analyst at Wells Fargo Securities who focuses on education-related companies, he found it "ironic" that major universities are embracing online education when they have been dismissive of earlier efforts by for-profit companies like the University of Phoenix.

"These are two of the most arrogant types of institutions—Silicon Valley companies intersecting with these elite academic programs," he says. "Neither of them considers that anyone else has come to this place before they've arrived. They say, We're here now, so now it's sort of legitimate and for real."

And he argues that the plan relies heavily on all of the money colleges are already spending on professors and facilities. "It's a way to carve out some extra money on the top of the existing program, but it's not an alternative system that is going to solve the cost crisis of higher education," he says. "It's being subsidized by incredibly high-priced education."

Ms. Koller insists that the courses the company is offering differ fundamentally from those at the University of Phoenix. "Their online effort is really traditional teaching mediated by the computer as opposed to using the tech in a fundamental way," she argues. "There's no economies of scale there. What we're doing is one instructor, 50,000 students. This is the way to bend the cost curves."

The comment on economies of scale caught my eye.  On the face of it, that seems plausible -- a MOOC appears to up the productivity ante substantially, moving to astronomical student-faculty ratios.  But what is actually produced in the process?  In other words, what value do the 50,000 students get out of the experience, and how much will they be willing to pay for it?   The article mentions two possibilities:

Coursera's leaders say they are actively pursuing only two of the moneymaking ideas on the list: charging students who pass the courses a small fee for a certificate, and serving as a matchmaker between students looking for jobs and companies seeking qualified employees.

Both of these possibilities, however, threaten to increase the costs of the venture and erode the economies of scale.  For the certificate, Coursera must determine how it will show that someone "passed" a course.  This will require identity verification as well as a credible form of assessment.  For the job matching, Coursera must offer some service on top of a job clearinghouse if it is to add value beyond existing job matching sites.  That is, they presumably want to claim that the MOOC's help identify better potential employees, which adds value to the matching.  But that brings us back to the need for credible assessment.

[As an aside, the above reminds me of the Epic 2020 video, which while compelling in its presentation, never spoke to the question of credible assessment.]

All of this makes me wonder where we are heading, and whether the enthusiasm for MOOC's will ultimately wane.  A Wall Street Journal article from Friday intersected with this thought -- here's the quote that made me think:

"Investors who were excited about social networking have learned just how immature these companies' business models are," said Michael Shinnick, who manages $2.5 billion for Wasatch Advisors of Salt Lake City, Utah, and doesn't own Facebook shares.

Are we back to the jump first, monetize later philosophy, based on a misapplication of network effects, that characterized the tech last bubble?  Or are MOOC's onto something more substantial?

 

 

Census of Law Professor Twitter Users -- Version 2.0

Here's Version 2.0 of the census of law prof Twitter users.  Of the 204 faculty members included on this list, 142 are male; 62 are female.  The beta version (here) had counted 93 users, so I've had lots of help in updating the list. 

All additions and corrections very welcome for future versions.  Feel free to use the comments or email me directly at bcrawford@law.pace.edu

The list is meant to cover individual law professor tweeters only.  The list is not meant to be a comprehensive account of everyone (adjuncts, librarians, practitioners, students, group blogs) publishing law-related tweets.

For folks interested in the raw data, my spreadsheet is available here: Download LawProfessorTwitterCensus

FIRST NAME	LAST NAME	TWITTER NAME (PRECEDED BY @)	SCHOOL
Aziza	Ahmed	AzizaAhmed	Northeastern
Ann	Althouse	annalthouse	Wisconsin
Heidi	Anderson	HeidiRAnderson	Florida Coastal
David	Ardia	dsardia	UNC
Richard	Ashcroft	qmulbioethics	Queen Mary London
Jonathan	Askin	jaskin	Brooklyn
Ian	Ayres	iayres	Yale
Barbara	Babcock	bababcock	Stanford
Sam	Bagenstos	sbagen	Michigan
Stephen	Bainbridge	ProfBainbridge	UCLA
Jeffrey	Baker	JRBProf	Faulkner
Jack	Balkin	jackbalkin	Yale
Derek	Bambauer	dbambauer	Arizona
Jennifer	Bankier	jbankier	Dalhousie
Jennifer	Bard	profbard	Texas Tech
Ann	Bartow	profabartow	Pace
David	Batty	dlbatty	Charlotte
Jeff	Bellin	BellinJ	William & Mary
Adam	Benforado	Benforado	Drexel
Jason	Benth	Prof_Bent	Stetson
Gerry	Beyer	Gerry_Beyer	Texas Tech
Tamar	Birckhead	juvjusticeblog	UNC
Kristen	Blankley	ADR_Prof	Nebraska
John	Blevins	johnfblevins	Loyola New Orleans
Maxwell Gregg	Bloche	greggbloche	Georgetown
Jack	Bogdanski	Bojack54	Lewis & Clark
Craig	Boise	CMLAWDean	Cleveland-Marshall
James	Boyle	thepublicdomain	Duke
Barbara	Bressler	bbressle	DePaul
Kim	Brooks	SchulichLawDean	Dalhousie
Sam	Brunson	smbrunson	Loyola Chicago
Trevor	Buck	trevbuck	De Montfort U (UK)
Alafair	Burke	alafairburke	Hofstra
Beth	Burkstrand-Reid	beth_burkstrand	Nebraska
Gillian	Calder	gilliancalder	Victoria
Ryan	Calo	rcalo	Univ. Washington
Jennifer	Camero	jennifercamero	Southern Illinois
Paul	Caron	SoCalTaxProf	Cincinnati
Tim	Caulfield	CaulfieldTim	Alberta
Anupam	Chander	AnupamChander	UC Davis
Jim	Chen	chenx064	Louisville
Miriam	Cherry	Prof_MCherry	St. Louis University
Colleen	Chien	colleen_chien	Santa Clara
Luis	Chiesa	proflchiesa	Pace
Andrew	Chin	chinunc	UNC
Chester	Chuang	ChesterChuang	Golden Gate
Danielle	Citron	DANIELLECITRON	Maryland
Robert	Clinton	robertclinton	Arizona  State
Kim Diana	Connolly	kimdianaconnoll	Buffalo
Jorge	Contreras	contreraslegals	American
Nathan	Cortez	nathancortez	SMU
Brenda	Cossman	BrendaCossman	Toronto
Bridget	Crawford	profbcrawford	Pace
Susan	Crawford	scrawford	Cardozo
Dennis	Crouch	patentlyo	Missouri
César	Cuauhtémoc Garcia Hernandez	crimmigration	Capital
Steven M.	Davidoff	StevenDavidoff	Ohio State
Jeremy	de Beer	jdebeer	Ottawa
Stephen	Diamond	StephenFDiamond	Santa Clara
Amy	Dillard	adillard	Baltimore
Jim	Dimitri	profdimitri	Indiana
John	DiPippa	jmdipippa	Arkansas-Little Rock
Marc	Edeman	MarcEdelman	Barry
Joel	Eisen	joeleisen	Richmond
Ted	Eisenberg	TheEisenberg	Cornell
Jonathan	Ezor	ProfJonathan	Touro
Dave	Fagundes	Dave_Fagundes	Soutwestern
Joshua	Fairfield	JoshFairfield	Washington & Lee
Nita	Farahany	LawandBioDigest	Vanderbilt
Dan	Farber	dfarber	Berkeley
Gabe	Feldman	SportsLawGuy	Tulane
Dan	Filler	danielmfiller	Drexel
Eric	Fink	LuckyJimJD	Elon
Cynthia	Fountaine	clfountaine	Southern Illinois
Gary	Francione	garylfrancione	Rutgers-Newark
Michael	Froomkin	mfroomkin	Miami
Lance	Gable	professorgable	Wayne State
E. Townsend	Gard	ETownsendGard	Tulane
Leslie	Garfield	LawAcademics	Pace
Eric	Goldman	ericgoldman	Santa Clara
Jerry	Goldman	oyez	Chicago-Kent
Colleen	Graffy	Colleen_Graffy	Pepperdine
Kyle	Graham	kylefgraham	Santa Clara
Kent	Greenfield	Kentgreenfield1	Boston College
James	Grimmelman	grimmelm	NYLS
Jill	Gross	profgross	Pace
Hugh	Hanson	HughCHansen	Fordham
Woodrow	Hartzog	hartzog	Cumberland
Rick	Hasen	rickhasen	Irvine
Michael Avi	Helfand	MAHelfand	Pepperdine
Joan	Heminway	VolunteerTwit	Tennessee
William	Henderson	wihender	Indiana
David	Herzig	professortax	Valparaiso
Robert	Heverly	robheverly	Albany
Hugh	Hewitt	HHRadio	Chapman
Nancy	Hogshead-Makar	Hogshead3au	Florida Coastal
Danielle	Holley-Walker	danielleholley	South Carolina
Joan	Howarth	JoanHowarth1	Michigan State
Blake	Hudson	ForestLawProf	Louisiana State
Lolita Buckner	Inniss	AuntieFeminist	Cleveland-Marshall
Kendall	Isaac	workplaceadresq	Appalachian
Eric E.	Johnson	Eric_E_Johnson	North Dakota
Anil	Kalhan	kalhan	Drexel
Daniel Martin	Katz	computational	Michigan State
Ariel	Katz	relkatz	Toronto
Renee	Knake	reneeknake	Michigan State
Russell	Korobkin	russellkorobkin	UCLA
Kim	Krawiec	KimKrawiec	Duke
Greg	Lastowka	greglas	Rutgers-Camden
Richard	Leiter	rleiter	Nebraska
Mark	Lemley	marklemley	Stanford
Jack	Lerner	jacklerner	USC
Lawrence	Lessig	lessig	Harvard
Browne	Lewis	bayouwriter	Cleveland-Marshall
Michael	Lewyn	mlewyn	Touro
Lyrissa	Lidsky	LidskyLidsky	Florida
Lawrence	Lokken	Llokken	Florida
Brian	Love	BrianJLove	Santa Clara
Daithí	Mac Síthigh	macsithigh	East Anglia (UK)
Michael	Madison	profmadison	Pittsburgh
Phil	Malone	berkphil	Harvard
Irina	Manta	irina_manta	Hofstra
Dan	Markel	DannyMarkel	Florida State
Christopher	Marsden	ChrisTMarsden	Essex (UK)
Craig	Martin	craigxmartin	Washburn
Jonathan	Masur	jonathanmasur	Chicago
Kris	Mayes	krismayes	Arizona State
Michael	McCann	McCannSportsLaw	Vermont
Marcia	McCormick	marciamccormick	St. Louis University
Lisa	McElroy	ProfLisaMcElroy	Drexel
Tracy	McGaugh	millennialprof	Touro
William	McGeveran	BillMcGev	Minnesota
Paul	McGreal	PaulMcGreal	Dayton
Greg	McNeal	gregorymcneal	Pepperdine
Nancy	Millar	lpprof	Phoenix
James	Milles	jgmilles	SUNY Buffalo
Richard	Moberly	Richard_Moberly	Nebraska
Derek	Muller	derektmuller	Pepperdine
Haskell	Murray	HaskellMurray	Regent
Cynthia	Nance	Nancecy	Arkansas
Ira Steven	Nathenson	nathenson	St. Thomas
Anthony	Niedwiecki	LawProfAnt	John Marshall (Chicago)
Sean	Nolon	snolon	Vermont
Beth Simone	Noveck	bethnoveck	NYLS
Rory	O'Connell	rjjoconnell	Queens University Belfast
Paul	Ohm	paulohm	Colorado
David	Opderbeck	dopderbeck	Seton Hall
Jessica	Owley	JessicaOwley	Buffalo
Frank	Pasquale	FrankPasquale	Seton Hall
Scott	Peppet	speppet	Colorado
Lisa	Philipps	lphilipps	Osgoode Hall
Randal	Picker	randypicker	Chicago
Ellen	Podgor	whitecollarprof	Stetson
Thaddeus	Pope	thaddeuspope	Hamline
Susan	Poser	susanposer	Nebraska
Brian JM	Quinn	bjmquinn	Boston College
Neil	Richards	neilmrichards	Wash U. St. Louis
Keith	Robinson	wkeithrobinson	SMU
Cassandra Burke	Robinson	AndraRobertson	Case Western
Jennifer Murphy	Romig	JenniferMRomig	Emory
Tom	Russell	houseofrussell	Denver
Meghan	Ryan	MeghanJRyan	SMU
Matthew	Sag	matthewsag	Loyola Chicago
Steve	Sanders	SteveSSanders	Michigan
Susan	Scafidi	CounterfeitChic	Fordham
Jason	Schultz	LawGeek	Berkeley
Michael	Scott	PrivacyLaw	Southwestern
Christopher	Seaman	cbseaman	Washington & Lee
Paul	Secunda	psecundaWrkProf	Marquette
Eric	Segall	espinsegall	Georgia State
Lea	Shaver	leashaver	Hofstra
Anna	Shavers	ambersmother	Nebraska
Ross	Silverman	phlu	Southern Illinois
Gordon	Smith	professor_smith	BYU
Dan	Solove	DanielSolove	George Washington
Larry	Solum	lsolum	Georgetown
Christopher	Sprigman	CJSprigman	Uva
Ruth	Stirton	RuthStirton	Sheffield (UK)
Lior	Strahilevitz	liorjs	Chicago
Kate	Sutherland	LawandLit	Osgoode Hall
Peter	Swire	peterpswire	Ohio State
Aaron N.	Taylor	TheEdLawProf	St. Louis University
Hollee	Temple	holleeinbalance	West Virginia
David	Thomson	dicthomson	Denver
Beth	Thornburg	btSMU	SMU
Jonathan	Turley	JonathanTurley	George Washington
Rebecca	Tushnet	rtushnet	Georgetown
Christopher	Tyson	chrisjtyson	Louisiana State
Barbara	van Schewick	vanschewick	Stanford
Steve	Vladeck	steve_vladeck	American
David	Wagner	david_m_wagner	Regent
Polk	Wagner	PolkWagner	Penn
Ari Ezra	Waldman	ariezrawaldman	Cal Western
Kimberlee	Weatherall	kim_weatherall	Sidney (Aus.)
Phil	Weiser	pweiser	Colorado
Adam	Winkler	adamwinkler	UCLA
Mary	Wong	marymagistra	UNH
Kevin	Woodson	unyoung_	Drexel
Joshua	Wright	Josh_D_Wright	George Mason
Tim	Wu	superwuster	Columbia
Jane	Yakowitz	JaneYakowitz	Arizona
Sandi	Zellmer	SandraZellmer	Nebraska
Jonathan	Zittrain	zittrain	Harvard
Christopher	Zorn	prisonrodeo	Penn State

The IT Productivity Paradox and Online Education, Part 3

In two prior posts (here and here), I discussed the IT productivity paradox, and the three main reasons that reduced productivity is sometimes observed in the aftermath of dramatically increased IT: (1) mismeasurement of productivity, (2) poor useability of IT, and (3) poor implementation of IT.  I discussed the first two reasons in my prior posts, and I now discuss the third in this final post.

A recent article in the New England Journal of Medecine gives a great example of poor implementation of IT:

In terms of mismanagement, the introduction of new technologies usually forces reexamination of the assumptions that underpin less productive processes. Early 20th-century manufacturers spent nearly two decades figuring out how to realize the productivity benefits of electricity. Initially, factories simply swapped waterwheels and steam engines for large electric motors but retained inefficient belt-and-pulley systems to transmit power from the central power source. Real productivity gains came only after manufacturers realized that many small motors distributed throughout a factory could generate power where and when it was needed; ultimately, it was the reengineering of processes coupled with the new technology that generated explosive growth in U.S. manufacturing productivity.

Are we seeing the same thing with elearning?  That is, are we simply en-grafting new technology onto an existing inefficient system of learning, instead of reengineering the learning process along with incorporating new technology?  If faculty are merely posting syllabi and other materials online instead of handing out hard copies, or our students use ExamSoft instead of typing or handwriting, it seems we are merely slotting new technology onto the old learning process.  The same could be said for replacing paper books with e-books (and there is also a useability problem with the current generation of e-books).

So, are there ways technology can help re-engineer the learning process?  One possibility may lie in allowing faculty members to incorporate more assessment of learning outcomes into large section courses.  Take the example of so-called "minute papers," which can be used at the end of a class meeting to gage and reinforce student learning.  Working with a former colleague who knew a lot more than I did about assessment, I developed several minute papers for my constitutional law class.  Here's an example of questions from one of those minute papers:

1.    Based on today's readings, write a definition of a "compelling government interest."

2.    Based on today's readings, provide an example of  a "compelling government interest."

3.    Provide an example of a "compelling government interest" that was not covered in the readings for today's class.

In the past, students would take five minutes at the end of class to write their responses on index cards or a sheet of paper, and I would collect these after class.  In a class with 85 students, this often made for an unwieldy mess of information to review.  Using TWEN (or another LMS), I can now use a web form to collect this information at the end of class, and TWEN loads the student responses into an Excel spreadsheet that I can access electronically whenever and wherever I want.  I can then scan the spreadsheet to quickly assess common misunderstandings, and I can display portions of the spreadsheet in class (without identifying specific students) to clarify the material.  And I have this information electronically available for reference in future semesters.  Technology has allowed me to "engineer" a form of periodic assessment into my large section class.

In a subsequent post, I will discuss how Richard Susskind's book The End of Laywers? might help us think about other ways to "re-engineer" law teaching, as well as how initiatives like Purdue University's Course Signals application might help too.

The IT Productivity Paradox and Online Education, Part 2

In a prior post, I discussed the IT productivity paradox, and the three main reasons that reduced productivity is sometimes observed in the aftermath of dramatically increased IT: (1) mismeasurement of productivity, (2) poor useability of IT, and (3) poor implementation of IT.  I discussed the first of these in the last post, and I discuss the second in this post.

A recent article in the New England Journal of Medecine gives a great example of poor useability:

[I]n the mid-1980s, the Internal Revenue Service purchased 18,000 computers and specialized software, hoping to increase the productivity of field agents. However, the new system required agents to load as many as 18 different diskettes to perform a single audit. Productivity dropped by 40%, and most agents refused to continue to use the system.

I have experienced useability issues in trying to incorporate the iPad into the classroom. As background, I should mention that I started using a SMARTBoard six years ago, and I love the way it lets me annotate and save pre-made slides in the classroom.  Over the last five years I have also used a Windows tablet PC (first an IBM Thinkpad, then a Dell notebook, and now an HP notebook) with PPT slides as a virtual whiteboard.  I attach the tablet to a projector and then use the stylus to mark up the PPT slides.  This method has also worked well to create video podcasts (using Camtasia) to post for out-of-class viewing.  And this all worked well because the handwriting capture on a Windows tablet PC has been amazing -- great feel of the stylus in my hand, precise interaction between the stylus and the software, and great resolution of the handwriting.

When the new iPad (i.e., iPad 3) came out, I was hoping it would have the features I loved about using the Windows tablet PC in class: virtual whiteboard and great handwriting feel and recognition.  And I even dared hope that the new iPad might actually un-tether me from the podium via wireless interaction with a projector.  Well, we're not quite there yet, hence my mentioning this in a post on useability.  None of the virtual whiteboard apps for the new iPad are as good as PPT on a Windows tablet PC for creating slides before class, and then for annotating in class.  Also, every handwriting stylus I have used for the new iPad feels light and odd in my hand, and the handwriting itself is imprecise and downright poor at writing small lettering.  And while there are apps that allow you to use the new iPad as a remote for a desktop in the classroom, thus un-tethering me from the podium (see Splashtop and Doceri), those apps merely allow me to control a Windows desktop and are still clunky to use.  So, at this point, I have spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to use the new iPad in the classroom and have come up empty.  Don't get me wrong -- the new iPad has made me more productive in other ways, but classroom use is not one.

I'd be interested in hearing any tech that has made profs more productive, as well as any tech dead ends that I ought to steer clear of.

The IT Productivity Paradox and Online Education

My thanks to Dan and other members of The Faculty Lounge for the opportunity to return.  As he mentioned, since my last visit, I have taken on a deanship, and that has led to many wonderful conversations with faculty, staff, students, alumni, and colleagues at other law schools about legal education.  Dan has been kind enough to allow me to extend those conversations to this forum.

A topic that has occupied me of late is how online education might work in legal education.  David Thomson's wonderful short book Law School 2.0 transformed my thinking on this front, and it propelled me to teach both hybrid and fully online courses.  One of the key insights, which is at the heart of the flipped classroom movement, is that by using the online environment to deliver certain basic material and information, the instructor can spend class time on more valuable activities.  In other words, faculty members can maximize the value of the time they spend with students.  Plus, if students receive release time for material covered online, a faculty member can cover more credit hours with fewer contact hours, which could be seen as a gain in productivity.  The faculty member could then devote this additional teaching activities, performing additional service, or conducting research. 

With all of this on my mind, I was quite interested to read a recent article in the New England Journal of Medecine that discussed how the so-called IT productivity paradox might apply to greater use of technology in providing health care services.  The article has this great summary of the paradox:

During the 1970s and 1980s, the computing capacity of the U.S. economy increased more than a hundredfold while the rate of productivity growth fell dramatically to less than half the rate of the preceding 25 years. The relationship between the rapid increase in IT use and the simultaneous slowdown in productivity became widely known as the “IT productivity paradox,” and economists debated whether investing billions of dollars in IT was worthwhile. The Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow observed in 1987 that “you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”

The article notes three main reasons that reduced productivity was observed in the aftermath of dramatically increased IT: (1) mismeasurement of productivity, (2) poor useability of IT, and (3) poor implementation of IT.  I'll take the first of these in this post, leaving the other two to subsequent posts.

Mismeasurement error can occur when there is an improvement in production that is not captured in the then-existing metric of productivity.  For example, when electricity was first used for outdoor lighting and public transit, it allowed increases in quality of service, such as brighter lighting and shorter trip times.  While these improvements were of value, they were not captured by the productivity measures of the day.  Paul A. David, The Dynamo and the Computer: An Historical Perspective on the Modern Productivity Paradox, 80 Am. Econ. Rev. 355 (1990).  This mismeasure could lead to underestimating the value of the technological improvement.

I wonder whether we may face the same issue as technology makes e-learning more widespread.  Higher education has a very difficult time judging productivity as it is, largely because it is hard to agree on what output we should be measuring.  McPherson, Schapiro, and Winston, Paying the Piper: Productivity, Incentives, and Financing in U.S. Higher Education.  For example, we ought to be squeamish about defining the output purely as the number of degrees conferred because that measure takes no account of the quality or learning outcomes of the education.

If higher education has such productivity issues generally, is there hope of measuring the return on investments in the technology of e-learning?  Yes and no.  No, because the productivity added by e-learning would seem to face the same obstacles as measuring productivity in higher ed generally.  Yes, because there have been some attempts to compare the learning outcomes in e-learning courses to in-person courses.  See here and here.  So while absolute productivity claims may prove difficult, relative measures may be possible.

A Twitter PSA

Twitter is intuitive in most ways, and many of its social norms are not all that different from other forms of social media (for example, don’t be this guy). But there’s one Twitter rule that is not remotely intuitive, yet goes to the heart of the purpose of Twitter and is seemingly unknown to many people who tweet, even those who tweet a lot. Since so many law profs tweet, herewith this brief PSA. I'll return to substantive blogging in short order.

Many, many tweets begin with the @ sign, e.g.:

@SCOTUSblog is reporting that SCOTUS has upheld the individual mandate! [Yay!/Boo!] #ACA

This tweet will show up in the timelines (or Twitter “feeds”) of only those people who follow both you and @SCOTUSblog. That’s presumably not the result you want in this case, since anyone following @SCOTUSblog already knows that they’re reporting the outcome of the ACA case.

If you want your tweet to appear in the timelines of everyone who follows you, all you have to do is begin your tweet with any character other than the @ sign. This is why you’ll see so many tweets beginning with periods that look like typos, e.g.:

. @SCOTUSblog is reporting that SCOTUS has upheld the individual mandate! #ACA #RobertsIsA[Hero/Traitor]

Of course, this works, too:

Big #ACA news: @SCOTUSblog is reporting that SCOTUS has upheld the individual mandate! #TheWorldIs[Redeemed/Over]

Once you know about it, this is actually a feature rather than a bug of Twitter. Twitter offers three levels of publicity/privacy, each appropriate to different tweets:

1. Private DMs (direct messages): These are exactly like Facebook’s message feature, i.e., they’re private messages between you and the recipient (and the FDA, if you're an FDA whistleblower or someone who communicates with them, apparently with the approval of FDA counsel).
2. Less public tweets that begin with the @ sign (sometimes called @replies): These will only appear in the timelines of those who follow both the sender and the recipient, so often relatively few people will see them. However, anyone with an internet connection can look at your Twitter profile page, e.g., https://twitter.com/SCOTUSblog, which shows every tweet you’ve sent, whether it begins with the @ sign or not.
3. Fully public tweets that don’t begin with the @ sign (tweets, proper): These appear in the timelines of everyone who follows you. In addition, as above, anyone with an internet connection (whether they have a Twitter account or not) can navigate to your profile page and see all of your tweets.

As an aside, when we’re through with the NFIB postmortem and return to discussing the actual law that that case upheld, can we please go back to calling it PPACA, rather than the ACA? Puh-PACK-uh is so much more fun to say.

Reflections on Online Course Evaluations

My school has gradually moved from paper-based course evaluations to online evaluations over the last couple of years.  I have now had about three or four of my courses evaluated electronically.  The first go around, I had a rather small class but was pleased to see a good response rate ie higher percentage of students filling in the online evaluation than had filled in the paper evaluations probably because the online evaluations are available outside of class time for a window of several weeks for students to fill in.  I was also pleased and surprised to see no negative comments at all.  I noticed the same pattern the following year ie a high response rate and a dearth of negative comments. 

I also noticed that there were fewer substantive/qualitative comments overall in the online evaluations than there had been in their paper-based counterparts.  In the paper-based evaluations, most of my students had written something in the 'comments' sections even if it was only a word or two.  In the online evaluations a much smaller number of students wrote anything at all under 'comments'.

This got me to wondering whether the move to online evaluations skews the results in unfortunate ways.  For example, although I'd love to think I've become such a magnificent teacher that no one can think of anything negative to say about me, I suspect this is not the case.  I wonder if the lack of negative evaluations might be explained by students' suspicions that anonymous online surveys are not really anonymous at all and can be traced to them in a way that paper-based evaluations cannot. 

The lack of negative evaluations might also be a function of the smaller number of qualitative/substantive comments overall.  However, I can't see why a move to an online format would skew evaluations in favor of positive feedback unless students were concerned that they would be tracked and somehow punished for negative evaluations.

It's also interesting that students have written less comments in the online format when one would assume it's easier and quicker to type comments into a computer screen than to handwrite them on a paper form.

Has anyone else had the experience of a switch from paper to digital evaluations and, if so, what have your experiences been?  Clearly online evaluations are convenient for students as well as being easier to collate and access remotely.  But are there downsides we might have been missing?