H20 – An Electronic Casebook Creation Tool

Harvard Law School created a suite of tools for professor – student collaboration called  H2O.   It has  four components:

• Playlist  – A syllabus with links to books and articles.
• Question Tool – For use during lectures.  Class participants can ask questions, answer questions  and vote on which questions they want the professor to answer.
• Collage – casebook creation tool.  Allows for tagging text, annotating it, and hiding portions of text without changing the original document.
• Rotisserie – a discussion tool.  “Users respond to a question, then are assigned discussion partners, who critique their responses.”   Hacking the Casebook.   Also see Ethan Zuckerman’s blog, Best Practices in Legal Education

Students can outline and mark up cases they’re assigned to study and share them with a study group.  Professors can use the system to share syllabi and edited cases.  Check out this   sample playlist (click Playlist and scroll to Chapter 2: Battery) to see what the system looks like.

H20 is still in its alpha testing stage.