“That’s wonderful,” says Arthur Miller, a professor at New York University’s School of Law, of the Final Club’s objective, “but that doesn’t mean that people should profiteer off it. The irony is the [blogger] could be nailed under the handbook, and these other guys might not be nailed.”
New lessons
The Final Club — the name itself is a tongue-in-cheek mockery of the secret, elite undergraduate social clubs that aren’t recognized by Harvard — comprises two components. The first is what Magliozzi and Bacrania call “course blogs,” which consist of student-composed essays and personal musings on a class. In his American Protest Literature from Tom Paine to Tupac course blog, for instance, “Fauxneme,” a grad student, writes of Jefferson’s Declaration: “Interestingly, the Declaration fell out of favor quickly. It wasn’t until the mid-19th century that people began to reclaim the language and importance of the declaration. This may be because the bulk of the text is Jefferson’s list of 27 grievances, and God help you if you ever have to read all of them.”
The second piece of the Final Club involves linked annotations designed to assist in the reading of public-domain, classic works of literature. These function as explanatory footnotes to the full text: a Cliffs Notes–like study guide that you read with, not instead of, a book. Anyone can contribute an annotation to the books posted on the Final Club’s Web site (unlike course blogs, which can only be written by Harvard students). At the moment, though, they’re contributed almost solely by “sponsored annotators,” who are likewise paid to seed such content throughout the site.
“I personally — and the Berkman Center in general — are pretty big on open access to knowledge,” says Phil Malone, who teaches a Cyberspace in Court freshman seminar in Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and is one of the nine professors who agreed to have a student blog about his course during the fall semester. Malone says he watched with interest the development of OpenCourseWare at MIT — which today publishes 1800 courses’ worth of material through a noncommercial Creative Commons license, and receives about 800,000 to a million unique visitors per month — and was sympathetic with the Final Club’s vision.
While Magliozzi and Bacrania admit they drew inspiration from OpenCourseWare, their goal is not exactly the same. Nor does Final Club, despite its for-profit status, share its mission with other note-taking companies that seek to dumb-down classes and sell educational material. Instead, it might be said that they seek to enhance Harvard course information.
“Students have an important contribution to the open educational resources movement,” says Steve Carson, the external relations director for MIT OpenCourseWare and an admirer of the Final Club. “I would hope that this would inspire [Harvard] to get more involved in open education.”
The majority of MIT’s material — aside from a selection of class notes they pay students to take and then publish with permission — is faculty-created, with a faculty perspective in mind. Final Club, for the most part, is by students, for students.
Rather than posting a straightforward syllabus, class handouts, or lecture videos — which is the model the OpenCourseWare Consortium follows — the Final Club’s model is looser, more free-flowing, with the student perspective controlling much of its content. Colloquial language, mini-digressions, and Stephen Colbert videos transform what could otherwise be a bare-bones rehashing of an outline into something highly readable.
