During the past decade, the massive worldwide conversion of learning content from print and other older media on to digital networks has created gatekeepers who limit access to their digital content or require online users to pay for it.

A variety of gatekeepers have made a third choice:
to open their content freely into the Internet.
These are their stories.

August 17, 2006

Professor Douglas Linder's Famous Trials
Leader at the learning bar since 1995

For more than a decade, Professor Douglas Linder of the University of Missouri-Kansas City has created and maintained the leading website about famous trials. A quick search of Google will show that Professor Linder dominates the subject of trials online. His own website appears at the top of the first page of the Google list followed by law school and other sources which, when you click to open the links, have many links to Professor Linder's website. The one website that is in any competition to his work is by Court TV, but there only eleven trials are covered compared to over 50 covered by Professor Linder.

The most recent case on Professor Linder's website is the 2006 Trial of Zacarias Moussaoui. The coverage begins with a Trial Commentary" by Douglas Linder (2006), with these opening quotations:

"He killed the 9/11 victims as surely as if he had been at the controls of one of those airplanes."
--U. S. Attorney Robert Spencer, in his opening statement in the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui

"You can't judge him to get revenge for 9/11. You can't make him some substitute for Osama bin Laden. And you can't make him a scapegoat for what government officials did not do."
--Edward MacMahon, court-appointed lawyer for Zacarias Moussaoui, in his opening statement.

As for the each of the cases on this deeply documented website, the Moussaoui materials are extensive, including sections for: chronology, images and maps, trial humor, "Mastermind's" Statement, #93 cockpit tape, indictment, trial exhibits, dox & facts, transcript excerpts, 9-11 preventable (ZM trial revelations) and links.

The Famous Trials website that Professor Linder has created and maintained for more than a decade is very strong evidence for the ability of a single individual to make an awesome contribution to education by using the economy of open learning content on the Internet. Thousands upon thousands of students have acquired knowledge about criminal justice from his work.