CALIopolis

excited utterances has this great list of conferences, worldwide, that focus on legal technology and knowledge management:

technorati tags: km, legal tech, legal km, knowledge management

Slashdot is discussing wi-fi access in the college classroom in an article ominously titled...Is Wi-Fi Ruining College?

Here's an interesting solution that is likely to have some traction with law faculty...

"...I'm a student at Harvard Business School, where they have a fairly interesting solution for handling this problem. While every campus building has wireless access, all the access points in the classroom buildings require a web based log-in that checks your student ID versus your class schedule. If you're scheduled to be in class at that moment, you are denied wireless access to the internet (in any classroom building)..."

We've heard all the discussion on both sides of this...

• If students are paying, that's their problem,
• If faculty are boring, students will not pay attention anyway,
• Students could doodle or do crossword puzzles,
• Faculty should make the classroom more intereactive and interesting,
• The web is a seductive, shiny thing and no one could help themselves checking their email,
• There are valid educational uses for accessing the web inside the classroom like...
• Students looking up things that the instructor is talking about to better understand the material,
• Studenst IMing each other with the answers when one is called upon,
• Faculty integrating websites, research, etc into the classroom time,
• Students use their PCs to take notes, so you can't refuse them access to their PCs,
• Eventually, it will be impossible to block network access via cell phones, PDAs, mesh networks, wi-fi max, wi-fi muni, etc.

Here's a thought experiment. If a student did not attend any classes and still can get a 'A' in the course, does that negate the need for the classroom time?

Let me pose this thought experiment more generally (I did this at the CODEC workshop last April). If students are willing to pay the full tuition and they prove that they can pass the bar exam, would you 'sell' them their degree?

In case it is not obvious, I am asking whether law schools are selling education or a credential and whether students are buying an education or a credential.

I think the answer is both, but I know that schools place a lot of weight on student bar passage rates and quite a few schools are developing their own non-credit bar review courses to bring these numbers up. Is this just a natural manifestation of the disconnect between legal education and bar exam passage?

11/20/2006 - Update - Tipping Education's Sacred Cow: Reconsidering the Lecture

This blogpost considers whether lectures can be replaced by "coursecasts" where the student can pause and take notes, etc.

Why not do it both ways? Faculty can continue to deliver the live lectures and archive the video and audio for students to re-visit later. I don't think that the synchronous, live class meeting will go away, but it could be improved.

Coursecasts/podcasts/CALI lessons could cover doctrine and the live class could be interactive, socratic and discussion-oriented. Bligh says that lectures have limited capacity to deliver information and almost no ability to change attitudes or opinions. It is discussion with others that engages the student mind. Expect a future article on deconstructing the lecture.

A study by the Sloan Consortium found that a growing number of colleges are putting online more of the courses that they offer in a face-to-face setting. The consortium, an organization that promotes standards for online learning, found that more than three out of five institutions offering face-to-face undergraduate or graduate courses offer them at the same level online. The survey also revealed that more college officials see distance learning as crucial to their long-term strategies. The survey can be found at the Sloan Consortium Web site.

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Online Options

This trend will catch up with law schools in the near future.  CALI's work with CODEC and Classcaster is intended to bring awareness about and tools for online education to law schools.  You can download the complete text of the study here.

technorati tags: CALI, Classcaster, CODEC, distance education

In an announcement about Google Base on the company's blog, CollegeBoard.com is listed as one of the first users of the service. The service has a section for "course descriptions" and another on "education."

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Google Helps Students Search for Colleges

Well, this is interesting. A lot of the content in 'course descriptions' is from the MIT OpenCourseWare initiative. It is easy to see CALI adding Lessons here, even our subject outlines. I do wonder how this will be integrated into the regular Google results.

technorati tags: CALI, Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction, Google base, distance education

Seattle University School of Law is the first law school in the nation to partner with Legal Aid University to provide state-of-the-art training for legal aid and pro bono lawyers and clinical law programs.
Law school faculty will support design and development of LAU's online and in-person curricula and training programs. Ada Shen-Jaffe, a distinguished public interest practitioner in residence, will anchor the West Coast headquarters of LAU. Her first project will be strategic planning, organizational and leadership development for LAU. Shen-Jaffe, an expert dedicated to providing quality legal services for all, also will advise the university provost on leadership development for a more just and humane world.

Seattle University - News and events - University news

Current statistics for Version 3.1 are:Number of Bloggers: 202 bloggers.Growth: Since the last census on June 16, 2005, the number of bloggers has grown from 130 to 202, an increase of 55%! That’s a big increase in less than 5 months.

Concurring Opinions: Law Professor Blogger Census (Version 3.1)

Via BoleyBlogs. This list includes achart with links to all 202 blogs on the list. I should aggregate these. One thing the census doesn't reveal is what the content of the blogs is, how often they are updated, and how much institutional support there is for faculty blogging.

I've been doing some of the think-work in preparation for the 2006 Conference for Law School Computing to be held at Nova Southeastern Shepard Broad Law Center on Thu-Sat, June 15-17, 2006.

I fear that for some attendees, this conference is getting....stale.
We have consciously designed the conference to attract folks from three major communities...techies, law librarians and faculty. The original idea was that these folks didn't interact and share ideas and concerns as often as they might and that the CALI Conference was a way to mash-up the disparate needs of these three broad communities under the common rubric of technology in legal education, research and administration within law schools.

You may or may not have noticed that the idea of "tracks" in the conference has consistently been downplayed. If you look hard, there are tracks sort of meant for faculty and sort of meant for tech staff and sort of meant for tech administrators, but the slight ambiguity was purposeful to encourage some cross fertilization of ideas.

By far, the biggest number of complaints I get are from the "hard" techies and from the faculty. Both seem to feel that the conference does not have sufficient numbers of sessions to attract their attention. It has been suggested that we be much more specific about tracking or even sponsor *seperate* conferences for different constituencies.

Both of these ideas (tracking and seperate conferences) work against the original goal of the CALI Conference and that worries me.

A second important goal of the CALI Conference was to establish a sense of professionalism for tech staff at law schools. Faculty have AALS, Librarians have AALL, techies have techie conferences like COMDEX, Educause, TechShow, etc., but nothing aimed directly at the common problems of law school computing that all tech staff confront.

Balance, I believe, is important, but I struggle to find that balance every year. I fear that new tech staff don't know about the conference and that the sense of Law School IT Professionals has diminished as our jobs have diversified and roles have become both more defined and less defined.


More defined in the sense that 10 years ago, the typical law school IT staffer was a "jane/jack-of-all-trades". This is less so today where responsibilities are more clearly defined and we only need (or want) to know about things that are specific to our roles within our institutions.

When I was Director of Computing Services at Chicago-Kent, I adminstered the network, programmed in dBase and VB, repaired and sold student and faculty computers, changed toner cartridges and created strategic plans for future IT initiatives. Today, these responsbilities would fall under network administrator, programmer, help desk, lab technician and CIO/Director with much clearer lines of delineation. Of course, today, you must add a plethora of new responsibilities...webmaster, faculty liaison, classroom technology, instructional design and support, audio/visual....forgive me if I don't list everything here.

Less defined in the sense that what we do in law schools is no different than what anyone does in any school and so a conference aimed at "law school" computing makes less sense today. I don't believe this. There are all sorts of things that make law schools different from anything else, but this requires us to realize that we need to understand our institutional goals and not just our technology. The more defined our roles as webmasters, programmers, network administrators et al, the less we see the "law school" differentiator in them.

I ran across a very interesting article that sparked this post

http://www.centralityjournal.com/archives/homophily_of_professional_conferences.html

Give it a read and tell me what we can do so that the CALI Conference remains relevant, interesting and valuable.

Received an email this morning from my friend Tom Bruce announcing the immeadiate availability of Wex, a collaboratively-edited legal dictionary and encyclopedia built on the MediaWiki platform. Here's a bit from the Wex FAQ:

What is Wex? WEX is a collaboratively-edited legal dictionary and encyclopedia. It is intended for a broad audience of people we refer to as "law novices" -- which at one time or another describes practically everyone, even law students and lawyers entering new areas of law. No doubt purists will be quick to point out the differences between a dictionary and an encyclopedia. We deliberately blur the distinction, as we are interested in providing objective, useful material in a range of formats.

Tom and LII crew have seeded Wex with the lot of original content that was developed for the LII's 'Law About..' legal subject area series. This looks like it will be another hit for the LII.

Next steps in RSS, Reading Lists - Think about adopting this idea of RSS Reading Lists for legal ed. Berkman's H2O Playlists come pretty close. John could elaborate more here.

Thomson Peterson's >> Syndication for Higher Ed >> Learning Communities, Sharing, and RSS - Good article doing a bit of a wrap up on the current state of affairs re: RSS, etc. in higher ed.

Using WebHuddle, you have options—and flexibility. Meetings can be conducted either in conjunction with an enterprise’s existing teleconferencing service, or utilizing WebHuddle’s optional voice over IP. WebHuddle also offers recording capabilities—presentations can easily be recorded for playback over any web browser for those who missed the live meeting.

WebHuddle -- Alternative Communication

There is an intriguing bit here that seems to indicate that you can stream PowerPoint with audio.

The terrific Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Education has been featuring lectures and other educational materials at CALI Radio, otherwise known as the ClassCaster, for several months now.

A natural extension for podcasting. Between Lawyers: technology + culture + law

And they got it mostly right. It is important to note that Classcaster is the platform that CALI Radio runs on.

A pilot program that lets college students buy digital textbooks from their campus bookstores has gotten off to a slow start. But the company that runs the project says the early returns show at the very least that students are interested in e-books.

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Digital Textbooks Struggle to Gain a Foothold on Campus

E-books are something that have been around for a long time and their time may never come. The key thing in getting students to use this sort of thing is to give it to them as a tool. Add the ability to remix the text, annotate it, share it, etc. If all an ebook does is give you some computer based version to read off the screen or print, then it is never going to get anywhere.