CALIopolis

It looks like this year will be a watershed for new ebook readers. The popularity of Apple's iPod and the business model of iTunes has shown the way for this to work.

There are at least three ebook readers due for release in the next couple of months based on Eink technology.

The most anticipated is the Sony Reader (or called the Libre in Japan where it is current available).

A Chinese company Jinke has an entry due out in Spring of 2006. They are already selling a version of this reader in China.

Finally (well probably not finally as I would bet there are others that I don't know about), but last in my list is the Irex reader.

I plan to purchase at least one of these and do a session at the CALI Conference. I will have more to say about ebook readers and ebooks generally as they apply to legal education in the near future.

This is the CALL FOR SPEAKERS for the 2006 Conference for Law School Computing.

Registration will be up in a few days.

The hotel will take phone call reservations, but not web reservations
just yet - don't let that stop you as hotel rooms GO FAST and we lose
them 30 days before the conference.

EVERYTHING can be accessed at www.cali.org/conference


2006 CONFERENCE FOR LAW SCHOOL COMPUTING

RIP MIX LEARN

*** CALL FOR SPEAKERS ****

What: 16th Annual Conference for Law School Computing
When: Thursday - Saturday, June 15-17, 2006
Where: Nova Southeastern Shepard Broad Law Center, Fort Lauderdale, FL

Submit proposal ideas at www.cali.org/conference

Register SOON at www.cali.org/conference

$395 - CALI members
$695 - Law school/non-members
$995 - non law school attendees

Hotel information at www.cali.org/conference

SHARE YOUR KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE AND IDEAS

Are you ...

‒ law faculty,
‒ law librarian or
‒ IT staff

with experience using, installing, supporting or building IT-based
systems for teaching at your law school? Are you an...

‒ Administrative systems developer,
‒ Help desk staffer,
‒ Webmaster,
‒ Instructional designer,
‒ Graphic artist/Flash programmer, or
‒ A/V/Classroom Technology guru?

If so, you have real-world experience to share as a SPEAKER at this
conference. Speaker registration fees are discounted $395, though you
will have to cover your own transportation and hotel costs.

If several people propose similar topics, I may group them into a
panel-o-presenters. If you are interested in becoming a speaker or
panelist, let me know. If you want to speak, but can't decide on a
topic, send me an email with your areas of expertise and I will try to
accommodate you. This is YOUR conference, help me to make it GREAT!

In the past, I have included a list of possible session titles. I am
going to break from tradition and see what comes flying in over the
transom. Get your creative juices flowing.

I came home from the store just now and was listening to a fascinating discussion about RSS and the transparency of corporations and business models of blogging and aggregation. When I hit the driveway, I sat in my car for a few moments because the discussion wasn't over yet I didn't want to turn off the car and miss the rest.

It was a Driveway Moment, but a false one.

I wasn't listening to the radio. I was listening to a podcast on my iPod Shuffle. Specifically, it was the Gillmour Gang's latest discussion that I ran across while downloading something else from ITConversations.

This is not the first time this has happened.

This is why I love podcasting.

I have had numerous driveway moments listening to National Public Radio's Chicago affiliate WBEZ, but certainly not every day or even once a week. When Terri Gross interviews someone in an area of special interest or on a topic that I am interested in, I listen avidly and when they don't, I feel a small letdown that I will have to listen to something or someone that I know little about and so it will be (blechhh) educational for me - you know, expand my horizons and all that.

Podcasting lets me find audio content that is almost always worthy of a driveway moment, but it doesn't have to happen serendipitiously. I now regularly listen to 10-15 podcasts per week while I am driving to/from work, walking the dog and doing the laundry.

Almost all of these (at present) are work-related - something to do with technology or education or the law and so it's a little like adding another 10 hours to my work week without any pain. In fact, it's great to have the distraction on the dog walks and they are a great alternative to my meagre music library.

This relates to podcasting in education and the Legal Education Podcasting Project. If students can add another few hours of study time - painlessly - to their schedule, that may be good. If they are listening to recorded lectures or summaries of classes that they have attended, the need to listen intently is lessened - they can pick up new insights or information and process it with the benefit of being several days or weeks away from the material. The more you study, the better off you are and if studying doesn't seem like studying, all the better.

This is not for everyone. I realize that. But that's what technology should be all about - giving us choices in how we manage, organize and consume information - our information.

If I am right, podcasting class lectures or summaries is a no-brainer and may actually be a significant improvement in efficient educational delivery.

I was having a very interesting discussion with Elmer Masters about how law faculty categorize what they do and how they think during the creation of legal education and scholarship. One high-level categorization system could be the "school of thought" that is being promulgated within the lecture, article or case commentary or analysis.

As a non-lawyer, I am only dimly aware of the concrete categories, but as a developer of social software pertaining to legal education, I am in need of understanding much more about what these categories are and how concrete they are.

A google search on "legal schools of thought" brings up some semi-familiar terms - even to me...

• the Chicago school
• feminist jurisprudence (via Wex which is looking more and more interesting every day!)
• critical legal studies (via Wikipedia)
• legal positivism
• natural law
• legal process
• law and economics

...and this was from looking only at the summaries that Google provides on the first two pages of search results. I realize that I am scratching the surface here because while I do want these top level categories of 'schools of thought; I am actually more interested in 'schools of thought' that are even more narrowly construed - down to specific legal subject areas or doctrines within specific topics of those subject areas.

It is at this point that I realize I am encountering exactly what 1Ls encounter as they seek the black and white and find only shades of grey and that some of these shades of grey have been around long enough to attract a name - a small school of thought (thoughtlette?).

I wonder if law faculty (or lawyers and judges for that matter) have generalized agreement on the boundaries of these schools of thought. As I think of my own profession - computer science - I realize ... of course they do ... but it would be rather difficult to find in one place all the mini-schools of thought in all of the different computer-related fields. It must be so in law as well.

So this is the mini-research project I have assigned myself. Find and list all of the major legal schools of thought (Wex and Wikipedia have bolstered my optimism) and talk to faculty in specific subject areas (Torts, Copyright, Criminal law, etc, etc.) about the schools of thought that exist below the surface of these major topics.

Why do this?

The articulation of this information is useful in constructing social software that is immediately recognizably useful to law faculty and valuable to law students - that is what CALI does.

It is quite possible, however, that the best articulation will be accompished via a bottom-up process, i.e. a folksonomy that is gradually built via many small encounters with material by many individuals like del.icio.us. That is actually a good metaphor for what I seek - a del.icio.us of legal schools of thought tags.

Can you assist?

Michael Sparks the Computing Services Director at LSU Law School conducted a survey of how law schools manage wireless access in their classrooms.

The survey pdf is here: wirelesssurvey.pdf.

There were 56 responding law schools and the results should not be too surprising. Some schools are using technology to restrict student surfing by either switching off the wireless access points or by using special software that students cannot circunvent.

Other schools use social means like instructions from the faculty or the Code of Conduct to control behavior.

There are two very good sides to this issue:

If the classroom is not interesting enough to engage the students, then faculty should make it more interesting....

... and ....

Faculty have a right to control their classrooms.

I agree with both and I believe that faculty will trumps all else. It is their responsibility to create the environment that delivers the educational message in the manner they desire. This is not to say that students who surf or doodle or generally don't pay attention cannot be considered an unspoken backchannel to the instructor. There could be value in having the students decide what the best policy is.

Multi-tasking or 'partial continuous attention' is a new facet of today's millenials and just because they are looking at the screen does not mean they are not tracking the class.

Interesting article that speaks to one of the main experiments we are conducting with the Legal Education Podcasting Project: Classroom recordings vs. Weekly summaries.

"...Recording a lecture may not produce a good podcast. This point was made by a colleague, Michael Rappa, who produced podcasts for his Fall 2005 course. His says, "It is not as simple as just recording lectures." His approach has been to record a separate 30 minute presentation covering the lecture content. Is this worthwhile?..."