CALIopolis

"Please Pay Attention" is the working title of the new podcast series. We would love to get suggestions from listeners to name this podcast.

Elmer Masters and I talk about legal education-related IT topics several times a week and we have threatened in the past to turn some of those conversations into podcasts because we believe that others might benefit. Alternatively, others might listen and set us straight.

So we have followed up on our threat and recorded the first in a series of podcasts. The general topic area is IT in legal education/law schools. We don't expect to be the only voices on this podcast as we will be inviting "guest speakers" - that is - real IT folks who work at real jobs in real law schools.

But for this first podcast, we decided to keep it between just me and Elmer and talk about Drupal (Elmer attended DrupalCon in Boston last week), Drupal, the massively popular open source content management system and related topics on law school website design, development and administration issues.

We talk a bit about the planned DrupalFest to be held during the 2008 Conference for Law School Computing on June 18-21, 2008 in Baltimore, MD at the University of Maryland School of Law.

Give it a listen, give us some feedback and in a couple of weeks we will see if this a drive-by podcast or we will be repeat offenders.

Here is the podcast ... LegalEdITpodcast001rev1.mp3 (updated version after running The Levelator to clean up sound volume levels)

iTunes links to be added soon.

Intro and out-tro music is Creative Commons licensed and was found at Podsafe Audio. The artist is Heather Sullivan and the tune is "I Believe".

We have a theme!!!

"Transforming Legal Educaction" is the theme for the 2008 Conference for Law School Computing.

We'll be posting links for registration and putting out a call for speakers soon. All of these links will be here.

The 2008 Conference for Law School Computing will be held on Thursday - Friday, June 19 - 21, 2008 at the University of Maryland School of Law in Baltimore, MD.

We haven't set up the website or even put out a call for speakers yet because I am stumped on deciding a theme for this conference. After AALS, I was thinking of something like "From MacCrate to Carnegie: Back to the Future", but it doesn't have that much to do with Law School IT.

We ARE planning to have a dedicated track just for law faculty with all sorts of innovative presentations on technology that are specifically aimed at the classroom and teaching, but I can't really figure out how to make this work theme-wise.

So....

Below you will find some mockups for themes. Take a look and send me a note (jmayer@cali.org) with your suggestions or whether or not you especially love/hate any of these. I currently have comments turned off due to frequent comment-spam attacks.

CALI's Director of Membership, LaVonne Molde has pointed out that in my talk at AALS and in my slides, I list CALI as having only 206 U.S. law school members when that number should actually be 208!

Click here for the complete list and if you are a student or faculty at a law school that is NOT a member ... please tell me why not.

Here is the link to the screencast version of my talk at the 2008 Annual CALI Members Meeting held on Friday, January 5, 2008 in New York during AALS.

I had previously posted the podcast/audio recording and Powerpoint slides.

Here ...

AALS2008Carnegie.mp3

... is the recording of the AALS Session: Rethinking Legal Education For The 21st Century. The speakers included...

• Moderator: Edward L. Rubin, Vanderbilt University Law School
  
• Speakers: Vicki C. Jackson, Georgetown University Law Center
  
• Robert Mac Crate, Esq., Senior Counsel, Sullivan and Cromwell, New York, New York
  
• Martha L. Minow, Harvard Law School
  
• Suellyn Scarnecchia, University of New Mexico School of Law
  
• William M. Sullivan, Senior Scholar The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Palo Alto, California
  
• Judith W. Wegner, University of North Carolina School of Law

Here is the recording of my talk at the 2008 Annual Membership Meeting for CALI during AALS in New York, NY on January 5, 2008 ... AALS2008CALIBreakfast.mp3

Here are the slides ... 2008AALSBreakfast_final.ppt

I will be posting a screencast version soon and posting more information about ELangdell into the future.

The Family was over to the house to celebrate Christmas yesterday. One of our many annual traditions is to sing the 12 days of Christmas with different individuals/groups handling each "number". Others are tasked to try to confuse them with alternate lyrics ... hilarity ensues.

Here you go... MayerFamily12days2007.mp3

Paul Caron, blog-emperor and CALI Board Member asked me to contribute to the fascinating thread about "Advice to Erwin Chemerinsky".

The biggest constraint was the 250 word limit.... here's my advice...

As the Executive Director of CALI, I read a lot of feedback from students that pertains to their perceptions of legal education. The single biggest thing that students crave is more feedback. Imagine if you took a job where you were paid at the end of 15 weeks based on your performance -better performance= more pay, but you weren’t told how well you were doing until the end of the 15 weeks. That’s law school. Students are studying hard, but they aren’t sure that they know what they know until the results of the final exam are in.

I would advise Dean Chemerinsky to mandate that all classes provide some form of personal feedback to all students. This doesn’t have to be graded, but it should be substantive. This could be in the form of midterm exams, quizzes or even students evaluating each other’s mini-essays or shared collections of multiple choice questions. The technology tools exist so that this isn’t an undue burden on the instructor or require the hiring of teaching assistants for every class.

It is worth noting that feedback can be bi-directional. The aggregate results of weekly quizzes can tell the instructor where she has lost the students and should provide some additional instruction. If instructors want to read really excellent final exams, then you have to make sure that students are on track throughout the semester. The surprises you get reading the finals are no less disconcerting than the surprises that the students get when you grade it.

I am so excited to make this post.

Here's the press release.

What does the new website, Avvo, which rates lawyers and CALI Awards have to do with each other?

Read on...

A new website, Avvo (shortened "avvocato" which is italian for lawyer) purports to rank lawyers based on objective algorithmic evidence...

"...scores are calculated using a mathematical model, all lawyers are judged by the same standards. The Avvo Rating takes into account many factors, including experience, professional achievements, and disciplinary sanctions..."

I looked up some famous lawyers I know about and they did indeed have a lower score. For example, see "Fast Eddie" Vrdolyak's rating here. Mr. Vrdolyak was a longtime alderman in the Chicago City Council and was recently indicted on fraud charges. This wasn't the reason for his low score - rather he had been sanctioned by the ARDC in the past.

Of more personal interest, a commenter on Slashdot noted that they have a higher score due to the CALI Awards they received in law school. Law students receive a CALI for achieving the highest grade in a course. Looks like Avvo's been crawling the CALI website.

Only half the law schools in the U.S. participate in the CALI Excellence for the Future Awards program. Perhaps I will get a few more emails this week.

A few years back, someone started posting death rates for hospitals and doctors on the web. It was a simple statistic, but it's one of those statistics that is easy to misinterpret out of context. Some doctors just have sicker patients, right?

I was wondering why no one seems to have posted attorney ratings based on wins/losses in court cases. Wouldn't you like to know if your attorney was a "winner"?

Avvo doesn't do that...yet.

The reason for the Slashdot story is that an attorney is suing Avvo for his low rating. It looks like the data that Avvo is using is publicly available information, which would be an argument in their favor, I presume (IANAL).

More relevant, Avvo lets former clients post reviews of their experiences with attorneys. Sort of like an Angie's List for lawyers (though Angie doesn't have any listings or ratings for lawyers). Why shouldn't clients rate lawyers like they do plumbers, carpenters and dog-walkers?

It looks like someone has thought about suing Angie's List for a poor rating posted by a user, but ...

"... he'd like to sue Angie's List but that his attorney tells him it's protected..."

Angie's List doesn't rate vendors though - the users do. Angie just aggregates the information.

I can certainly see a downside to non-contextual rankings and sites like RateMyProfessor.com and the US News Rankings of law schools have both been villified for their lack of context (former) or opaque/unfair methodology (latter).

Still, more information is better and the web is certainly all about more information.

Right?

It will be interesting to see where this goes.

Techcrunch mentions a new service called Usphere where undergrads can pay $65 to apply to 33 unnamed colleges. The colleges then send acceptances letters (or not) with the costs of tuition that the student would pay.

LSAC (Law School Admissions Council and purveyors of the LSAT) has had a service for a long time where law students can fill out a single application and have it transmitted to many (most?) law schools that participate in the program. It's a single-sign-on idea applied to law school applications which are pretty similar from school to school.

What if they took it one step further and like Usphere allowed law schools to affirmatively "bid" for students. This already happens to a certain extent - schools compete for students - but the current system does not expose a law school applicants application to every law school. Applicants pick a small number of schools to apply to and the costs of applying to law school is not trivial (several hundred dollars in many cases).

My idea is a riff on Usphere where law schools can view all the applications whether the student has indicated they want to apply or not. This would allow them to approach students that might not otherwise have applied. I believe it could be handled smoothly without generating a boatload of unwanted spam. Schools could indicate a willingness to make an offer and applicants could see who is looking at them.

The network statistics from this would also be amazingly interesting. What kinds of applications result in what kinds of offers? What types of applicants are schools looking for?

As the Techcrunch article points out about USphere, this is more like a Match.com or dating service where personality traits and desired personality traits are matched up .... maybe more like an eHarmony for law school admissions.

It would be difficult to predict if law schools would participate or if there would be any benefit. It sure seems like it would be a good idea. It's a way to escapte the "tyranny" of measuring applicant quality by only LSAT score, GPA and undergrad institution rank.

Professor Leiter is conducting a study of law faculty scholarly productivity (methodology here). The goal (or one goal) is...

"...what is the most effective and efficient way to measure the scholarly impact of a law faculty..."

What if you replace the word "scholarly" with "teaching"?

If you have seen this video...

...then you can imagine how hard it is to measure teaching impact in the same way as Professor Leiter is measuring scholarly impact but perhaps there are some objective numbers that can be discovered and measured.

• number of classes taught
• number of students in those classes
• number of credit hours those classes are worth

These can be culled from the course catalog and a the class sizes by survey.

• casebooks published (first time)
• casebooks updated
• supplemental materials published

Theoretically, we could find this information out from the commercial publisher websites and matching up authors and co-authors with the publication dates to get an average per year.

Harder to get would be...

• adoption rates for casebooks
• sales figures for casebooks and supplemental materials
• whether supplemental materials are required, suggested or recommended.

Some of this could be culled from the course syllabi - many of which are online. There is a certain amount of "everyone knows" regarding what are the most popular casebooks in the major subject areas, but the long tail is harder to measure.

Having a casebook in the marketplace will generate a certain amount of traffic for the authors who must "teach the teachers" as well. This illustrates the point that teachers teach students and teachers teach teachers. Should we measure both? It would seem that teaching teachers has more downstream impact than teaching students. The places that teachers teach teachers include presentations given relating to teaching at ...

• AALS
• Conferences
• Workshops

What about non-traditional supplemental materials?

• CALI lessons written
• Websites related to educational activities
• Blogs and podcasts with educational intent like Classcaster

I can certainly measure the first item and there are over 100 law professors who have written a CALI lesson at some time in the past, but the others would be much harder to track. A lot of web-based educational material is behind a password or inside a learning management system.

None of this speaks to quality, however and so we look back to Leiter's study. He measures quality by citation. If someone else (either a court or another faculty member) has made a citation to your work, it is an indicator of impact and therefor some measure of the works value.

The nearest thing to citation in teaching is casebook/material adoption, but this would not capture the whole picture.

It would seem that potential law students would be very interested in this type of information, especially in the 150 law schools that are not going to end up in Professor Leiter's Top 30 ranking of scholarly impact.

I ran across Lee Arnold's video explaining the Bush Tax Cut some months ago and felt that it conveyed a complex topic with extreme clarity in a very short amount of time. I was gratified to see that Arnold has a series of videos on YouTube that you can access from here.

What is particularly interesting is his use of symbols that are apparently derived from the work of Howard Odum. Arnold calls it ecolanguage. Wikipedia tells me...

...Howard Thomas Odum (1924–2002), known as H.T. Odum or Tom Odum, was an American ecosystem ecologist and a professor at the University of Florida. He was collectively known as one of the "Fathers of Ecology" together with his brother Eugene...

I am fascinated by Arnold's multimedia creations that short, powerful and enlightening in so little space and time.

I am convinced that there is an interesting project to develop a similar set of symbols - and also multimedia presentations - that could bring clarity to teaching the law. This is an idea I have been working on for a while that I call "Talking Flowcharts".

The first examples I saw of them in law were done by William Andersen from the University of Washington School of Law and they are embodied in his CALI lessons on Administrative Law.

In the original CALI lessons, Andersen included video and audio of him talking and explaining the charts as he walked students through the Administrative Procedure Act. Unfortunately, this was 1993 and the size of the media files was too large to be able to effectively distribute and we have never gone back to re-integrate them now that video and audio flies around the web with such ease.

James Maule, author of many, many CALI Tax lessons likes to point to the work of Arnold Mitchel, an International Tax Attorney who has created hundreds of charts explaining short concepts on his area of practice.

Finally, there is the excellent work of Professor Karl Manheim on his Constitutional Law charts.

All of these charts can be produced using Visio or SmartDraw or other tools and it's would be somewhat straightforward to use Camtasia to create screencasts where narration could be added, but I my goal is larger. I want to create a consistent system or software that lets any law faculty easily create their own talking flowchart. Lee Arnold's symbology makes me think that we could create something that would resonate with a large number of faculty and would generate multimedia presentations that are powerful and instructive.

I may be wrong however.

Law can be viciously complex and difficult to reduce to such symbols and the whole project would be open to the criticism of oversimplification. I would counter, however, that the talking flowcharts should not replace, but supplement - the usual argument for new teaching materials.

I would also contend that a talking flowchart is closer to what faculty do in the classroom with the chalk ... er ... whiteboard. They talk and draw circles and arrows and stab and gesture to emphasize key points. Talking flowcharts would have to imbue those same "gestures".

More exploration on this topic to come.

I have compiled the results from the 2007 Survey of Law Students who were in podcasted courses.

First, the number of students responding was a less than half from last year (120 in 2007 vs. 300 in 2006).

A couple of interesting trends are noticable. More students knew about podcasting this time around.

More students used portable MP3 players to listen to podcasts than before (24% vs. 17%), but the PC was the primary listening device.

More students listened to podcasts from other professors (15% vs. 8%), so awareness of podcasting professors is growing.

Podcasts as attendance-supressors seemed to decline with this survey. 2% said they attended less classes vs. 7% last year. 11% said they skipped classes vs. 12% last year.

Students rated podcasts value as EXCELLENT or ABOVE AVERAGE at about the same rate - 75% in 2007 vs. 74%.

The summary report is available here - 2007Survey.pdf - in PDF format.

The summary of comments is here - 2007SurveyComments.pdf