The 6th incarnation of Elmer's blog
Well, I’ve been meaning ot get this down for a while, but I’ve finally moved my personal blog to a better space and I’m hoping ot start blogging more. We’ll see.
One of the things I’m trying to get sorted out in my head is the complicated relationship between blogging and all this other social media stuff like Twitter and Facebook and Friendfeed. I am confident that I will strike on some sort of formula that get all og these things working nicely together.
Wish me luck 🙂
This is very odd. Just got a message I am being followed on Twitter by Serenity White (Serenity6176) at http://twitter.com/Serenity6176. Visit the page, mouseover the ‘following’ icons. Notice anything? Yep, all Elmer. Is it some weird fetish (we won’t even consider Elmer porn) or a bot that searches out Elmers on Twitter? Normally I would just block this sort of thing, but this intrigues me (enough to actually right a blog post) so I’m going to keep an eye on it and see if anything happens.
With the backing of some top medical schools, a foundation is calling on physicians and scientists to help them build a huge online encyclopedia of medicine, called Medpedia. Today the Medpedia Foundation raised the curtain slightly on their Web site, giving prospective collaborators a peek.
This sounds a lot like the medical version of the Wex project at LII, a nifty effort at building a collaborative, open law dictionary and encyclopedia. For some reason, Wex was never heralded in a press release like this:
Nor does Wex have direct support from “Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, the University of California Berkeley School of Public Health, the University of Michigan Medical School and dozens of health organizations around the world” as Medpedia does. I certainly hope it lives up to its press release.
Anyway, it does make me wonder why more law schools don’t support efforts like Wex directly. Time and energy put into making more legal information freely available would be a great investment in our communities and may even result in a greater demand for legal services by a more informed public.
13. Online learning. US schools are often bad. A lot of parents realize it, and would be interested in ways for their kids to learn more. Till recently, schools, like newspapers, had geographical monopolies. But the web changes that. How can you teach kids now that you can reach them through the web? The possible answers are a lot more interesting than just putting books online.One route would be to start with test prep services, for which there’s already demand, and then expand into teaching kids more than just how to score high on tests. Another would be to start with games and gradually make them more thoughtful. Another, particularly for younger kids, would be to let them learn by watching one another (anonymously) solve problems.
Y Combinator: Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund
And that sounds right to me in the groups market. Charlie says the least common denominator in the groups market are these three functions:
1. A customizable site to call their own, even if it just has information as to what the group does and how to sign up.
2. A way to communicate internally, via a one-way or two-way listserv, depending on the group.
3. A way to do RSVPs for events.So using the less is more mantra, someone should build just that, make it drop dead simple, and then build the killer API that lets everyone build on top of that. It may be that the big social nets are in the best spot to do that. Or maybe not.
Yep, it sure sounds a lot like OG for Drupal. In fact it sounds a lot like what I’m building right now to allow faculty and students at law schools to come together and form ad hoc groups around classes, ideas, scholarship, organizations, etc.
Tags: drupal, Fred Wilson, organic groups, groups, elangdell
Charles R. Nesson, a professor at Harvard Law School, says the key for professors is to know when laptops are good for class and when they’re not.
“Technologies are not good for everything,” says Mr. Nesson, who is also a founder of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. “Sometimes they destroy some good things along with the opportunities they make available.”
In Mr. Nesson’s classes, laptops are good for looking up legal material. During class students are encouraged to find the right evidence rule on the Web and to contribute to a class wiki, a communal Web site they frequently edit and update.
He says laptops are not good, however, during and immediately following a guest speaker’s presentation. He requests that the computers stay shut, signaling to students that they should all participate in discussing issues the speaker raises.
Law Professors Rule Laptops Out of Order in Class – Chronicle.com
This just isn’t going to go away. I think the real answer here is for law school tech folks and interested faculty to actively pursue and advocate for constructive ways to use laptops in class. Make the laptop a useful tool rather than a distraction.
As for laptop use, shouldn’t this be a matter decided by law profs and their students on a class by class basis, even perhaps on a day by day basis? If so, law profs might want to read Kevin Yamamoto’s (South Texas College of Law) article, Banning Laptops in the Classroom: Is it Worth the Hassles? [SSRN]. Yamamoto argues that laptops should be banned unless their use aids the learning process.
Law Librarian Blog: Banning Laptops in the Classroom: Is it Worth the Hassles?
This just isn’t going to go away. The referenced article looks fascinating and I’ll certainly give it a read.
Future-safe archives (Scripting News) – Dave is concerned about his digital legacy surviving him. This is a huge issue, really. Who is going to archive all of the stuff that is out there? I remember the dread that appeared in the law library when the ‘papers’ of a wealthy alum turned up one day along with his request that it be kept for future generations of legal scholars. To us it looked like boxes of stuff from his garage (which it was). Once we got inside the boxes it turned out to be a treasure of research and writing in a particular area of the law. So we built a collection out of it. But libraries are ill prepared to handle large amount of archival material. Digital stuff is even worse.
There is no doubt that the things Dave is concerned about are valuable now and for the future, but keeping them around is a hard question. I think that there is a certain amount of irony in that the best suggestions for long term archiving mentioned in the comments are to just put everything into hard copy, have it well bound, and distribute it to libraries. Books are the longest lived, most stable, most accessible archival format mankind has found to date. Maybe we sgould jusat be thinking about what is really worth archiving and print it out.
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