Category: Closed Course

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Course Listing Apps on Facebook

Now that Facebook has opened up its pages to independent software developers, there are plenty of course-listing applications like this one floating around. And none of those tools seem especially popular: According to VentureBeat, the most widely-used course-listing tool has less than 3,300 “daily active users.” Applications like Courses might be useful, but their success will depend on whether students decide that Facebook is an academic tool, not just a social one.

Course-Listing Tools Hit Facebook – Chronicle.com

This is a big issue.  CALI is building a space for law students and faculty that allows them to create and collaborate in an academic environment (see http://w.cali.org/ for a sneak peek).  I consider it to be an anti-social network:)  The point of the space I’m designing for CALI is to promote the education of law students and support the scholarship of law faculty.  Right now, this tends to be a bit of a solitary pursuit, but we hope that, given the tools, law students and faculty will adopt to the collaborative nature of the environment and being working together and sharing the results with each other and ultimately the world.  I’ll keep you posted.

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What About Law Schools on Wikipedia?

Wikipedia improvement – TrainBoard.com – Some fans of railroads are certainly concerned about train information on Wikipedia and if you follow the thread, you will see that an actual Wikipedia editor pops up as a member of the Trainboard community to try and help organize stuff. 
This gets me to wondering: what about law schools?  There is a page for American law schools but I have no way of knowing how good it is.  It appears that a lot of the work done on it is by law students or pre-law students.  There is a list of US law schools that seems pretty complete, but the qulaity of entries for individual schools varies, to say the least. IS there anyone out there in the law school community that loks after law school entries on Wikipedia?

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Being IN the Long Tail Not Profitable, But Fun Anyway

The blogs that they started live in the long tail of the blogosphere, however, and the reality is that it is difficult to make money in the long tail – Anderson’s point was that the money is to be made by selling to the long tail, not so much by existing in it. In this post we examine why that is and look at other aspects of long tail economics.

There’s No Money In The Long Tail of the Blogosphere

OK, so law school casebooks are long tail stuff.  The money is in selling the books, not in writing them.  The value to authors in the casebook market is reputational not monetary.  But the reputational value comes from being in the long tail, not being the long tail.  In other words if you write the only casebook in area Y of the law, then it will get used, or not, because the choice is limited.  If you write a casebook in area X that is has a greater choice of titles, then your reputation is enhanced when the book is chosen over competitors.  This means that eLangdell should be looking for works in the traditionally well covered areas of the law to get started, because nothing will enhance the reputation of eLangdell authors more than having their work chosen over traditional works.

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Students Contribute to Wikipedia for Class

Prof replaces term papers with Wikipedia contributions, suffering ensues – Good idea, somewhat questionable execution.  Pluses include a sense of ownership of the topic, broader audience for students’ work; minuses include dealing with the Wikipedia community, learning the syntax, finding open topics.

Seems to me that a really good compromise here would be a another wiki, focused on student scholarship across disciplines.  Students contribute to fulfill course requirements and the world at large, as with  Wikipedia , is the audience.

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CS 685 @ Cornell: The Structure of Information Networks

The past decade has seen a convergence of social and technological networks, with systems such as the World Wide Web characterized by the interplay between rich information content, the millions of individuals and organizations who create it, and the technology that supports it. This course covers recent research on the structure and analysis of such networks, and on models that abstract their basic properties. Topics include combinatorial and probabilistic techniques for link analysis, centralized and decentralized search algorithms, network models based on random graphs, and connections with work in the social sciences.

The Structure of Information Networks (Jon Kleinberg)

Just following along with the reading for this course would be interesting.  Most of the stuff is on the net, but you could certainly get your hands on the rest through any university library.

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Textbending Laws

Recombinant Text – 6.5 Law Making – Textbender is an interesting little project I’ve been keeping an eye on for a while.  The idea is to create a collaborative editing/drafting environment that allows each author/editor access to all of the text used at all points in the process and to assemple, disassemble and reassemble the text in interesting ways.  Now it seems that it has occured to someone that this might be a useful way to draft laws and regulations.  It will be interesting to see if anything comes of this.

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Freeing American Case Law, Part II

AltLaw.org contains nearly 170,000 decisions dating back to the early 1990s from the U.S. Supreme Court and Federal Appellate courts. The site’s creators, Columbia Law School’s Timothy Wu and Stuart Sierra, and University of Colorado Law School’s Paul Ohm, said the site’s database would grow over time.

Columbia News ::: Columbia Law School Launches Free Database of U.S. Court Decisions

Following closely on the heels of this developmnet, Altlaw.org comes along with a collection of case law from US Federal Courts going back more than ten years.  The key to this is that it is all in one place.  Most of the cases included in this search engine are avaialble on sites scattered about the web, as shown in Emory Law’s Federal Courts FInder.  The lack of a single free, public, non-commercial interface for searching case law has been a sort of Holy Grail for lots of folks, myself included, since we started putting case law on the web in the early nineties.

There is also a companion site, LawCommons.org, that promises to serve as a vehicle for releasding the technology and collections behind Altlaw.org.  These 2 sites have the potential for becoming a major resource in the area of providing free access to American case law.

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WSJ Celebrates 10 Years of Blogging

It’s been 10 years since the blog was born. Love them or hate them, they’ve roiled presidential campaigns and given everyman a global soapbox. Twelve commentators — including Tom Wolfe, Newt Gingrich, the SEC’s Christopher Cox and actress-turned-blogger Mia Farrow — on what blogs mean to them.

Happy Blogiversary – WSJ.com

Good article marking the 10th anniversary of the ‘weblog’ as we know it, more or less, today. I’ve been blogging since October 16, 2000, a mere 3 years after it got going, primarily as away to keep track of stuff I find that interests me. I think that is still the strength of blogging: the ease with an individual can add content to the web. Everything else, order, search, etc is handled by the software. All I need to do is type into a form. Sure, most blogs are not of interest to anyone beyond the author, including mine. But that is what is so cool.. Even though I don’t have some sort of regular global audience, I can still type this entry without much effort on my part and someday I’ll come back to it and smile:)

BTW, I thnk the real highlight of my blogging career is a comment Jorn Barger himself after a brief article I wrote about the origin of the word weblog. Pretty cool!

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Launching Symphora to Bring Open Source Software to Law Schools

Symphora provides informational and educational technology services to law schools with a focus on helping law schools implement open source software solutions and providing IT management consulting.

Symphora | Bringing open source software to legal education

Yep, finally decided to do it.  After tinkering around with the idea for a number of years, I’ve decided to try and generate a little side income from deploying and supporting open source software solutions for law schools.  First up, a turn -key solution for student organizations based on Drupal:)  Let me know if I can help you out.

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eWeek Lists of Important Open Source Apps

The Most Important Open-Source Apps of All Time

eWEEK Labs names the applications that have moved open-source technologies from corporate curiosities to integral enterprise tools.

This a pretty good list, rounded by suggestions from eWeek readers.  Taken together, these lists demonstrate the power and versatility of Open Source software today.  It would be perfectly reasonable to build an IT infrastructure of any size using just OS software, saving considerable money on licensing fees and gaining the flexibility of having direct access to the source code for the applications.

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