Category: Closed Course

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Open-Access Academic Journals: Where is Legal Academia?

Slashdot | Free/Open-Access Academic Journals Growing
“Wired News reports on the growing number of free/open-access academic journals. The Directory of Open Access Journals lists 1527 journals. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is launching three new open-access journals this year: PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics and PLoS Pathogens. The National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Public Access Policy is also part of the movement. The traditional academic journals aren’t happy, saying that it’s unethical to accept money for publishing. But the traditional journals face their own ethical dilemmas by accepting money from advertisers.“

The DOAJ listing for law journals is here. 10 American law schools list 14 titles. CLearly there is room for expansion here:)

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Law Professor Teaching Loads @ Top 25 Schools

Conglomerate Blog: Law Professor Teaching Loads
“When I entered academe just over a decade ago, almost every law school had a standard teaching load of four courses or 12 credit hours per year. In the past decade, the norm among top law schools has shifted to three courses or 10 credits per year. Although I had noticed that most of my friends were teaching lighter loads, I didn’t realize how pervasive the shift was until my Associate Dean asked me to gather information from top law schools as background for a debate about teaching loads here at Wisconsin.“

The results of an informal poll of teaching loads at the top 25 law schools reveals what we’ve probably known for a long time: loads are lighter at top tier schools. Now, I don’t know exactly what this means, but it would seem easy enough to equate lighter teaching loads with better legal education.

Did I say that out loud? Of course that’s not completely true. The higher tier schools attract better students, better firms hire their grads, etc. Faculty may argue that it is the lighter load that helps the most, but I think it is a real chicken and egg problem.

Finally, it is worth taking a look at the comments section if you follow the link, there are some good ideas there.

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Acrophobia: A Networked PDF Soft Printer


“Acrophobia is a Linux-based network PDF printer. Acrophobia appears as a standard network printer. Any jobs printed to the Acrophobia ‘printer’ are converted to PDF and sent via e-mail back to the originating user.

Acrophobia is a project of the Open Source Software Peer Group of the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA – formerly LawNet) , an association of legal technology professionals. This project was created in order to demonstrate the usefulness of open source technology within the law-firm environment.“

ILTA is like teknoids for law firm/department technology types. There are things to learn here…

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AOL Gets VoIP

Slashdot | AOL Enters the VoIP market
“AOL is entering the VoIP market with its new service entitled ‘AOL Internet Phone Service’. The service will be available in 40 cities around the US and offer integrated IM presence indicator, voice/e-mail and features like Call Waiting, CallerID. As a bonus current AOL members will receive a wireless AP when signing-up for the service.“

VoIP is all fine and dandy so long as you actually have the IP part. I’ve been experiencing considerable difficulty with my cable broadband over the past few weeks and it has been a good thing that i wasn’t relying on it for phone service.

This is the basic flaw in VoIP: no way to guarantee the same level of service availability that you get from a telco. When I pick up my land line, I get dial tone. I don’t get that from any other service. My cells are plagues by ‘dead spots’, dropped calls, and poor reception. My cable and broadband are not always there when I want them. If VoIP is ever going to be anything other than a novelty, VoIP and broadband providers need to work together to make sure that the service is up all the time.

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what’s in it for me? why would I want to start a blog?

Why indeed. I’ve been blogging since October 19, 2000, mainly as a sort of scrapbook/clipping service/notebook. I blog to note things of interest to me that I may want to quickly find again. On occasion I opine. The bonus is that I choose a public place for this and a few other folks are interested enough in what I post to follow along.

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For law faculty, I can think of 2 reasons to blog: self-publishing in areas of interest (scholarly and otherwise) and communicating with students. It is important to keep in mind that a blog and the software that powers it are just a set of tools that you use to accomplish something. While most blogs have certain off-the-cuff, spur-of-the-moment diary quality about them, that is not all that they are good for. The key thing about blogging is that it is web-publishing made easy. Blogs can do anything a ‘regular’ website can do, without the overhead.

For further reading about weblogs in education I would suggest Educational Blogging by Stephen Downes, (EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 39, no. 5 (September/October 2004): 14–26).

Why start a blog?

Self-publishing

  • pick a topic
  • pick a schedule
  • pick an editor
  • pick an audience

Class/Course blogging

  • quickly, easily post course material
  • allow for student comment and interaction
  • not email
  • less ‘overhead’ than Blackboard, TWEN

What’s in it for me?

  • A wider audience for your work
  • Increased communication with students
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Shining Light on the Windows LIfe-Cycle Process

Understanding the Windows lifecycle policy (for all you IT Pros out there)
“With so many customers relying on IE, it helps to get a solid grasp of the Windows Lifecycle Policy, which at first blush can appear to be a bit cryptic. Fortunately I think I can shed some light on Microsoft’s policy“

OK, so a quick read indicates that MSFT is supporting 6 versions of IE on 8 different versions of Windows. Wow! THat is a bit of a nightmare, even with the deep pockets of MSFT. If you figure in stuff like variations in hardware, net access, other installed software, it just makes support a nightmare on a good day.

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Students Do Better Without Computers

Slashdot | Students Do Better Without Computers
“The Telegraph is reporting a large study that shows that the less students use computers at school and at home, the better they do in international tests of literacy and math. The more access they had to computers at home, the lower they scored in tests, partly because they diverted attention from homework. Students tended to do worse in schools generously equipped with computers, apparently because computerised instruction replaced more effective forms of teaching. “

There are some good comments in this piece. This study highlights the ambivilence toward the use of computers in education. It is not that difficult to find evidence on both sides of this argument, but the thing that one should carry away from it all is that computers are a tool. And any tool can have a either a negative or a positive impact depending upon how it is used.

I think the key to primary and secondary education in the US is parental involvement. Know what your kids are doing in school and at home, guide them in decisions on which tools to use, and be proactive about what is going on in your child’s classroom. Yes, it is a lot of work, but raising children is no easy task.

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3rd Party VOIP to Get Dissed?

PBS | I, Cringely . The Best days of Voice-over-IP Telephone Service May Already Have Passed
“These are heady days for Voice-over-IP (VoIP) phone services. From Vonage to Packet8 to Skype and a hundred more besides, several million people around the world are enjoying really cheap phone calls that are carried primarily over the Internet. But that fun may be diminishing soon because the big Internet service providers, which is to say the big telephone and cable TV companies, are about to start taking back that third-party VoIP traffic, leaving Vonage and the others at a distinct disadvantage.“

The argument is that cable and telco broadband providers will tag their VOIP packets to guarantee a higher level of service and leave the Vonages of the world with ‘best effort’ service resulting in things like dropped calls and bad audio quality. There is no evidence of this yet, but with Comcast just announcing the availabilty of VOIP in metro Atlanta, it will be interesting to see if soemthing like this develops.