Category: Education

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Could VIVO, An Open Source Platform For The Discovery of Researchers, Help Foster Collaboration in Legal Academia?

VIVO is an open source semantic web application originally developed and implemented at Cornell. When installed and populated with researcher interests, activities, and accomplishments, it enables the discovery of research and scholarship across disciplines at that institution and beyond. VIVO supports browsing and a search function which returns faceted results for rapid retrieval of desired information. Content in any local VIVO installation may be maintained manually,  brought into VIVO in automated ways from local systems of record, such as HR, grants, course, and faculty activity databases, or from database providers such as publication aggregators and funding agencies.

via About | VIVO.

Developed for use in the scientific research community, VIVO may have some interesting applications in the legal scholarship world. With enough community participation the VIVO platform would allow legal scholars to locate those with like interests to further collaborative efforts. It could also contribute to the identification of trends in legal scholarship and research.

The real question is whether or not law schools are prepared to make the necessary contributions. At the moment the beta version of the cross institutional VIVO search includes information from the law schools at three of the participating universities: Cornell, Indiana, and U of Florida. A search for “administrative law” returns 81 results, mostly from the 3 law schools.snapshot20130815-01

VIVO is worth keeping an eye as it grows. If it reaches its potential perhaps it will foster more collaboration in legal academia.

 

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Look Ma, No VCs! YouVersion Bible App Has 100 Million Downloads And It’s a Non-Profit

While YouVersion is on the radar of Silicon Valley investors, it’s a deal their funds can’t touch. YouVersion is part of the church, so it’s set up as a non-profit that doesn’t generate revenue or have exit plans. It’s funded entirely by donations, $3 million was donated to sustain the app last year, and by LifeChurch.tv, which has poured $20 million into it.

via YouVersion Bible app has 100 million downloads – Business Insider.

This is just the sort of thing that education needs: a well funded non-profit dedicated only to producing top quality educational materials.  What the edu space needs right now is more non-profit thinking and less venture capital money.

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Yes, A Picture Is Worth 1,000 Words In A Law School Class, And Here Are Some Possibilities for Thousands More

Prof. Rick Hills decided to tap his inner Tufte in his Yale Law classes this year with good results:

My basic goal was to make doctrinal relationships, legal and political history, and legal text more intelligible by representing it visually in different modes — color, shape, movement, or images generally. My prime directive was to adhere to Edward Tufte’s principles: For instance, avoid “chartjunk,” and never use bulleted text that you read from a screen. Within this capacious constraints, I tried a wide array of images and diagrams — decision trees and flow charts, Venn Diagrams, statutory text in multiple colors, photos galore, and some often hokey but hopefully memorable visual representations of causal and doctrinal relationships.
My verdict? In anonymous surveys with a decent response rate, my constitutional law section 70+ members seemed to like the slides. Many printed them out as guides during the final exam. My own sense: The pictures, if sufficiently simple and memorable, helped clarify ideas or narratives that had previously left some significant portion of the class baffled and frustrated. After the jump, I will provide some samples and invite you to share your comments on whether you think that these sorts of visual aids help and how they might be improved.

via PrawfsBlawg: Is a picture worth 1,000 words in a law school class? My experiment with visual aids.

More and more law professors are incorporating visuals into their lectures as a way to engage students and illustrate the points of law being discussed. While this trend has been picking up a lot of steam of late, the use of graphics, flow charts, video, and more in law school lecture halls has been going on for years. There are a number of interesting resources for visuals that any law prof could use in their lectures available on the Internet. Here are a few:

Like most things, I’m sure there are many, many more examples out there. Feel free to add stuff in the comments (one link per comment).

 

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And Who Says Law Students Wouldn’t Benefit From More Tech Training?

Frustrated by ridiculous bills for routine “commodity” matters, Flaherty decided to strike back, and recently launched his technology audit program, where firms bidding for Kia’s business must bring a top associate for a live test of their skills using basic, generic business tech tools such as Microsoft Word and Excel, for simple, rudimentary tasks.

So far, the track record is zero. Nine firms have taken the test, and all failed. One firm flunked twice.

“The audit should take one hour,” said Flaherty, “but the average pace is five hours.” In real life, that adds up to a whole lot of wasted money, he said. Flaherty uses the test to help him decide winners of the beauty contests, and to set rates and set performance goals. “I take 5 percent off every bill until they pass the test.”

via Big Law Whipped for Poor Tech Training.

This article is full of fun facts including things like less than 30% of associates know how to use the save to PDF function of Word with the rest printing then scanning documents to PDF. The reality here is that just because someone knows how to turn on computer and start typing does not mean they have any idea how to use the machine or the applications needed to function in the profession. Seriously, buying stuff on eBay should not be considered an advanced computer skill.

This presents a huge opportunity for the legal ed tech community (let’s call them Teknoids) to step up and provide the sort of instruction and training that is needed to turn smart law students into techno-capable lawyers. The practice of law is becoming more and more technical every day. Innovations in practice technology are requiring an increasing level of sophistication that isn’t going to get picked up on the street. Law students need training in the use of technical tools of their chosen profession. It is that simple.

I think this calls for something well beyond the LPM seminar or other small classes that reach only a fraction of the students. This sort of training needs to be required of each and every law student. Some of it can be added to the required research and writing programs as sessions that look at the features, basic and advanced, of standard software tools like word processors and spreadsheets. Make those programs paperless. Require students to use available tools to create PDFs and submit their work electronically. Require faculty to review and comment on the work in the same electronic format. Simply being able to master these tasks would probably get most law students through the audit described in the article.

Perhaps law schools should develop their own tech audit, a sort of technical bar exam. Students who complete the exercises would receive a certificate that indicates they’ve achieved a certain level of technical competency in a set of software tools. Wouldn’t it be great if law schools had access to some sort of platform to create these sorts of exercises, distribute them to students, track student results, and issue certifications? You with me here? This is something that could be done with the CALI platform. CALI Author for creating and authoring the exercises, Classcaster for Lesson distribution, the CALI Lesson system for student tracking. It’s all there, just waiting for someone to pick it up and run with it.

How about it Teknoids? Care to step up and get a piece of the change coming to legal education?

 

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An Open Legal Taxonomy: It Just Starts With A List of Words

Lately I’ve been spending a fair amount of time thinking about taxonomies (and probably ontologies too, but I leave that distinction for another day) and their application to the various CALI and free law projects I work on. CALI maintains its own taxonomy for describing legal education materials. We call it the CALI Topic Grids or just Topics. Originally developed as away to guide our authors as they created CALI Lessons, the Topics were intended to identify what a professor wants to teach today. The level of specificity of a Topic is what is the point of a law to be covered in a particular classroom session. Like so many of our other resources the Topics are created by faculty teaching in the area covered by the Topics.

Now reaching beyond Lessons we use the Topics to describe podcasts, blog posts, crossword puzzles, chapters and sections of books, and most recently, court opinions. Like any good taxonomy Topics not only provide a useful way to describe the contents of a resource but also provide a useful finding aid. Indeed the Topics are best expressed as an outline, instantly recognizable to law students and faculty. The Topics serve as the headings for the outline with various resources gathered beneath, see for example http://topics.cali.org/contracts/.

As the free law movement in the US grows one of the most pressing questions that arises is how to categorize and describe the immense body of law. Simple full text searching and basic gathering of meta data about the law is easy enough to accomplish, but all that doesn’t tell us what the law is about. How do I know if a court opinion deals with the formation of a contract or some obscure point of criminal procedure? The short answer is that unless you are using a very large commercial legal data service that includes the use of topics and headnotes in its products you don’t know what the opinion is really about without reading it. Sure you may have a clue from the search that turned up the document, but that isn’t really a lot of reliable data. You need to have that opinion tagged with a known taxonomy.

Applying a taxonomy to law seems like a daunting task, but not as impossible as it once was. Once upon a time the idea of applying a taxonomy to the law in the US was pretty much a non-starter because you couldn’t get access to the law you wanted to categorize. The good news is that we’ve gotten past much of that. We now have access to sizable portions of the law in the US, at least enough to begin applying a taxonomy. Which leads us to the question of the taxonomy itself. How do we do that?

The worlds of taxonomy and ontology (again, I know the 2 are different, but I’m lumping them together here for arguments sake) are awash in a sea of acronyms and competing standards. Most of that stuff is really about the application of a taxonomy or ontology in a given situation, more about the “how” of describing things. That isn’t the main problem. The main issue is words. At their base taxonomies or ontologies are just lists of words. Carefully chosen, domain specific words, but still a list of words. And once you have the words, then you can apply them as you wish.

The creation of a list of words intended to describe the law has been done. Some lists are proprietary and unavailable to the free law movement. Other lists may be too general, more for describing broader collections not individual resources. There is one list, the CALI Topics, that describes specific points of law in individual resources. I would recommend using the CALI Topics as a starting point for creating an open legal taxonomy.

The CALI Topics are not an exhaustive list but with 41 top level topics and 14 published full Topic Grids they are a good start. The Topics can be expanded to include more top level areas of the law and complete Topic Grids can be added to make the Topics more comprehensive. Because the Topics exist as just lists of words they can be adapted to just abut any taxonomy/ontology framework/specification.

By using an existing taxonomy as a base, the free law movement can save a considerable amount of time and effort in getting started on the task of describing the law. The resources saved by adopting an existing taxonomy can then be applied to really hard problem of actually figuring out how to apply specific terms to a given resource. I have some ideas for that too, but I leave those for another post.

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Reflections on #ReInventLaw and Some Thoughts on #ReInventLegalEdu

I spent Friday March 8 at one of the most interesting conferences I’ve ever attended. The ReInvent Law Silicon Valley conference promised 40 speakers in 9 hours, a day of the best in innovation in law practice, courts, and more. It certainly delivered. Much has been written about specific sessions and the ideas presented, so I’ll skip that sort of analysis. Instead I’d like to give you my impressions a few days after the conference and after having let it sink in a bit.

It is now apparent to me that there is a major structural shift going on in the way law, especially “big law”, is being practiced. Practice and the courts are embracing many aspects of technology as part of doing business. Lawyers and judges are looking to technology to increase efficiency, automate rote tasks, and create space, physical and virtual, for more personal interaction between attorneys, clients, judges, parties, and legal consumers. There is a growing awareness that the delivery of some basic legal services can be delivered by non-lawyers and that there is a great unmet need for legal services among those who cannot afford to pay hundreds of dollars an hour for a lawyers time.

As with all structural shifts like this, there are barriers and points of resistance. A major barrier to the shift is ABA Rule 5.4 governing the professional independence of a lawyer. This rule effectively prohibits the investment of outside capitol in law firms or organization engaged in the practice of law. Without access to outside capital and business structures practicing attorneys will have a difficult time taking full advantage of the opportunities presented by increasing the use of technology. They will get there eventually, but the rate of change would greatly accelerated with an infusion of outside capital.

Of course it isn’t just a practice rule that is slowing down the ReInvent Law movement. Lawyers themselves need to examine the way they have traditionally structured practice. The billable hour came under criticism just as often as Rule 5.4 during the presentations. The use of billable hours builds inefficiency into the system and was cited as a strong demotivator of efficiency in practice. Indeed the wisdom of continuing the “big law” model of life tenure partnerships was questioned. A more flexible structure with compensation linked to actual outcomes is seen as a better model to deal with the swift changes in technology confronting the legal profession.

And what about legal education? While the gathering included members of the legal academy both as presenters and in the audience (the organizers of the event are professors at Michigan State University College of Law), the focus of day was really on the practice of law and to a lesser extent the courts. Reform or reinvention of legal education was the topic of only a couple of the presenters and this was a shame because we could really use a #ReInventLegalEdu movement right about now.

There is little doubt that legal education in the US is facing a crisis of its own. Enrollment is down, applications are down, graduate employment is down, and debt load among graduates is high. On top of that the nature of the practice of law is under going a structural change. As law schools struggle with the crisis I think they are at risk of increasing the disconnect between the academy and practice especially if they continue to turn out graduates who are being educated for a style of practice that is disappearing.

The challenge to law schools, in the face of this crisis, is to embrace the changes moving through practice and the courts and #ReInventLegalEdu. There is an opportunity here for law schools to change, to embrace the technology and methodologies heralded by ReInvent Law, to provide the research and development that the practice and courts will need, and to graduate more tech savvy lawyers. I think change is coming to legal education and law schools have a choice, lead the charge to a new legal practice future or have the change imposed on them by the practice and courts. I’m hoping something like #ReInventLegalEdu helps to lead the way forward.

 

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An Experiment in Document Conversion and Generation

This is the README file for the Github repository that holds the files used and created in this experiment. I’m including the README in its entirety since it kills 2 birds with 1 stone.

1. Introduction

This repo holds a set of files that I created as an experiment in getting old work out of proprietary formats. The idea is to take a MSFT Word file and convert it into something that is human readable, open formatted, and convertible.

To do this is I settled upon AsciiDoc to mark up the text of the paper. I chose AsciiDoc over Markdown because of the depth of features and availability of conversion tools.

2. The Process

I decided to use a local install of Etherpad Lite (EL) as my primary text editor for this project. I did this because of a few features including autosave, versioning, and the potential for real time collaboration. I hoped that these features would provide me with a useful editing tool.

Once EL setup and configured I was faced with the problem of how to get the text of the paper into the editor in the first place. My initial inclination was to retype the document, formating and editing as I went along. Faced with a 10,000 word doc and no appreciable typing skills, I was not happy with this option. After a bit of poking around in EL I found its import features. To get MSFT Word files imported required a bit more configuring, but it worked. I then imported the Word file into EL.

The import process added the text of the document to the editor. It stripped all of the formatting from the text and inserted the 112 footnotes in-line into the text. All of this was actually a good thing, making the process of marking up the doc with AsciiDoc easier. Using the original word processing file as a guide I worked through the document adding the necessary AsciiDoc markup to format the paper. The most tedious part was the 112 footnotes, but since AsciiDoc handles footnote with in-line markup it moved along as fast as could be expected.

In total I spent about 6 hours working on the AsciiDoc version of the document. The most time was spent tagging footnotes and figuring out the format for the bibliography
[I am still not really pleased with the way the biblio looks. I think I can fix though on a later iteration.]
The rest of the formating such as section titles, quotes, emphasis, and lists was straight forward though I did keep a copy of the AsciiDoc User Guide open in another tab to help out.

I found the Etherpad Lite interface easy to work with and really appreciated the autosave and versioning features. EL doesn’t know about AsciiDoc markup though so that presented a challenge. In order to preview the work I had to export the file as text and then do the basic AsciiDoc to HTML, opening the resulting file in another browser tab to see what was going on. As I became more confident of my work, I checked less often so this was not much of an issue. I marked major revisions as saved revisions at the end of section of the document to give me a nice clean revision history.

Once I had a nice clean version that produced good HTML, I exported a final copy to my local computer and set about using the AsciiDoc utility a2x to generate the document in various formats. For this particular experiment I went with XHTML, PDF, and EPUB. The generation/conversion process was marred only by my problems with understanding the format for the bibliography at the end of the document. Once I figure out just how to mark up the bibliography process was flawless. a2x first converts the AsciiDoc marked document into a DocBook XML file and then converts the DocBook file into other formats. The process uses the standard set of XML processing tools as well as CSS to generate the files. By using custom CSS files, the layout and formating of the various output files can be changed as needed.

3. The Files

The files included in this repo are the ones used and generated as part of the process described above.

KELSOFIN20130111.docx The MSFT Word file that was used for the starting point. This document began as a WordPerfect file in 1992 and was moved to Word in the mid-90’s.
KelsoPaper.txt This is the AsciiDoc version of the file as created and edited in Etherpad Lite. This is the file used to generate the other formats.
KelsoPaper.pdf PDF file generated from KelsoPaper.txt using the command a2x -v -f pdf KelsoPaper.txt
KelsoPaper.html XHTML file generated from KelsoPaper.txt using the command a2x -v -f xhtml KelsoPaper.txt
docbook-xsl.css CSS file used to style KelsoPaper.html
KelsoPaper.epub EPUB file generated from KelsoPaper.txt using the command a2x -v -f epub KelsoPaper.txt

4. Conclusion

I am happy with the results of this experiment and hope to be able to further explore the use of Etherpad Lite and AsciiDoc as a tool set for creating free and open documents.

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Dewald On Blending the First-Year Contracts Classroom At Utah

We wanted the students to watch the videos prior to class. Instead of spending 30 minutes lecturing about the Restatements and then discussing them, the students came to class prepared to do the discussion. This reduced the time necessary in class and also facilitated a deeper discussion.  The time savings was used throughout the semester for more in-class group work. In class time was constructed assuming the students had watched the videos.

via Law School Ed Tech – Blending the First-Year Legal Classroom.

This is a great article and information is carries should serve as an example to law schools on how things should be done. Aaron provides great detail on the background in setting up the contracts course, how the videos were created, and the results from surveying the students who took the course.

The playlist of videos is on YouTube.

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Because MOOCs Needed A Yelp, Here’s CourseTalk

Today, CourseTalk is what you might expect — a Yelp for MOOCs — a place for students to share their experiences with these courses and a way to discover new courses they’d enjoy. Still nascent, the platform’s design is simple and its user experience is straightforward. Visitors can sift through courses by “Top Rated,” “Popular” and “Upcoming” or by category, like Business, Computer Science, and so on.
When a space gets its own Yelp, it’s generally an indicator of the fact that a bunch of content or businesses came online at once (or at least it seems that way when viewed from 5 miles up) and end users have no way to make sense of that noise. Sure, there are a lot of schools and programs rushing to take advantage of MOOCs because it’s perceived as a novel technology (even though the MOOC concept has been developing for more than a few months) and because of the scale MOOCs afford.

via CourseTalk Launches A Yelp For Open Online Courses And What This Means For Higher Education | TechCrunch.

Short term this site will help potential students sort through the loud, seemingly crowded MOOC field. Longer term the site or other like it may be in a position to be clearinghouses for quality on line courses.

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U of Minnesota Releases “Cultivating Change in the Academy”, Highlights Future of the Book

This collection of 50+ chapters showcases a sampling of academic technology projects underway across the University of Minnesota, projects that we hope inspire other faculty and staff to consider, utilize, or perhaps even develop new solutions that have the potential to make their efforts more responsive, nimble, efficient, effective, and far-reaching. Our hope is to stimulate discussion about what’s possible as well as generate new vision and academic technology direction. The work underway is most certainly innovative, imaginative, creative, collaborative, and dynamic. This collection of innovative stories is a reminder that we are a collection of living people whose Land Grant values and ideas shape who we serve, what we do, and how we do it. Many of these projects engage others in discourse with the academy: obtaining opinion or feedback, taking the community pulse, allowing for an extended discourse, and engaging citizens in important issues. What better time to share 50+ stories about cultivating change than in 2012 – the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Land Grant Mission!

via University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy: Cultivating Change in the Academy: 50+ Stories from the Digital Frontlines at the University of Minnesota in 2012.

Produced in just 10 weeks, this book is a snapshot of academic technology projects and research underway at the University of Minnesota. Of more interest to me than the speed with which it was produced or the subject matter are the formats in which the book was released. First, it is a blog and a website. Each chapter is a post with the text of the chapter embedded as a PDF file. The blog has commenting enabled, RSS feeds and its own Twitter hashtag, #CC50, so that readers may engage the authors in ongoing discussion.  Second, the work is available in EPUB, .mobi, and PDF formats so you can read it on the platform of your choice. The work carries a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

As I’ve stated in a prior post I think the future of books, especially textbooks and other educational materials lies on the web, not locked into some closed or crippled format. This book serves as an excellent example of the future of the book.