Category: NewsFeed

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New Drake Law School And Iowa State University Program Lets Students Complete Undergrad, Law Degrees in 6 Years

Students at Iowa State University will be able to earn their undergraduate and law degrees in six, rather than seven, years under an innovative new partnership between Iowa State and the Drake Law School. Developed and managed by the ISU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the program allows students to enter Law School in their fourth year and use the credits earned in their first year of Law School to complete their undergraduate studies.

via Drake Law School – News & Events.

This represents a great opportunity for students headed to Iowa State with an eye towards getting a JD. While students are not guaranteed acceptance in Drake Law, those that make it will receive a $5000 annual renewable scholarship. The goal is to provide more lawyers to serve rural Iowa.

More law schools should be looking at programs like this not only as a way to help students control costs but also as a way to help those interested in serving under served communities.

 

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Suggestions on How Non-Programmers Can Contribute to Techie Projects

I get asked a lot by people who are interested in helping out open source projects, but have absolutely no programming skills. What can they do? Well, here’s a few ideas how non-programmers can contribute to open source projects.

It is worth noting that it is best to contribute to software that you actually use yourself. That way you feel the benefits.

via How non-programmers can contribute to open source projects | opensource.com.

There are many ways to contribute to an open source project that go well beyond being a crack programmer in the language of the day. Indeed many of the suggestions cover ground that many Teknoids are already familiar with in other contexts. We love documentation, for example. Here’s the list:

  • Use the product
  • Bug test
  • Write documentation
  • Translation
  • Evangelize
  • Donate
  • Be professional

It is possible to help out other projects and organizations, like CALI, using these suggestions. For example, you could help out CALI by using and recommending our resources, reporting bugs you find, or write some docs on how your law school community could use CALI resources. And let us know if you’re doing any of these, we appreciate all of the support we get.

 

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The Debate Over Digital Textbooks Goes On and On

[W]hat’s going on here? A few things:

1) Most educators don’t know squat about IT. …
2) The management standards just aren’t there yet. …
3) The content makers privilege DRM protection over usability. …
4) The price is prohibitive. …

Debating the Digital Textbook Issue—Again « TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

The article looks at a couple of recent pieces on the ongoing debate about the actual value of digital textbooks. While I think there is a future in digital course materials, it is likely that the current models of providing digital textbooks are doomed mainly for the 4 reasons cited in the article.

I believe the future of digital course and learning resources isn’t in the poor replication of the print books on DRM locked proprietary platforms that place profit over education but in the creation of new all digital resources created with education and learning in mind, not investor profits.

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St. John’s Law Highlights Blogging Faculty

St. John’s is home to a dedicated faculty of engaging teachers and accomplished scholars. In the classroom, they foster our students’ analytical ability and practical skills. Outside the classroom, many of our professors are outstanding researchers and thought leaders who have “written the book” in their areas of interest and expertise.

A little over a year ago, the Law School launched the Faculty Scholarship Blog to showcase faculty activities and achievements, including their books and articles, speaking engagements, and media appearances. Produced and regularly updated by Professor Janai S. Nelson − the Law School’s Associate Dean for Faculty Scholarship − and Professor Jeff Sovern, the blog offers a detailed snapshot of the faculty’s timely and important work.

via St. John’s Law Bloggers Offer Virtual Tour of Today’s Legal Landscape.

It’s great to see a law school acknowledge faculty who blog and highlight the areas they are blogging in. This sort of thing will help make writing for a blog or website more acceptable as a form of scholarly writing. Certainly not every utterance that lands on the Internet is scholarly, but we are moving to a place where well thought out and researched articles on a blog or website are going to be considered scholarly products alongside more traditionally published law review articles. And that is a Good Thing.

 

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A Law School News Site: Diamond in the Rough or Beach Glass?

Recently while sifting through my project folder I cam across the bits and pieces of a law school news feed aggregator. I had started the code and gathered a dozen or so feeds with an idea of pulling together news from law schools around the country. Like many other weekend projects I had roughed it out and set it aside. The discovery of the code seemed like a nudge to do something with law school news feeds and so a site was born. I’m inviting folks to take a look and let me know if they think is some thing useful that should be further developed or not.

First a disclaimer: This is a personal project and is strictly “nights and weekends”. It is hosted on one of my personal servers. It is not related to any work project I’ve got going.

Let me introduce Law School News, a news reader for law school news feeds. The site gathers news items from the feeds of about 114 US law schools and presents them in an easy to read fashion.  Various pages provide lists of feeds and channels to get news on specific schools and topics. Basic search functionality is available.

The feeds included in the site represent about half the law schools in the US. I gathered feed URLs by visiting every law school website and attempting to locate an RSS or Atom feed. I used the links to law school websites found on the LSAC Law School Links page to get to each school’s site. Once on a site I looked for a RSS feed link on the homepage or checked the school’s news page. I did not make any effort to hunt down the feeds if they were not plainly visible. Many schools had more than one feed and in those cases I selected the one that appeared to be a general news feed.

Please note that if you look at the feeds list and see that a particular school is missing it is because either I couldn’t easily locate a feed or the link for the feed didn’t work properly. I have not made a list of schools without feed or with feeds that didn’t work properly. If I missed your school’s feed, let me know in the comments below.

As for the future of this project, who can tell. I would like to expand the coverage to all of the feeds that schools have and that would move beyond news into events, blogs, and library information. And I could certainly wouldn’t mind some help, especially with the tagging of feeds and items. If you’re interested in helping out, let me know in the comments.

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GitHub Adds 2 Factor Authenitcation

When you enable this feature, it adds an additional layer of security to your account. When logging in to GitHub, after providing your username and password, you will be asked for a two-factor authentication code that is delivered to your mobile device via SMS or a free two-factor application. This additional step ensures that a malicious person who has discovered your password will not be able to log in to GitHub as you.

Two-factor Authentication · GitHub.

Seeing a lot more two-factor authentication being offered on the net. This can really help make your accounts safer, but you’ll have a problem if you don’t have your phone. GitHub provides a number of recovery options including  backup SMS numbers and recovery codes. If you’re going to use 2 factor auth make sure you have recovery options setup.

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More Small Colleges Go with CIO to Oversee Libraries and IT

More than a tenth of college chief information technology officers are also in charge of campus libraries, a sign of the rapid digitization of scholarship and the desire of small colleges to consolidate administrative functions.About 12 percent of CIOs oversee libraries, according to annual surveys by the Center for Higher Education Chief Information Officer Studies. The surveys suggest the arrangement is appealing mostly to smaller colleges at this point. “You get smaller institutions and a good percentage are community colleges,” said Wayne Brown, the centers founder.

via Small colleges are putting the same administrator in charge of IT and libraries | Inside Higher Ed.

As this trend continues, I wonder if we’ll see it spread to law schools? Many law school IT operations live inside the library as it is, so it would make some sense. Of course it also raises the possibility of having the law library ultimately run by a non-librarian.

 

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Same on the Outside, New in the Inside

Just a quick note to mark the changing of some of the back end of my blog. I’ve upgraded to WordPress 3.6. That was straightforward and seems to have gone well. I know there are a slew of new features included i WP 3.6 but I haven’t gotten to those yet. For a variety of technical reasons I moved the hosting and DNS of the domain and blog to Linode. With the move to Linode I switched web servers too. This blog is now running on the Nginx web server instead of Apache. I’ll probably have more to write about that switch in the coming weeks.

With these changes I bumped the version number of the blog to 6, so this now officially the sixth incarnation of my blog. I’ve been using WordPress since 2005 and you can find all of versions 4 and 5 going back to February 2005 on this blog. I’ve been blogging since October 2000 and have most of the archives of those blogs handy but offline at the moment. I’ll be bringing them all back shortly.

More soon.

 

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From The Front Lines: Peeking Inside a MOOC in Progress

For example, students have complained about not being able to complete in-video quizzes when they download the lecture videos. While our instructional team wanted to help them complete this work off-line—many students have very limited Internet access—we could not provide a way to do so. We pressed Coursera support-staff members for a solution, but they could not provide one.

…

My limited ability to make key pedagogical choices is the most frustrating aspect of teaching a MOOC. Because of the way the Coursera platform is constructed, such wide-ranging decisions have been hard-coded into the software—decisions that seem to have no educational rationale and that thwart the intent of our course.

via Inside a MOOC in Progress – Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

I suspect that this will not be the first time we hear from a MOOC faculty complaining about some sort of failure of the the tech platform. Something important here is that Coursera is commercial company and the platform is closed and proprietary. At least if this were an open platform like EdX or Canvas there would be a chance to add the features that the teachers need to educate their students as they see fit, not as some random engineer or developer tells them it needs to be done.