Category: NewsFeed

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Public School Teachers Create Own Textbooks Online, Save District $175,000

MINNEAPOLIS – The new textbooks in Michael Engelhaupt’s statistics class at Blaine High School are kind of cheap and won’t last long, but he doesn’t mind. After all, he wrote them.
Instead of mass-produced textbooks, the more than 3,100 sophomores in the state’s largest district are learning from an online curriculum developed by their teachers over the summer with free software distributed over the web.

– via The Republic, “Anoka-Hennepin teachers write their own online textbook, save district $175,000”

After being used this school year and tweaked next summer, the resources will be made freely available on the Internet. Teachers recognized that creating own material would allow for easy local customization.

It is the ease of local customization that is going to be the key for Open Education Resources. Once it is fully understood that like any educational resource, OER needs to be tweaked for local uses, then the true value of OER will be realized. The savings in OER comes not only from the adoption of freely available materials, but also in the ease with which the resources can be adopted to local uses.

The same should apply for OER in legal education. Materials for a course in Torts are not intended to replace a professor teaching Torts but rather to provide a freely available foundation that the professor can use to create a unique course of their own.

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U.S. Copyright Office – Mass Digitization: : Charting the Way Forward in the Wake of Google Books

http://www.copyright.gov/docs/massdigitization/

The Copyright Office has published a Preliminary Analysis and Discussion Document that addresses the issues raised by the intersection between copyright law and the mass digitization of books. The purpose of the Analysis is to facilitate further discussions among the affected parties and the public – discussions that may encompass a number of possible approaches, including voluntary initiatives, legislative options, or both. The Analysis also identifies questions to consider in determining an appropriate policy for the mass digitization of books.

This is a discussion document from the U.S. Copyright Office. It is intended to provide a foundation for discussion regarding mass digitization projects going forward. HT to TeleRead for the link.

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Amazon Adds Import/Export of Data From External Storage Devices Shipped to AWS Data Centers

AWS Import/Export accelerates moving large amounts of data into and out of AWS using portable storage devices for transport. AWS transfers your data directly onto and off of storage devices using Amazon’s high-speed internal network and bypassing the Internet. For significant data sets, AWS Import/Export is often faster than Internet transfer and more cost effective than upgrading your connectivity.

via AWS Import/Export.

This is an interesting development for folks who need to move really large amounts of data on or off of the cloud. According to a table in the article the cost of shipping the drive and having Amazon do the transfer at the data center becomes cost effective when dealing with data amounts over 1TB being pushed over a 10Mbps connection. That is a lot of data[1].

The service will accept eSATA, USB2.0, and internal SATA drives and transfer your data to an S3 bucket or an EBS Snapshot.

[1]For reference, a single copy of all the data on CALI’s public servers (lessons, court opinions, podcasts, conference video, as so on) weighs in at just over a 1TB.

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LexisNexis to Open Source Hadoop Alternative HPCC Systems

LexisNexis is planning to release its internally developed supercomputing platform as open source, providing developers with an alternative to the Hadoop framework for large-scale data processing, the company said Wednesday.
LexisNexis has been developing the technology, dubbed HPCC Systems, for the past 10 years, according to the company, which provides a variety of information services to legal firms, libraries, corporations and government entities.

via Hadoop alternative to be open sourced – Computerworld.

It will run on commodity Linux boxes and will be released in Community and Enterprise flavors. The Community version will have a GNU Affero GPL v3 license.

And there is one important note:

LexisNexis stressed that HPCC Systems won’t involve the release of any of its “data sources, data products, the unique data linking technology, or any of the linking applications that are built into its products.”

It will be very interesting to see how this develops.

 

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Laptops in the Law School Lecture Hall – More Research/Observations

They spotted the first student texting 17 minutes into her law school career. Of the upper-year students, the observers could see using laptops, 58 percent used them for non-class purposes at least half the time. Altogether, 87 percent of the upper-year students used laptops for non-class purposes more than five minutes per class. Announcing that students should not surf the Web seemingly made no difference; even as a professor proclaimed such a prohibition, students continued visiting the Internet.

via Laptops in class: How distracting are they? – CSMonitor.com.

This CSM op/ed piece is drawn from a draft paper by Prof. Jeff Sovern at St. John’s University School of Law. Based on back of room observations of students’ use of laptops, Prof. Sovern speculates that student react to a tension between incentives to pay attention and the temptation to be distracted when not engaged. The result is that upper level students are more likely to be doing something else with the technology available to them during class rather than paying full attention to the lecture.

While the op/ed piece comes down firmly on the side of banning laptops in the classroom, a move Prof. Sovern notes is paternalistic yet shows a “responsibility to their students’ future clients”, the fuller draft leaves conclusions more open and encourages others to conduct similar studies.

The “banning laptops” debate has been ongoing in legal academia for over a decade and it looks like there is no end in sight. The problem is that law schools have spent a large part of that decade encouraging students to purchase laptops, providing them with ubiquitous wireless access, and increasing student reliance on electronic resources. The message at some schools is that law students should use laptops everywhere but in the classroom, a place where many students actually find technology most useful.

I suspect that this problem will continue until law faculty and law students can sort out what it is they are trying to achieve in the classroom.

 

 

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Illinois Courts Drop Print, Stick With Proprietary PDF, Adopt Public Domain Citations

The changes are part of a movement by the Supreme Court under the tenure of Chief Justice Kilbride and his predecessors to integrate electronic technology with a goal of achieving  greater court  transparency and efficiency. The Illinois Supreme Court was one of the first to incorporate Twitter in publicizing announcements and was also among the early few to make available video and audio recordings of its oral arguments the same day they occur before the Court. The audio of all Appellate Court arguments is also available on the Court’s website at www.state.il.us/court.

The changes in citation will be overseen by the Supreme Court Reporter of Decisions, Brian Ervin. The new method of citation goes into effect July 1, 2011. The current contract for printing the advance sheets and bound volumes of Illinois court opinions expires July 31, 2011 and will not be renewed.

via Illinois Supreme Court ends era of printed volumes with new public domain citation system « Illinois Lawyer Now.

This is great, but like most courts the opinions are available only as PDFs. While PDFs do provide an easy way to access and read the opinions, the PDF format is of very limited use to anyone looking to do things like the Free Law Reporter or otherwise make programatic use of the files. It doesn’t need to be this way. From 1996 through 2005 the Illinois Supreme Court made its opinions available for download as HTML and WordPerfect documents before switching to PDF only in 2006. Surely, at the very least, the court could continue to provide additional formats for download along with the PDF?

 

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Oracle Gives OpenOffice to the Apache Software Foundation Starting Incubation Process

IBM, which had lobbied for Oracle to spin out the OpenOffice project after it was clear that the company had no commercial interests in continuing its development, also issued a statement today, saying that “We look forward to engaging with other community members to advance the technology beginning with out strong support of the incubation process for OpenOffice at Apache.”
But those community members may be elsewhere, as the creation of The Document Foundation included some of the leading developers on the OpenOffice project. While Oracle has handed over its OpenOffice code, the move does not reunite these two groups.
The Document Foundation stressed the importance of bringing these communities together in its statement in response to todays news: “The step Oracle has taken today was no doubt taken in good faith, but does not appear to directly achieve this goal. The Apache community, which we respect enormously, has very different expectations and norms – licensing, membership and more – to the existing OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice projects. We regret the missed opportunity but are committed to working with all active community members to devise the best possible future for LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org.

via Oracle Donates OpenOffice to the Apache Software Foundation.

Seems like a good move all around, but there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to undo the mess that followed Oracle taking over Sun and the OpenOffice project.

 

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CourtListener.com – US Fed Appellate Court Alerts and Yet Another Legal Search Engine

A mention in the BeSpecific blog tipped me off to an interesting project called CourtListener.com. From the about page:

The goal of the site is to create a free and competitive real time alert tool for the U.S. judicial system.

At present, the site has daily information regarding all precedential opinions issued by the 13 federal circuit courts and the Supreme Court of the United States. Each day, we also have the non-precedential opinions from all of the Circuit courts except the D.C. Circuit. This means that by 5:10pm PST, the database will be updated with the opinions of the day, with custom alerts going out shortly thereafter.

The site was created by Michael Lissner as a Masters thesis project at UC Berkley School of Information.

A quick perusal of the site and its associated documents tells us that Michael is using a scraping technique to visit court websites looking for recently released opinions. Once found, the opinions are retrieved, converted from PDF to text, indexed, and stored. Atom RSS feeds are then generated to provide current alerts.

The site is powered by Python using the Django web framework and is open source, so you can download the code. The backend database is MySQL and search is handled by Sphinx. The conversion from PDF appears to be plain text. If you register on the site you can create custom alerts based on saved searches.

All in all CourtListener.com provides another good source for current Federal appellate court opinions. Be sure to check the coverage page to see how far back the site goes for each court. Perhaps the future will bring an expansion to more courts and jurisdictions.

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Beware of Openwashing as “Open” Becomes the New Black

The old “open vs. proprietary” debate is over and open won. As IT infrastructure moves to the cloud, openness is not just a priority for source code but for standards and APIs as well. Almost every vendor in the IT market now wants to position its products as “open.” Vendors that don’t have an open source product instead emphasize having a product that uses “open standards” or has an “open API.”

“Openwashing” is a term derived from “greenwashing” to refer to dubious vendor claims about openness. Openwashing brings the old “open vs. proprietary” debate back into play – not as “which one is better” but as “which one is which?”

What does it mean to be open? And how can you tell if a product is really “open”?

via How to Spot Openwashing.

The article goes on to recommend paying close attention to licensing, the community, and a vendors proprietary products to see if their software and APIs are truly open source or just wrapped in a open blanket to take advantage of the latest buzz words.

Over the years I’ve seen a number of instances of openwashing, most notably with companies who built commercial products around a core of open source projects. The companies would make big noise about being open source and such, but community releases would just be a mash-up of other open source projects with the glue and features that comprised the real product they wanted to sell held back as proprietary.

So, buyer/developer beware. That open source based product that looks so cool may really just be a mirage.

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Is The Great Amazon EBS Failure the Beginning of the End For Disk Abstraction?

The promise of network block storage is wonderful: Take a familiar abstraction (the disk), sprinkle on some magic cloud pixie dust so that it’s completely reliable, available over the same cheap network you’re using for app traffic, map it to any instance in a datacenter regardless of network topology, make it so cheap it’s practically free, and voila, we can have our cake and eat it too! It’s the holy grail many a storage vendor, most of whom with decades experience in storage systems and engineering teams thousands strong have chased for a long, long time. The disk that never dies. The disk that’s not a disk.

The reality, however, is that the disk has never been a great abstraction, and the long history of crappy implementations has meant that many behavioral workarounds have found their way far up the stack. The best case scenario is that a disk device breaks and it’s immediately catastrophic taking your entire operating system with it. Failure modes go downhill from there. Networks have their own set of special failure modes too. When you combine the two, and that disk you depend on is sitting on the far side of the network from where your operating system is, you get a combinatorial explosion of complexity.

Magical Block Store: When Abstractions Fail Us « Joyeur.

Fascinating piece on the perils of disk abstraction. Raises a very good question: Why do we worry about disks at all in the cloud? I wonder how many folks would just be tossing data into the cloud without the comfy metaphor of disk and machine to lean on?