Category: @work

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Everyone at every law school should read this: Competitive Data Trends for Great Lakes and Midwest Law Schools 2012-2015

I have rarely seen a critical competitive disadvantage set out as clearly and starkly as that.What this means is that just to survive, not to mention do well or even excel, Ohio’s law schools and those of Michigan, Western Pennsylvania, Indiana and Illinois must develop aggressive and powerful strategies that unfortunately most have shown no indications they are able or willing to do.Instead, in too many instances, law schools have become hotbeds of disagreement in which tenure track faculty work to hold on to the perquisites of their positions, too many deans act as if the conditions being experienced are temporary and cyclical, and Legal Writing and Clinical faculty work collectively to advance their own agendas and protect their employment positions. All this is predictable behavior of long-sheltered and privileged constituencies but it does not do much of anything to deal with the challenges.
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There is also a “down the line” crisis being quietly created by law schools that are admitting and graduating students who are at best of marginal intellectual quality because they need the revenue those students represent—in part because many law schools are caught in a vicious circle of needing the tuition payments from lesser qualified students to fund the significant scholarships awarded the most highly credentialed applicants in an effort to sustain their “intellectual image”. The problem with this strategy is that “dumb is dumb” and one of the last things the legal profession and a stressed society needs is more stupid lawyers. We already have enough.

Source: Barnhizer, David, Competitive Data Trends for Great Lakes and Midwest Law Schools 2012-2015 (March 8, 2016). Cleveland-Marshall Legal Studies Paper No. 294. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2744854

This is a grim but true picture of the current state of legal education in the aftermath of the Crash of 2008. While the focus is on the Great Lakes and Mid West, the analysis will hold up for any region of the country. Legal education is going to be disrupted, it has been disrupted.

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Are e-casebooks doomed by perceived shortcomings of e-books generally?

Can these obstacles be overcome? It doesn’t seem likely. While e-books are great for keyword-searching and access via tables of contents, for tasks that require flipping back and forth and finding the right page in a hurry, they’re not so great. While e-books do have the convenience of instant access and search capability, they will probably always be better-suited to mass-market fiction that is meant to be read in a linear fashion, rather than textbooks and reference material that needs instant random access.

— Sometimes e-textbooks come up short – TeleRead News: E-books, publishing, tech and beyond http://www.teleread.com/sometimes-e-textbooks-come-short/

I think the reason e-textbooks (and e-casebooks in my world) come up short is because they merely replicate print in an electronic format. These resources attack print typically on price and weight, 2 attributes that have nothing to do with the information being delivered. The potential for electronic educational materials is practically limitless but publishers and even authors are focused on recreating print.

Think of the first automobiles. They were referred to as horseless carriages for a reason, many designs were engines dropped into horse carriages. And that didn’t really work out, did it? It took many years and a lot of development to break the idea of copying carriages and come up with what we now know as the automobile.

E-books are still in the horseless carriage phase of development, everything getting forced into the tired metaphor of a book. We need to break free of the limits imposed by the book and push development of these educational resources into the future. The tools exist to do all the things we want to do with e-casebooks, we just need to use the tools and let go of the past

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Getty Scholars’ Workspace: A Drupal-based platform for collaborative research | Opensource.com

Built on Drupal, the Getty Institute’s Getty Scholars’ Workspace provides a platform for art historians, and researchers in similar fields, to work collaboratively on multiple projects without having to use several different platforms.

A Drupal-based platform for collaborative research | Opensource.com https://opensource.com/education/16/3/getty-scholars-workspace

The platform includes scholar friendly features like importing Zotero files to create bibliographies and collaboration tools like forums and shared documents. If course it is Drupal so it’ll take some take configuration to get it going. With checking out.