Category: @work

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Textbending Laws

Recombinant Text – 6.5 Law Making – Textbender is an interesting little project I’ve been keeping an eye on for a while.  The idea is to create a collaborative editing/drafting environment that allows each author/editor access to all of the text used at all points in the process and to assemple, disassemble and reassemble the text in interesting ways.  Now it seems that it has occured to someone that this might be a useful way to draft laws and regulations.  It will be interesting to see if anything comes of this.

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Add Instant Definitions, Explanations to Your Site

AnswerTipsTM are small information bubbles that define any word when double-clicked. An AnswerTips-enabled site or blog means visitors get fast facts on 4 million topics provided by Answers.com when they double-click on any word, without opening a new browser or following outbound links. AnswerTips deliver instant definitions, explanations and facts including biographies, tech terms, geography, pop culture and much more.

AnswerTips™: Information from Answers.com

This is pretty cool. It puts a javascript wrapper around a page and when a word is double clicked info is grabbed from answers.com and displayed in a little bubble. It works pretty well. For an example, check this out on my CALI dev site and double click on your favorite legal term for a bit of a definition. Pretty neat.

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Paragraph Level Embedded Comments for WordPress

CommentPress is an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text.

CommentPress

This remarkable WordPress plugin is being developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book.  It adds a high level of interactivity and coinversation to WordPress blogs by allow for comments at the paragraph level with the comments displayed in a floating window.  I think the implications for this in education are astounding.  Imagine providing a text that be readily commented on, paragraph by paragraph by students and teachers.

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New Facebook API Provides Great Opportunity

Facebook Developers | Documentation

The Facebook Platform is a standards-based web service with methods for accessing and contributing Facebook data. We’ve made the methods as easy to understand as possible, and included full documentation to help you learn more.

Given the ongoing popularity of FB, would it make sense to integrate FB features into CALI?  Perhaps FB could provide the groundwork for some of our social apps.

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Managing Faculty Publications In The Digital Age

Technology increasingly drives the evolving nature of the library’s role in managing faculty publications. Libraries not only create physical archives of faculty scholarship, but take on the active role of facilitating immediate access to content. Trends in legal scholarship, including new formats such as blogs and podcasts and the open access initiatives, compel libraries to develop creative solutions such as enhanced bibliographies, searchable databases, and digital repositories to manage access, preserve, and disseminate faculty writings.

SSRN-The Evolving Nature of Faculty Publications by Jan Novak, Leslie Pardo

Via CMLibraryBlog. Good article with an overview of the ‘state of the art’ of faculty publication in the world of blogs and didgital respositories.

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Recruiting Students the Web 2.0 Way

The study also found that 63 percent of respondents said they would read a blog authored by a faculty member as a way to seek more information about students and faculty at a particular institution. While only 9 percent said they had participated in an online chat on a school Web site, 51 percent said they would if they could. Also, 9 percent of prospective students indicated that they had downloaded a podcast from a college or university, but 54 percent said they would if they had the opportunity.

Prospective College Students Receptive to Electronic Social Networking Recruitment Methods, Survey Finds

OK, we hang a survey off of LTL to find out what prospective law students think about this sort of stuff.  Then use the results to get law schools to start moving forward.

Via Library Stuff

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Why Podcast?

To ‘cast or not to ‘cast. It seems to be a much hotter topic than it deserves to be these days. Here’s how it boils down. Are you producing media for the web: Yes/No. If you check the Yes box, why not create an RSS feed for it? If you check the No box, why aren’t you?

Peterson’s – a Nelnet Company–Syndication for Higher Ed » Podcasts Passe – Or were they ever “In”?

As usual, Dan asks a good question.  I left him this comment:

One year ago we launched a simple service for law school faculty to create podcasts of lectures and course summaries at www.classcaster.org. Now we have over 60 active bloggers and podcasters, more than 2500 hours of audio material, a lot of satisfied students. I think you need to look past the hype about podcasting and ask a basic question: is there value for the student in having this supplemental material? If the answer is yes, you can create an effective infrastructure for recording classes and summaries with less than $100 digital recorders and open source software. All the information on how we built Classcaster, including the software we used, is at http://www.classcaster.net/.

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