Tag: education

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Are Law Students Dumber? Law Profs See Damage Done by NCLB

One professor at a top-20 law school recently confided that he has to teach his students how to write business letters. A professor at another elite school complained that grading exams is far more difficult now because the writing skills of students are so deficient that each exam requires several reads. Bernstein’s article suggests that he knows what accounts for this—federal education policy. He  may be right.
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Teaching to the test overshadows (if not supplants) teaching critical thinking, higher-order reasoning, and the development of creative-writing skills. As Bernstein emphasizes, contemporary teaching or teaching to the test does not “require proper grammar, usage, syntax, and structure.” In fact, those skills may be perceived as unimportant in this modern age—as many of the tests taken by K-12 students employ multiple choice, and those that require essays grade on a rubric that pays little if any attention to the quality of writing.

Law Professors See the Damage Done by ‘No Child Left Behind’ – The Conversation – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Something to add to the pile facing legal education today: students may not be as smart as they used to be. And that’s a problem because the law is more complex today than ever and requires extraordinary analytical and critical thinking skills. If you show up at law school lacking the necessary skill set, you will not do well.

As the father of 2 teenagers I can tell you that even in the best public schools “teaching to the test” is a great problem. Bright kids hit high school without a lot of writing and independent thinking skills and aren’t learning or even working on those skills there. I can certainly see where issues are going to come up in higher education as these kids move forward.

Be sure to read the comments following the Chronicle piece, there is some good stuff in there.

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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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Media Commons white paper examines future of transparency in peer review

The always-insightful Alex Reid has penned an essay “on the question of open peer review,” which examines a draft white paper posted to Media Commons last week. The paper—Open Review: A Study of Contexts and Practices—struggles, Reid argues, to address a critical question: “What is the problem with existing scholarly review procedures that the open review process seeks to solve?”

via New Media Commons white paper examines future of transparency in peer review | opensource.com.

 

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A Book Is A Book And Other Thoughts On Our Webby Future

In February I wrote that every book is a website and we need to embrace the webiness of books. This led to some good discussion about the nature of books generally and casebooks in particular and about the nature of websites. The discussion helped clarify a couple of things in my mind.

First, though every book is a website not every website is a book. As I mentioned in the previous article, once a book is in an electronic form such as EPUB the process to make the book into a website is straight forward. That is not to say that it is easy, but that the path from EPUB to website is clearly marked. The reverse is not true. Moving a website to a book format such as EPUB is not straight forward and may even be impossible.

A website is a often a complex and carefully organized store of information. It may be fairly static, with a single information store arranged and hyperlinked for readers to discover. It may be interactive, drawing the the reader/visitor deeper into the site primarily through the use of hyperlinks to reveal or explain things. It may not even contain any text at all. The design of a website holds clues as to whether or not it can survive the transformation into a book.

Simple static websites are the best candidates for books. Information, often mostly text, is arranged in some sort of linear fashion. Links to outside sites are minimal. A single author or a small group of collaborators gives the site a particular voice. A blog is a good example of the sort of site that lends itself to being bookified.

Contrast this to a more complex and interactive site where the community contributes to the site or games are played or movies are watched. Information is arranged in a non-linear fashion. Links, both internal and external, abound. A multitude of authors, editors, and contributors all bring their voices to the site. Wrangling this into a book could not be done without destroying the value of the site.

This brings me to my second point, a book is a book. It does not matter if the medium is paper or bits, the form and structure of a book is still the same. Books have covers, title pages, tables of contents, chapters, notes (foot or end). The structure of a book is a known thing and the structure carries through all mediums. This is something that makes books unique. A book is a book in hard cover, paperback, on the Kindle, Nook and iPad, in the PDF file on your PC, and ultimately on the web.

Moving a book from print to electronic is not magic and it does not make the book better. The change in format just changes how readers access the book. If you want to make a “better” book, then build a website. Adding interaction and multimedia to a book are often valuable ways to enhance the information that is provided, but adding these enhancements are better done as website than a book.

Transforming a book into a website is the way to make a better book and destroy the book at the same time. Rather than spending time trying to shoehorn elements of a website into a book, we should let go of the book and embrace the web as the book of the future.

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Swaapr Brings Peer-to-Peer Textbook Rentals to College Campuses

Our company mission is simple: We want to make your college experience more affordable and fun. We believe in transparency, integrity, and customer satisfaction at the highest level. This company was founded by the three college students who were tired of getting ripped off by companies that capitalize on college students. So we built a service with the college student in mind. We offer peer to peer rentals as well as allow students who wish to share skills that with one another on one’s college campus.

via Swaapr | About Us.

Seems like a pretty good idea. It seems like Swaapr just got off the ground a month or so ago, so it will be interesting to keep an eye on them as they grow. You can follow along on the the Swaapr blog or Twitter.

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A pedagogy of abundance or a pedagogy to support human beings? Participant support on massive open online courses | Kop | The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning

http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1041/2025

This paper examines how emergent technologies could influence the design of learning environments. It will pay particular attention to the roles of educators and learners in creating networked learning experiences on massive open online courses (MOOCs). The research shows that it is possible to move from a pedagogy of abundance to a pedagogy that supports human beings in their learning through the active creation of resources and learning places by both learners and course facilitators. This pedagogy is based on the building of connections, collaborations, and the exchange of resources between people, the building of a community of learners, and the harnessing of information flows on networks. This resonates with the notion of emergent learning as learning in which actors and system co-evolve within a MOOC and where the level of presence of actors on the MOOC influences learning outcomes.

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What Is Publishing? A Report from THATCamp Publishing – ProfHacker – The Chronicle of Higher Education

http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/what-is-publishing-a-report-from-thatcamp-publishing/37420

THATCamp Publishing provided a forum for three stakeholders in this changing industry: traditional academic publishers, libraries-as-publishers, and faculty. While traditional publishers are interested in the bottom line, libraries-as-publishers are focused on the problem of access. Faculty, on the other hand, are concerned with how their publications will lead to promotion, tenure, and the advancement of knowledge. THATCamp Publishing highlighted how the evaporation of funding for scholarly publishing and the rise of the Internet as a low-cost, easy-access means of dissemination are radically changing the nature of this industry, and the inter-relationships of these three stakeholders.

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CUNY’s Open Source “Commons in a Box” A Big Win For Open Source in Academia

With a $107,500 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, CUNY has announced that it will now begin work on the “Commons in a Box” project, assembling its software into a single installation package. This means that other colleges and universities will be able to easily create their own academic platforms. News of the project came with the announcement that the Modern Language Association will take part in its development and will use the platform to create an MLA Commons for its members.

The project has been built using open-source tools, including WordPress (which enables multisite blogs), BuddyPress (a WordPress plugin that turns the blog into a social network), and MediaWiki (the Wikimedia Foundation’s wiki software). As a proponent of open-source technologies in education, that makes the Commons in a Box project a win in my book. It isn’t simply that the project will put the tools to create their own academic networks into the hands of schools; it’s that the Academic Commons development team has been sharing its coding back with the open source community, with WordPress plugins for example that have been downloaded over 100,000 times.

Inside Higher Ed: “Commons in a Box” & the Importance of Open Academic Networks

CUNY’s project joins a number of other major university projects including Open.Michigan, ELMS @ Penn State, and Open Scholar @ Harvard that are using open source software and licensing to develop sophisticated collaborative learning and research spaces. Given the collaborative nature of legal practice, law schools should be at the forefront of these sorts of projects.

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Navigating the Uncharted Waters of Teaching Law with Online Simulations by Ira Nathenson :: SSRN

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1944664

The internet is more than a place where the Millennial Generation communicates, plays, and shops. It’s also a medium that raises issues central to nearly every existing field of legal doctrine, whether basic (such as Torts, Property, or Contracts) or advanced (such as Intellectual Property, Criminal Procedure, or Securities Regulation). This creates tremendous opportunities for legal educators interested in using the live internet for experiential education. This Article examines how live websites can be used to create engaging and holistic simulations that tie together doctrine, theory, skills, and values in ways impossible to achieve with the case method. In this Article, the author discusses observations stemming from his experiences teaching law courses using live, online role-playing simulations that cast students in the role of attorneys. The Article concludes that such simulations have significant benefits for law students, and surprisingly, can also benefit scholars who use simulations proactively to deepen the synergies between their teaching and scholarship. However, the resources required for simulations may also exacerbate long-standing systemic tensions in legal education, particularly regarding institutional resources as well as the sometimes conflicting roles of faculty as teacher-scholars. Because the American Bar Association will almost certainly, and appropriately, require law schools to expand their simulation offerings, the benefits and tradeoffs of simulations teaching must be addressed now.

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Inside Higher Ed :: What Were They Thinking?

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/11/09/essay-why-smart-people-make-foolish-ethical-choices

Every time there is a new ethics scandal, whether in a university or some other setting (such as in government or the corporate world), observers wonder how those involved could have been so stupid. Could they really have done the things of which they are accused? If so, what were they thinking?
In fact, there are three precipitating factors for ethics scandals that practically guarantee that they will not be going away anytime soon. The three factors are foolishness, the complexity of ethical reasoning, and ethical drift, which I discuss in turn.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/11/09/essay-why-smart-people-make-foolish-ethical-choices#ixzz1dLKWYdlv
Inside Higher Ed