Tag: law school

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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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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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American Airlines Dumps 35 lbs of Paper By Deploying iPads

“Our Electronic Flight Bag program has a significant positive environmental and cost-savings impact,” said David Campbell, American’s Vice President – Safety and Operations Performance. “In fact, removing the kitbag from all of our planes saves a minimum of 400,000 gallons and $1.2 million of fuel annually based on current fuel prices. Additionally, each of the more than 8,000 iPads we have deployed to date replaces more than 3,000 pages of paper previously carried by every active pilot and instructor. Altogether, 24 million pages of paper documents have been eliminated.”

via American Airlines Completes Electronic Flight Bag Implementation :: American Airlines Newsroom.

American is replacing nearly 35 lbs of loose leaf binders with a single iPad as it rolled out the Electronic Flight Bag (EFB). The press release notes the program is fully underway and the paper is gone. That means no more paper updates and loose leaf filing chores for flight crews.1» The FAA-approved EFB uses a specially designed app from a division of Boeing Digital Aviation to manage all of the information and is kept up-to-date electronically.

As we see more and more iPads being used in various professions, it should only be a matter of time until law schools start handing incoming law students an iPad loaded with all of the material they need for their law school education. Or maybe not.

 

And I thought that onerous task was only endured by librarians and their minionsPowered by Hackadelic Sliding Notes 1.6.5
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Taking CALIcon13 Live to the Web Using YouTube Live Events, TeleStream Wirecast for YouTube, and Commodity Hardware

We were able to live stream the entire CALI conference on YouTube this year. A lot of folks have asked me about how we did this and that’s what this article is going to cover. Before I get into the nitty gritty of how it all worked I want to make sure to thank the folks at IIT Chicago-Kent for making all of the tech stuff happen. Specifically from the Audio Visual & College Service Center Staff: Jarryd Scott Steimer, David Townsend, Alton Jackson, Sue Jadin, Gloria Juarez, Aaron Ruffin; from the Center for Law and Computers Staff: Sejal Vaishnav, Nisha Varughese, Bill Mette, Mohit Gaonkar, Rudi Buford, Efe Budak, Heather Banks, Greg Morris, Larry Adamiec; and Debbie Ginsberg and Emily Barney from the Law Library. Thanks everyone for making CALIcon13 a great tech success.

One upon a time webcasting a conference live on the Internet took a LOT of effort. Cameras, capture cards, encoders, PCs, a streaming server, and a fair amount of good luck to make sure it all worked. We did it for many years with the CALI Conference for Law School Computing. Eventually we gave up, as it became too difficult to manage especially as we took the conference on the road every year to a different law school. Even something as seemingly basic as pointing a camera at the front of room became difficult especially when you multiplied it across 5 rooms and 4 – 5 sessions per day. Lots of equipment and lots of things to go wrong. We just went back to recording for archives and dropped the live stream.

Earlier this year Google began making YouTube Live Events available to Google Apps for Education organizations. YouTube Live allows you to schedule and stream live video using YouTube’s infrastructure. Using YouTube Live requires having an encoder running on a local computer and a good, stable Internet connection to connect the encoder to YouTube. Once connected to YouTube, the event will not only stream live on YouTube but it will also record to YouTube. The archived recording of the event becomes available on YouTube at the same URL shortly after the live streaming of the event concludes. After testing the product I realized that we might be able to bring live streaming back to CALIcon.

The basic set up for this is pretty straight forward and is well handled by commodity hardware. We used a Canon video camera, Star-Tech USB capture, and Dell laptops. The actual specifics of the hardware isn’t really important since it is more about the features of the hardware. The camera should have composite video and audio outputs. High definition video isn’t really necessary here, it just uses extra bandwidth. The camera’s video and audio outputs were connected to the USB capture device. The capture device was connected via USB to the laptop. The laptop needn’t be a hot rod, just current. The encoding software we used is available for Mac or Windows computers.

With the hardware in place the USB capture device is seen as a USB camera by the encoding software. This allows the audio and video from the camera to be streamed to YouTube. For encoding of the video, we used the free version of TeleStream Wirecast for YouTube. Wirecast proved easy to use and the free version provides enough features to get your stream up and running, especially for most law school events that you might be streaming.

Once we sorted out the hardware and software we were going to use the next thing was making sure that all of the sessions were scheduled on YouTube. 55 sessions were scheduled on YouTube. This gave us event slots that we could connect the encoders to at the right time. We created a separate event for each CALIcon session. This created a YouTube link for each session. The URL was embedded in each session page on the CALIcon website so that the conference sessions could be watched live directly from the CALIcon website. The same URLs embed the archived session video in the session page on the site.

And that is all there is to it. We also recorded the video on SD cards in the cameras for archival purposes. Of the 55 session streams that we launched, we had some timing issues with the first set of sessions that resulted in some short streams, and we had 1 stream that did not record properly on YouTube. All of these videos were replaced on YouTube with the video recorded on the SD cards. Within 4 days of the end of CALIcon13 all of the video for all of the sessions that were recorded was available to all on YouTube and on the CALIcon13 website.

I would recommend that you give this a try at your law school. No matter what sort of recording/streaming solution you are using, I think you’ll find the YouTube Live Events solution useful. If you have any thoughts or questions, please use the comments below or send me an email.

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How About a Pastry Box Project For Legal Ed?

Every so often I find something on the Internet that is truly interesting and engaging. The Pastry Box Project is one of those things.

Each year, The Pastry Box Project gathers 30 people who are each influential in their field and asks them to share thoughts regarding what they do. Those thoughts are then published every day throughout the year at a rate of one per day, starting January 1st and ending December 31st. 2013’s topic is “Shaping The Web”

About – The Pastry Box Project

The result of this is a stream of daily posts on a given topic, this year it happens to “Shaping The Web” . Every morning there is something new. It might just be a 140 character thought, a single tweet. It may be 1000 words on some point of web design. Or it may be just about anything in between. No matter what the topic, it is one of those 30 voices, every morning. And the interesting thing to me is how those 30 voices merge to create a single tone for the blog. It’s that tone that brings me back every morning.

Of course it took just 2 or 3 days of reading for me to start thinking about the possibilities in this format. How great would it be to get 30 voices involved in legal education,a collection of deans, teachers, technologists, librarians, to participate in something like this? 30 individuals letting us know what they are thinking about, or doing, or tying to do on the topic of “Shaping Legal Education“. Everyday, one a day, for a year. I think that would be pretty cool.

The Pastry Box Project software is open source and is mostly a WordPress theme, which means it can be run just about anywhere, even added to CALI Classcaster. The editing interface is pretty straight forward and all posting is scheduled using the workflow tools baked into WordPress. The hard part is finding 30 voices.

I would suspect that a little leg work would turn up 30 folks interested in posting once a month for a year according to very fixed schedule. One of the great things about the Pastry Box from an editor’s point of view is that it is very predictable. The timing of (and deadlines for) posts from a specific person can be mapped out for the entire year. Everyone knows what is expected of them and when.

This time I’m just writing about the idea. I haven’t set up any software, just getting the idea out there (something I’m trying to more of).

What do you think? 30 individuals letting us know what they are thinking about, or doing, or tying to do on the topic of “Shaping Legal Education“. Everyday, one a day, for a year. Please use the comments to let me know if you’re interested in the idea, think I’m out of mind, etc.

 

 

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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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New ABA Questionnaire Requires More Detailed Graduate Jobs Data Reporting From Law Schools

http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1202534457162

The American Bar Association is changing the way it collects graduate employment information from law schools.

The council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar on Dec. 3 approved a new annual questionnaire intended to gather more detailed information about where recent law grads find work. The change came as law students, graduates and three U.S. senators heaped criticism on the ABA and law schools for not providing prospective law students with an accurate picture of graduate employment and salary levels.

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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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ABA Standards Review Committee To Hold Public Forum 4/2/11 On Accreditation Changes

[T]he ABA Standards Review Committee (SRC), the body that proposes changes to the law school accreditation standards for action by the ABA Council on Legal Education, is holding its next  public forum in Chicago during the morning of Saturday, April 2, 2011.   The SRC is actively considering issues concerning legal education broadly,  student learning outcomes,  faculty status, governance and security of position.

via Input needed: Newest SRC Accreditation Revisions & Chicago Meeting « Best Practices for Legal Education.

Be sure to visit the ABA SRC website for the latest drafts of the proposed changes to the accreditation standards. Look for the “Meeting Date: April 2-3, 2011” heading about half way down the page for the drafts as PDFs.

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Law School Website Design Study 2009

The starting list of schools for this report was taken from data provided by the American Bar Association’s Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar. This is their “2008 Official Guide to ABA-approved Law Schools”. Selective data is reproduced to present demographic data about schools to provide context for the content displayed. Factors such as student body size, program type, number of faculty, library collection or tuition could directly or indirectly influence website content needs. However, no inference is made regarding the relationship of this data to the homepage content.

In addition to capturing information about schools in the ABA spreadsheet, the report includes several non-ABA schools and online legal education organizations. For good measure, the homepages for Oxford and Cambridge are also included.

via Law School Website Design Study 2009.

Not something you see everyday. Roger Skalbeck of Georgetown Law Library put this report together and will present it at the CALI’s 2009 Conference for law School Computing. Something like this is a good thing for law schools, giving folks something to compare their site to.