The 6th incarnation of Elmer's blog
Trailblazer is a web browser that turns students’ research process into a browsable map. This visualisation helps keep students on track, and lets their teachers see how they’re learning
This looks interesting. It would have plenty of interesting applications in legal ed and law practice.
Outcomes Based Education – UCHastings. – This page provides some good information about outcomes based legal education including many links to articles and books. Serves as a fine starting point for anyone interested in learning about how to apply learning outcomes and assessment in legal ed.
Today we’re excited to complete that story with three major developments:
- OneNote for Mac is available for the first time and for free. With this, OneNote is now available on all the platforms you care about: PC, Mac, Windows tablets, Windows Phone, iPad, iPhone, Android and the Web. And they’re always in sync.
- OneNote is now free everywhere including the Windows PC desktop and Mac version because we want everyone to be able to use it. Premium features are available to paid customers.
- The OneNote service now provides a cloud API enabling any application to connect to it. This makes it easier than ever to capture ideas, information and inspirations from more applications and more places straight into OneNote, including:
- OneNote Clipper for saving web pages to OneNote
- me@onenote.com for emailing notes to OneNote
- Office Lens for capturing documents and whiteboards with your Windows Phone
- Sending blog and news articles to OneNote from Feedly, News360 and Weave
- Easy document scanning to OneNote with Brother, Doxie Go, Epson, and Neat
- Writing notes with pen and paper and sending them to OneNote with Livescribe
- Mobile document scanning to OneNote with Genius Scan and JotNot
- Having your physical notebooks scanned into OneNote with Mod Notebooks
- Connecting your world to OneNote with IFTTT
Go to www.onenote.com to get OneNote for free for your Mac, PC or other devices, and try out the new OneNote service connected experiences.
via OneNote now on Mac, free everywhere, and service powered | Office Blogs.
This is big news. Microsoft is giving away its OneNote application and adding a Mac version into the product mix. I’ve installed it on Mac and Windows and it is a close competitor to Evernote.
Overall this looks like a good move from MSFT that will likely increase use of OneNote. I would expect see much more adoption of OneNote in law schools because it compliments their MS Office installed base quite well.
Education and open science hackathon guide | opensource.com. – This article is from March 2013 and it provides some good ideas for organizing and running an open education hackathon. A course sprint that bring s subject matter experts together with tech and design people sounds like a good way to jump-start an open education resource project.
Students at Iowa State University will be able to earn their undergraduate and law degrees in six, rather than seven, years under an innovative new partnership between Iowa State and the Drake Law School. Developed and managed by the ISU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the program allows students to enter Law School in their fourth year and use the credits earned in their first year of Law School to complete their undergraduate studies.
via Drake Law School – News & Events.
This represents a great opportunity for students headed to Iowa State with an eye towards getting a JD. While students are not guaranteed acceptance in Drake Law, those that make it will receive a $5000 annual renewable scholarship. The goal is to provide more lawyers to serve rural Iowa.
More law schools should be looking at programs like this not only as a way to help students control costs but also as a way to help those interested in serving under served communities.
St. John’s is home to a dedicated faculty of engaging teachers and accomplished scholars. In the classroom, they foster our students’ analytical ability and practical skills. Outside the classroom, many of our professors are outstanding researchers and thought leaders who have “written the book” in their areas of interest and expertise.
A little over a year ago, the Law School launched the Faculty Scholarship Blog to showcase faculty activities and achievements, including their books and articles, speaking engagements, and media appearances. Produced and regularly updated by Professor Janai S. Nelson − the Law School’s Associate Dean for Faculty Scholarship − and Professor Jeff Sovern, the blog offers a detailed snapshot of the faculty’s timely and important work.
via St. John’s Law Bloggers Offer Virtual Tour of Today’s Legal Landscape.
It’s great to see a law school acknowledge faculty who blog and highlight the areas they are blogging in. This sort of thing will help make writing for a blog or website more acceptable as a form of scholarly writing. Certainly not every utterance that lands on the Internet is scholarly, but we are moving to a place where well thought out and researched articles on a blog or website are going to be considered scholarly products alongside more traditionally published law review articles. And that is a Good Thing.
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.
While YouVersion is on the radar of Silicon Valley investors, it’s a deal their funds can’t touch. YouVersion is part of the church, so it’s set up as a non-profit that doesn’t generate revenue or have exit plans. It’s funded entirely by donations, $3 million was donated to sustain the app last year, and by LifeChurch.tv, which has poured $20 million into it.
via YouVersion Bible app has 100 million downloads – Business Insider.
This is just the sort of thing that education needs: a well funded non-profit dedicated only to producing top quality educational materials. What the edu space needs right now is more non-profit thinking and less venture capital money.
Prof. Rick Hills decided to tap his inner Tufte in his Yale Law classes this year with good results:
My basic goal was to make doctrinal relationships, legal and political history, and legal text more intelligible by representing it visually in different modes — color, shape, movement, or images generally. My prime directive was to adhere to Edward Tufte’s principles: For instance, avoid “chartjunk,” and never use bulleted text that you read from a screen. Within this capacious constraints, I tried a wide array of images and diagrams — decision trees and flow charts, Venn Diagrams, statutory text in multiple colors, photos galore, and some often hokey but hopefully memorable visual representations of causal and doctrinal relationships.
My verdict? In anonymous surveys with a decent response rate, my constitutional law section 70+ members seemed to like the slides. Many printed them out as guides during the final exam. My own sense: The pictures, if sufficiently simple and memorable, helped clarify ideas or narratives that had previously left some significant portion of the class baffled and frustrated. After the jump, I will provide some samples and invite you to share your comments on whether you think that these sorts of visual aids help and how they might be improved.
via PrawfsBlawg: Is a picture worth 1,000 words in a law school class? My experiment with visual aids.
More and more law professors are incorporating visuals into their lectures as a way to engage students and illustrate the points of law being discussed. While this trend has been picking up a lot of steam of late, the use of graphics, flow charts, video, and more in law school lecture halls has been going on for years. There are a number of interesting resources for visuals that any law prof could use in their lectures available on the Internet. Here are a few:
Like most things, I’m sure there are many, many more examples out there. Feel free to add stuff in the comments (one link per comment).
Overtime the CALI eLangdell Project has morphed and evolved starting starting as a radical attempt to revolutionize course materials in legal education and leading to the founding of a more traditional ebook imprint that today provides free, CC licensed casebooks and supplementary materials to legal education. One constant has remained over this transition: how to manage the transition from print to digital formats. This transition, required of both authors and readers, is a difficult one and more complex in the education space than in the leisure reading space. I will tell you now that I don’t have definitive answer to this problem, but I have some ideas.
Much of the focus with eLangdell is on the authoring of material and that will be my focus for the balance of this piece. The creation of digital legal education materials, like any another form of creation, is hard work. Making it more difficult are the habits and assumptions of our author pool. Like textbook authors everywhere, authors of legal casebooks come to the table with a career full of assumptions about being an author. They are writing for print. They expect long lead times with only occasional updates. They want a physical artifact, a book, that memorializes their effort. None of this really applies in the digital world. The material may never be printed. It needs to produced with a sense of immediacy and the ability to quickly and frequently update. There will not be a physical artifact to put on a shelf.
To successfully manage the transition from print books to digital resources these three points need to be dealt with to change the way authors create. And it isn’t going to be easy.
Authors, and most everyone else, still write for print. The tools we use are often intended to produce beautiful printed pages. Printed on paper. With all the limitations and structure that comes with the printed page. Word processors are designed to first mimic typewriters. Typewriters strike an image of type to a paper page. When an author sits down and opens Microsoft Word all the metaphors of the print world are brought to bear. And this isn’t necessarily a bad thing if that’s what you want to do.
Creating digital resources requires a different approach. A key feature of the digital realm is the ability to separate content and presentation. Separate the words from the page. Producing content for this environment is fundamentally different than producing content for print where content and presentation are typically tightly linked. Word processors conflate content and presentation in such a way that the two are difficult to separate. This leads to great difficulty in moving word processor documents into the truly digital realm.
The solution is to scrap word processors as we know them today and use a more basic text editor with a limited amount of readable markup to create the digital resources that will replace print books. Text markup languages such as AsciiDoctor and Markdown and more sophisticated XML schemes like HTML and DocBook provide the sort of markup that allows the author to create reusable content that still conveys information about what the author intends to emphasize. That is to say, you can still use bold and italics and notes to get your point across.
Once word processors are scrapped the exact tool and even the markup language used become less important than the actual content produced. There are many very capable text editors, some, like the one I’m using now, are on the web and run in your browser from anywhere. Others are desktop programs that run locally like your old word processor. All produce marked up text that is not just content but data that be reused and reformatted.
By making the switch from writing for print to writing for digital, the author brings the focus back to the content being created. And that should be of primary importance, especially to legal educators.
Writing for print brings with it the long lead times and occasional updates of the printed book. Writing for digital is more immediate, and allows for frequent updates and revisions. Creating a digital resource means releasing a work that will be forever live on the network. That may sound a little scary, but it isn’t meant to be. Authors creating digital content just need to be aware that once the content is released it will be out there, somewhere, for a very long time.
The best tools for creating digital resource allow for the frequent updating and revising of the work. This is one of the great things about writing digital. In the legal education realm this means being able to revise your materials to include the latest changes in the law as the changes occur. No more waiting 2 years for a pocket part that includes changes that are already a year old. Updating and revising become a more regular part of the authoring process.
Writing digital provides for easier collaboration, making those updates and a revisions a kind of community exercise. Gone are the days of sending word processor files around and the endless effort to make sure that work is incorporated properly. Again we can use readily available tools to manage digital resource creation in such a way that multiple authors can work in harmony without spending valuable time tripping over each other.
Writing for print implies that you are writing for the grandest of print prizes, a book. A book is a physical artifact that contains the printed writing of the author. The things that the author does in the word processor are with an eye toward what is going to come out on a printed page, and ultimately a book. Writing for digital is a whole other animal. Since creating digital resources is more about content than presentation that means that writing digital can result in a web site, a wiki, a blog, a podcast, series of tweets, a slide show, a PDF, even a physical book. It really doesn’t matter about the final container of the content so long as the content is free to be loaded into the container. And creating that content is what writing digital is all about.
The movement away from the print book as the final end game of authorship is something that will take a lot of getting used to, but it is going to happen. And it will liberate authors from constraints they didn’t even realize they had. In legal education it means creating learning resources that are interactive, collaborative, and current in a format that allows for the free flow of the content in the format appropriate for the teacher and student.
Like this post the road from print to digital is long, unclear, and confusing, but it is a road we need to travel.