Tag: legal education

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And Who Says Law Students Wouldn’t Benefit From More Tech Training?

Frustrated by ridiculous bills for routine “commodity” matters, Flaherty decided to strike back, and recently launched his technology audit program, where firms bidding for Kia’s business must bring a top associate for a live test of their skills using basic, generic business tech tools such as Microsoft Word and Excel, for simple, rudimentary tasks.

So far, the track record is zero. Nine firms have taken the test, and all failed. One firm flunked twice.

“The audit should take one hour,” said Flaherty, “but the average pace is five hours.” In real life, that adds up to a whole lot of wasted money, he said. Flaherty uses the test to help him decide winners of the beauty contests, and to set rates and set performance goals. “I take 5 percent off every bill until they pass the test.”

via Big Law Whipped for Poor Tech Training.

This article is full of fun facts including things like less than 30% of associates know how to use the save to PDF function of Word with the rest printing then scanning documents to PDF. The reality here is that just because someone knows how to turn on computer and start typing does not mean they have any idea how to use the machine or the applications needed to function in the profession. Seriously, buying stuff on eBay should not be considered an advanced computer skill.

This presents a huge opportunity for the legal ed tech community (let’s call them Teknoids) to step up and provide the sort of instruction and training that is needed to turn smart law students into techno-capable lawyers. The practice of law is becoming more and more technical every day. Innovations in practice technology are requiring an increasing level of sophistication that isn’t going to get picked up on the street. Law students need training in the use of technical tools of their chosen profession. It is that simple.

I think this calls for something well beyond the LPM seminar or other small classes that reach only a fraction of the students. This sort of training needs to be required of each and every law student. Some of it can be added to the required research and writing programs as sessions that look at the features, basic and advanced, of standard software tools like word processors and spreadsheets. Make those programs paperless. Require students to use available tools to create PDFs and submit their work electronically. Require faculty to review and comment on the work in the same electronic format. Simply being able to master these tasks would probably get most law students through the audit described in the article.

Perhaps law schools should develop their own tech audit, a sort of technical bar exam. Students who complete the exercises would receive a certificate that indicates they’ve achieved a certain level of technical competency in a set of software tools. Wouldn’t it be great if law schools had access to some sort of platform to create these sorts of exercises, distribute them to students, track student results, and issue certifications? You with me here? This is something that could be done with the CALI platform. CALI Author for creating and authoring the exercises, Classcaster for Lesson distribution, the CALI Lesson system for student tracking. It’s all there, just waiting for someone to pick it up and run with it.

How about it Teknoids? Care to step up and get a piece of the change coming to legal education?

 

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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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CNN Money Takes Notice of Open Source Textbook Publishers, Misses eLangdell

Ideally, the major publishers, the free education players, and the open source firms will end up egging each other on, upping the ante at each step of the way, and ultimately benefiting students and teachers. After all, why cant it play out like the way open-source Linux helped propel advances from Microsoft MSFT and Apple AAPL? “I think there will always be what I think is a healthy relationship between publishers and the open-source world. They push each other forward. They challenge each other. Competition is good,” says Wiley.

via Startups are about to blow up the textbook – Fortune Tech.

Open educational resources get the focus in this article. CK-12 gets the most ink, while challenges to traditional publishers are nicely laid out. Articles like this are great because they bring info about OER to audiences that wouldn’t hear about it otherwise.

In the legal education arena, CALI‘s eLangdell project, especially the eLangdell Press , provides OER for law schools. eLangdell Press provides free and open access to over a dozen titles including casebooks, Federal rules, and statutory supplements.

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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.
…
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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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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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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Feds Launch Learning Registry To Improve Discoverability of OER

The Learning Registry addresses the problem of discoverability of education resources. There are countless repositories of fantastic educational content, from user-generated and curated sites to Open Education Resources to private sector publisher sites. Yet, with all this high-quality content available to teachers, it is still nearly impossible to find content to use with a particular lesson plan for a particular grade aligned to particular standards. Regrettably, it is often easier for a teacher to develop his own content than to find just the right thing on the Internet.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/11/education-learning-registry.html

The Learning Registry is a joint Department of Education + Department of Defense project to provide a common infrastructure for providing discoverable metadata for OER. The goal is to help the teacher locate the “just right” education content that is freely available on the web. Rather than just being yet another portal the Learning Registry is designed as infrastructure with community members running registry nodes that feed metadata and paradata back to other nodes all via a set of open APIs.

This seems like an excellent step toward solving the discovery problem that seems to plague OER.  It also presents a opportunity for folks creating OER in the law school community to create a Learning Registry node for law school OER.

 

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Time For Law Schools To Embrace the iPad?

 The biggest take-away is that the iPad has become a “game-changer” in part because already perhaps as many as half of all appellate judges nationwide are at least sometimes reading briefs on an iPad and because it seems likely that soon all judges will read most briefs on screens.

– Law School Innovation, The importance of appreciating (and teaching) iPad realities for lawyers and law students

Indeed it would seem that the use of the iPad in the legal profession is increasing. If law schools are truly interested in preparing students for law practice it would certainly make sense to help them learn to use the tools they will encounter in practice.

 

 

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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.