Tag: legal education

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Public School Teachers Create Own Textbooks Online, Save District $175,000

MINNEAPOLIS – The new textbooks in Michael Engelhaupt’s statistics class at Blaine High School are kind of cheap and won’t last long, but he doesn’t mind. After all, he wrote them.
Instead of mass-produced textbooks, the more than 3,100 sophomores in the state’s largest district are learning from an online curriculum developed by their teachers over the summer with free software distributed over the web.

– via The Republic, “Anoka-Hennepin teachers write their own online textbook, save district $175,000”

After being used this school year and tweaked next summer, the resources will be made freely available on the Internet. Teachers recognized that creating own material would allow for easy local customization.

It is the ease of local customization that is going to be the key for Open Education Resources. Once it is fully understood that like any educational resource, OER needs to be tweaked for local uses, then the true value of OER will be realized. The savings in OER comes not only from the adoption of freely available materials, but also in the ease with which the resources can be adopted to local uses.

The same should apply for OER in legal education. Materials for a course in Torts are not intended to replace a professor teaching Torts but rather to provide a freely available foundation that the professor can use to create a unique course of their own.

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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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The Report of Current Opinions: Santa Comes Early to the Open Law Movement

Public.Resource.Org will begin providing in 2011 a weekly release of the Report of Current Opinions (RECOP). The Report will initially consist of HTML of all slip and final opinions of the appellate and supreme courts of the 50 states and the federal government. The feed will be available for reuse without restriction under the Creative Commons CC-Zero License and will include full star pagination.This data is being obtained through an agreement with Fastcase, one of the leading legal information publishers. Fastcase will be providing us all opinions in a given week by the end of the following week. We will work with our partners in Law.Gov to perform initial post-processing of the raw HTML data, including such tasks as privacy audits, conversion to XHTML, and tagging for style, content, and metadata.

via The Report of Current Opinions – O\’Reilly Radar.

On Sunday Dec. 19 Carl Malamud made the startling announcement quoted above. And you did read it correctly: “The Report will initially consist of HTML of all slip and final opinions of the appellate and supreme courts of the 50 states and the federal government. ” To say that this is huge would be the understatement of the year.

From personal experience I can tell you that the “slip and final opinions of the appellate and supreme courts of the 50 states and the federal government” have never all been freely available in HTML before. Not even close. At best you could probably wrangle 75% of these opinions in PDF using a mountain of code to scrape sites and parse feeds. To have all this available as a single feed is a game changer.

As a researcher and builder of tools for legal research and education, having access to a single feed that contains all of this data is just the thing I’ve been looking for (and occasionally trying to build) for the past 15 or so years. I have no doubt that the availability of this feed will spark a flurry of development to use the data in new and interesting ways. I will certainly be incorporating it in the CALI tools I’m currently working on.

Of course there are a couple of caveats here. First, we haven’t seen the feed yet. It won’t be available for a few weeks, so right now I’m still just waiting to see what it will look like. Second, there are 2 “timeouts” built into this service, direct government involvement by July 1, 2011 and a general sunset of private sector activity in creating the feed at the end of 2012. The timeouts underscore the belief that providing free and open access to primary legal materials is a duty of the government, plain and simple. As citizens we are bound to follow the law and our government should be obligated to provide us with free and open access to that law.

I know I’m certainly looking forward to a new year that brings greater free and open access to the law. Thanks, Carl.

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Paper Tablet App Lets Livescribe Echo Smartpen Write On Your PC

You can now draw virtual lines on your computer screen at the same time as you scribble them on paper.

A new smartpen app called Paper Tablet gives the Livescribe Echo smartpen some of the functionality of a dedicated graphics tablet, letting you write on the computer screen in real time and add manuscript text to files already on your computer.

“The essence of our business is the capture, access and sharing of written and spoken information,” Livescribe CEO Jim Marggraff told Gadget Lab. “We happen to have this tool in the form of a pen, but it’s really about capture, access and sharing.”

via Smartpen App Makes Paper as Mighty as the Mouse | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.

In addition to creating freehand notes, the app allows for marking up MSFT Office docs and saving them (in Windows, Mac functionality is limited). The Echo can also record up to 800 hours of classroom audio, making it a great way to record lectures while taking notes. The notes can be exported to PDF, the audio to MP3, making the device quite versatile. Wired recently wrote a lengthy review indicating the pen works especially well for journalists and students.

It would be interesting to see how useful it would be in the law school classroom.

The Livescribe 4 GB Echo Smartpen and the Livescribe 8 GB Echo Smartpen are available from Amazon and other retailers.

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Hewlett Foundation Awards $1.5 Million Grant for Open Textbooks

The third and last of Monday’s news developments also comes in the digital textbook arena — but from the free, rather than for-profit, perspective. The Community College Collaborative for Open Educational Resources said the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation had given it $1.5 million in new funds to expand its work, which focuses on increasing the number of free, online textbooks and training community college instructors on how best to use such books. Its main resource, the Community College Open Textbook Project, has dozens of college members and seeks to significantly expand the number of freely available digital textbooks it makes available.

via News: Textbook Bonanza – Inside Higher Ed.

Would be really nice if CALI could come up with some grant money to fund development of our open education resources projects including eLangdell and the Legal Education Commons.

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New Form Carolina Academic Press: Teaching Law by Design

Professors Michael Hunter Schwartz, Sophie Sparrow and Gerry Hess, three leaders in the teaching and learning movement in legal education, have collaborated to offer a new book designed to synthesize the latest research on teaching and learning for new and experienced law teachers.  The book begins with basic principles of teaching and learning theory, provides insights into how law students experience traditional law teaching, and then guides law teachers through the entire process of teaching a course. The topics addressed include: how to plan a course; how to design a syllabus and select a text; how to plan individual class sessions; how to engage and motivate students, even those tough-to-crack second- and third-year students; how to use a wide variety of teaching techniques; how to evaluate student learning, both for the purposes of assigning grades and of improving student learning; and how to be a lifelong learner as a teacher.

via Carolina Academic Press: Teaching Law by Design.

Form the introductory materials online it looks like a pretty good book.