Digital Directions

Welcome

Welcome to the new Digital Directions blog from the UKCLE.  Here you will find discussion related to e-learning for legal academics as well as the other related subjects.  You will also be able to comment and contribute to this blog, receive regular updates and subscribe to podcasts using the links on the right hand side column.

Enhancing Legal Education in Scotland Event

This was the first UKCLE event in Scotland (that wasn’t attached to another event) for some time, and possibly the first event to involve representatives from all levels of legal education.  The event was held in Edinburgh and was well attended by over 50 delegates – mainly from academic institutions (representing both the LLB and postgraduate diploma stage) but the legal profession was also widely represented by the Law Society of Scotland, HR directors and managers, heads of training and partners from law firms.

The first keynote from Alastair Robertson (HEA, Academy Scotland) covered a range of issues including the changing nature of the student learning experience, new ways of relating to businesses and the profession and forthcoming challenges: in particular how the four nations of the UK will contribute to devolved policy and the likely divergence that may lead to tensions.  Relating to news earlier this week that England & Wales have a new framework for HE - will there be pressure to adopt similar or distinctly different policy in Scotland?  Alastair also spoke of graduate attributes and what it means to be a graduate of a particular HEI or in a particular discipline such as law.

Prof Margaret Ross (University of Aberdeen) spoke about the diversity of the legal education student body and the study of law for its own sake.  Pointing to Edinburgh University’s centenary of women in legal education, Margaret spoke of the first two women to gain a postgraduate LLB in 1909 who both had legal profession links in their family, but who did not, and could not, enter into the profession.  The law society, at the time, decided to wait until the end of the Great War to see if they would have enough male members returning from the battle fields before considering whether to admit women – rather much a response to market forces than the emancipation of female lawyers!

Nevertheless, Margaret also indicated how some things have not changed – William Twining’s book Blackstone’s Tower relates a story where law students were directed to bring in a broadsheet newspaper and identify the items that had legal issues until the entirety of the paper had been considered – modern law students may well use electronic publications rather than the paper-copy but the learning experience remains the same.  Less positive is the lack of change in terms of funding for legal education.  Margaret made comparisons with medical practitioners, honorary NHS contracts and the general view that law is a professional subject that can be taught on a lower budget due to the absence of scientific labs etc.

Still to come, guest blog post from the Law Society of Scotland, and a review of the afternoon sessions!

The value of social media

This month's Big Question from Tony Carrer's Learning Circuits Blog is an interesting one, not just for learning professionals who are trying to enage colleagues, but also for academics who are trying to engage their students!

"How do I communicate the value of social media as a learning tool to my organization?"

"My coworkers are Baby Boomers and Traditionals. When I mention blogs or any social networking they "poo-poo" me and say our workers should not use those tools because it will make them inefficient and not do their jobs. When I have presented the idea of how we can use discussion threads on our environment to discuss topics and make comments outside the classroom, many of my co-workers said it can't be done. They either haven't opened their mind to the idea or really care. In essence, if it is not classroom, they are really not interested in it.

My question is how do I get my coworkers to even consider the capabilities of these tools when it really does not interest them."

In relation to higher education, and legal education in particular, I think that the uptake of social media by the profession can also be used as a driver to encouage staff to (re)consider using such tools in the classroom setting.

It may well be that the profession is also experiencing this 'Big Question' and that senior partners are poo-pooing tools that may be considered as an inefficient use of time, but recently the use of social media by both large and small firms has really taken off.

Writing for the Binary Law blog, Nick Holmes picks up on other commentators in thrall of the BigLaw firms, in particular whether the legal press pays a disproportionate amount of attention to large law firms - with their panoply of marketing directors, PR advisors, website and social media mavens.  His response to Jordan Furlong, a Canadian blogger at slaw.ca, was:

"I do think you’re not seeing the wood for the trees here. Social media do already provide the means for solos and smaller firms to leave a bigger footprint and “amplify their voice and multiply their narratives within the profession as a whole”. As you well know, they are doing it through public blogging and the public SNEs; and the pooling and focussing is done via public group activity on group blogs and special interest groups on the SNEs.

That does not provide a complete solution and third party collaboration and aggregation channels are evolving, but I don’t really see that they need “their own media channel” – will it not be an agglomeration of media channels?

The first step for solos and small firms is to engage with social media and they have only themselves to blame if they don’t.

You suggest that their footprints need to be left “in the places where journalists search for ideas and leads”. Turn that around: how about journalists need to engage better with social media and source their stories from a wider range of media channels? Surely it’s a very lazy hack who relies on the mainstream legal media for their ideas; surely they need to be reading blogs, following Twitter et al? Now I know you do this, so the next question to ask (of an employed journalist) is – It’s all very well for me to source some of my ideas and stories from solos and small firms, but will that sell the rag/will it attract the advertising bucks, will it please my paymaster? I suspect the answer to those questions is No."

In a previous post, Holmes also points to a critique of Susskind's book, The End of Lawyers? reviewed by Gillian Bull, which further contributes to the notion of BigLaw:

“Susskind’s book in the main deals with life on Planet Mammon: life on Planet Rumpole (or even Planet Pooter) doesn’t figure much.” Thus, in her view, the book is not relevant to most lawyers and the public at large. Not only that, but City lawyers either won’t need to read it if they’re already on the game, or won’t want to read it if they’re not; and their ICT managers will “need more than the collection of anecdotes and predictions that this book comprises. To make their case for spending money they need lots of hard data, of which there are none here.”

But then, this book does focus on the large law firms and perhaps another book, or another author, could /should look further at small firms and the sole practitioner.

So, returning to the 'Big Question', then yes, both large and small firms are using social media and there may well be an expectation that future employees (our students) should be able to engage, contribute to, or even lead with this type of engagement.

The HEA in general, UKCLE in relation to legal education and individual HEIs all encouarge staff to undertake pilot projects and the sharing of examples which is probably our sector's solution to this Big Question, and has been for some time.  However, this does rely on the innovative lecturer to adopt or adapt the case studies for specific purposes on his or her course.

I was particularly drawn to an existing response to the Big Question that included the following presentation - a PR jobs-worth trying to ban the telephone in favour of social media!

New technology - the threat to our information

View more presentations from normanlamont.

ALT-C 2009 - A Virtual Perspective

As I was unable to go, I asked a couple of colleagues who went to the Association of Learning Technology Conference (ALT-C) to let me know of anything interesting, so here’s a guest blog post!

 

ALT-C isn’t subject specific, so many new and emerging classroom technologies can often be found… not all take off, but some do.  The following post is by Kathy Trinder and Linda Creanor, so my thanks to them!

 

--------------------------------------------------

 

A very busy few days this year. Many old contacts reconnected, many fellow education tech twitter-ers met in person, and many interesting and in depth conversations took place in pubs, over pints & pies, at the end of the day.

 

This year I initially put on my researcher hat and attended one session on "The agenda of research culture". I won't comment on these here, but links are available for the abstracts:

 

Activity Theory: what does it offer e-learning research?

 

A Research Agenda for Emerging Technologies in Education:

 

Gathering evidence of the design, use, reuse and redesign of Open Educational Content:

 

SCoPE Online Community to Support Individuals Interested in Educational Research and Practice: A Snapshot of Evolution:

 

 

For the rest of the conference, other than the keynotes by Wesch and Bean (see links to the videos

and other blog posts here and here, and always lots to read about ALT-C at: http://elearningstuff.wordpress.com/category/altc2009/), I have to admit I pretty much just followed the Virtual Worlds theme, of which I was part with my presentation on how Glasgow Caledonian University has been using SL in teaching Artifical Intelligence (AI) in computing.

 

2 years ago at ALT-C few people were using 3D virtual worlds in teaching, and the main conference themes revolved around Web 2.0 tools and how we could possibly use these. However that was the year that I detected a buzz and many whispers about this thing called Second Life. Like many I'd signed up for an SL account the previous year, when it first hit the headlines, but had not done a lot in there. It was highly intriguing to hear that year what had been happening, what all the really early adopters in H.E. had been doing.

 

This year there is a noticeable difference, with several sessions on Virtual Worlds, mirroring the general trend in UK HE of most universities now having some presence in SL or other 3D virtual worlds.

 

We are now beginning to see some real solid teaching scenarios appearing, beyond the pilot project stage, however pilots are still seen as important as we are still exploring what we can do with these worlds, and we cannot yet know their limits as they are still very much in development (though some are calling for an end to pilots and a start to some real teaching. But to me they are technology killers. This is an emerging technology and will be for many years to come. We are not there yet!). There is still much discussion about the technical issues, and institutional barriers this year at the conference. I think most places now are aware of issues and whilst we haven't solved them all we have discovered the more obvious ones are and sharing work rounds.

 

But it could be seen from the presentations given that many different disciplines are now exploring 3D Virtual Worlds. Some concentrated on the technology - 'bots, haptic feedback, tool kits, and integrating mobile & cross world devices; whilst others explored the cognitive - e.g. simulations, drill & practice, etc. About half the presentations though looked more at the affective or soft skills, (particularly in the arts & social sciences), and are more concerned with issues such as identity, gender, networking, and the very social aspects of such worlds.  There was discussion around whether or not the the SL expericne can feel like a 'real' experience ('Yes', but it depends on the student, the scenario, the design and the willingness of all participants to allow it to feel real.) Another question asked was does such a visual medium always benefit or can it kill imagination and creativity ("Which one is *your* Hurcule Poiroit or your Mr D'arcy?").

 

Another strong strand that emerged is that of staff and teachers and how we 'train' staff about these worlds. Do they need to become immersed in order to understand the environment and be able to use it effectively for teaching?

 

Games based learning emerged, I feel, as 'the next big thing'. With the introduction of 3D virtual worlds, who many see as being game-like, this is perhaps a natural progression. Again there is much historical work in this field, but it is being re-visitied because it seems that many of the processes of game play can potentially be used in virtual worlds to help structure learning and teaching.

 

These are all trends that can also be seen emerging across Europe as well as in the UK (I recently attended ICWL VW Workshop http://www.iicm.tugraz.at/ViWo/ViWo2009Workshop).

 

For the abstracts of the sessions I attended in SL, please see the links here:

 

Second life processes - 3 short paper(s)

300 Bioscience and forensic science students get a Second Life®

Rose Heaney, Stephanie Henderson-Begg, Olivia Corcoran

 

317 A fusion of mobile technology and Second Life in a learning environment to support the transition from school to university

Jane Magill, E Magill, B Canavan, A Devlin, M Pomerantz, J Trinder:

 

 

308 Dreams into [virtual] reality

Kate Boardman:

 

 

Visual redesign - 3 short paper(s)

155 Designing Engaging Visualisations to Support History Learning

Nic Earle, Shelley Hales

 

 

163 A Case of High Engagement: Applying immersive online gaming to History research skills.

Alex Moseley

 

313 Moving in 3D: The X, Y, Z of learning through doing in immersive, virtual environments

Helen Farley, Caroline Steel

 

 

Second life technologies - 3 short paper(s)

75 Designing game-based learning activities in Second Life

Maria Toro-Troconis, Martyn Partridge

 

 

206 If we dream it, will they come? The self-efficacy of students new to Second Life Learning

David Moffat, Kathryn Trinder

 

 

251 Virtual Reality: designing learning environments in Second Life

Fay Cross

 

 

Guest post by: Kathy Trinder and Linda Creanor, Caledonian Academy, Glasgow Caledonian University

 

 

Is the language of English law in need of fundamental reform?

Today, The Times reports on a debate chaired by Lord Justice Jacob on the motion The Language of English law is in Need of Fundamental Reform.  Organised by the English Project, the debate marked the anniversary of the Statute of Pleading in 1362 (647 years not being particularly significant, so I imagine the Statute was passed during this October week) which decried the use of French in English legal cases.

The suggestion that legal language with its "elaborate circumlocutions and Latin tags" should follow the fateful path of les mots français and be abolished in favour of plain English received a bit of a knockback:

For the reformers it was an open and shut case. As Gerlis put it, the traditional conventions — from the use of expressions such as “My learned friend” to Latin expressions such as lis mota and praecipe — were out of place when communication, through texting, was moving towards shorter words and expressions. Traditional legal language did not serve the public who were entitled to understand the rules and regulations that governed their lives, he said.

This was underlined by Clive Ludlow, a prison officer at Belmarsh, who spoke from the floor on behalf of Safe Ground, the education charity. He said that a survey of prisoners indicated that many were baffled by the legal arguments that determined their futures.

Atkins recounted her own recent and confusing experience with a lawyer. “It’s very important that I, as a client, understand what you, as my legal adviser, are saying.”

In response Gordon and Ley conceded that many complicated forms of expressions could be dropped. But the problem, they said, was not with English legal language but with the lawyers who used it — and who lapsed too readily into well-worn phrases.

Gordon said this was not the fault of the language. Its strength and vigour lay in a history of solid Anglo-Saxon words, with the occasional Latin and French term to provide consistency and concision. As Jonathan Croucher, of Taylor Wessing, pointed out: “The law is often not straightforward.” It was inevitable that some complexity would creep in.

As the debate progressed, the case for precision cut the ground from beneath the feet of the radicals. The “rushed” Dangerous Dogs Act 1991 highlighted the dangers that arose when seemingly clear words such as “pitbull terrier” were used. The public might think that they knew what the words meant, but that would not be enough in a court where exactitude and certainty were required, said Ley. Correctly used legal language would guard against these ambiguities.

Speaking from the floor, Professor Susan Nash, the Dean of the City Law School, City University, raised the issue of whether universities should share the blame for obscure legal communication.

She said that the need for “appropriate language suited to the listener” was heavily emphasised at law schools, such as her own, but the complexity of law inevitably meant that some technical language would have to be used — although only when essential.

The question hanging over the debate was whether the French today were doing any better than in the 14th century. Pascal Chadenet, of Salans, the Paris law firm, said that while French contracts were usually shorter than their English equivalents, French legal discourse was at least as confusing and often more complex. “When you read a decision of the French court you often don’t understand the question, let alone the answer,” he said.

Leon Pickering and Saad Butt, both law students, summarised the arguments, followed by Lord Justice Jacob, who, in his guidance to the audience, said: “In the courts one only saw the pathology of the law, not the physiology.” The point went home. The vote revealed that the audience had changed its mind and soundly rejected the motion.

The French did away with Latin themselves, according to the Ordinance of Villers Cotterêts in 1539, which made Parisian French the sole legal language, although not necessarily the sole language of the country (cf. lingua franca?!).  Stipulating:

"Nous voullons et ordonnons qu’ilz soient faictz et escrits si clerement qu’il n’y ait ne puisse avoir aucune ambiguïté ou incertitude, ni lieu à en demander interpretacion"

[We wish and command that [judicial acts] be made and written so clearly that there be neither ambiguity or uncertainty nor possibility of ambiguity or uncertainty, nor cause to ask interpretation thereof].  Humm, did this really work?!

Interestingly, more of my forensic anthropology students have studied 'Higher Latin' at school than my LLB students - nevertheless, my impromptu and ad hoc translations of actus reus and mens rea into the 'naught act' and the 'naughty thought' are sufficent to get the point across!  I haven't yet come up with a witty translation for res ipsa loquitur (although Hobhouse LJ states this is no more than a convenient Latin phrase) or res gestae, but answers on a comment/postcard please!

Blawg Review: On blogs and 'accidental' legal education (teach your children well...)

This week, Blawg Review #232 is hosted by Susan Cartier Liebel at Solo Practice University on World Teachers' Day. Held annually on October 5th since 1994, World Teachers' Day commemorates teachers’ organisations worldwide. Its aim is to mobilise support for teachers and to ensure that the needs of future generations will continue to be met by teachers.

For those who don't know, Blawg Review is carnival blog that is hosted by guest bloggers using their own blog site to provide content of a (usually specialist) theme.  It usually has a technology / IPR / alternative slant and, in the main, hosted by US bloggers.  There have been UK and Irish hosts in the past, most notably BabyBarrista (TimesOnline), CharonQC (Mike Semple Piggot), Cearta (Eoin O'Dell) and Lex Ferenda (Daithi MacSigthi).

This, it would appear, is the first blawg review to focus on legal education specifically, yet does so in a way that illustrates the 'Accidental Educator':

"Who is the accidental educator? In this case, the lawyer, regardless the myriad motivations for doing so, who shares his or her expertise that benefits many through the ever-expanding world of the internet. The tweeter who tweets one article that helps another find invaluable life-saving information and who continues to do so often and in random fashion. The lawyer who condemns in the court of public opinion a rule of law which is just plain wrong. But for this forum it might go unnoticed by the majority, unheard and unexplained. The opinionated who challenges you to rethink your position. The provocateur who baits others to engage in a much needed public debate. They are all educators if they make you think. They are all educators if they challenge your ideas, your biases, your beliefs. If they create and promote the conversation, they educate. You don’t have to agree, but you listen."

Susan then reviews and celebrates some of the blawgosphere's educators - again, mainly US but this does introduce the reader to further niches: bicycle law?

Last week, Colin Miller updated a list of US ‘legal educator’ blogs, following on from Daniel Solove‘s earlier census reports which were restrictedly solely to law professors.  It can be found on the Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) and downloaded here.

Whilst interesting to flick through, the organisation of this list is mainly by law school or blog title.  Some titles reflect the name of the blogger, such as Lessig Blog, or Brian Leiter's Law School Reports, others are plain subject titles such as the Mass Tort Litigation Blog, some might even be a collective effort from one particular institution: The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog.  Others, however, are less indicative of their content: Law Prof on the Loose!  What it does not do, is organise by field, subject or specialism – which might be of more use to those looking for a particular type of blog to read.

Miller does offer some stats on the (roughly) 60/40 male-to-female ratio for these bloggers, and that Harvard Law School leads the field with 23 bloggers on their faculty.  This does, as he observes, offer some “indication of where law schools stand in the blogosphere”, and it will be interesting to see if these observations change over time.  Interestingly, Harvard does not lead the table of ‘number of blogs on which educators at those schools post’.

In the light of Susan's comments on accidental educators, the authors of the blogs in the above list are clearly opining in one way or another, yet few comment on their approach to teaching.  Paul Maharg observed in his blog Zeugma that only one such blog focused on legal education as their primary theme: the Best Practices blog, maintained by Prof Mary Lynch and here are links to some of her recent posts:

So, what can we say about these legal bloggers?  Yes, they are giving an educational experience to the reader, but it is more than likely that the reader will be a fellow academic, a practicing lawyer,or other professional.  Less likely is that law students will read or engage with these blogs, other than perhaps blogs written by their own teaching staff. It might be interesting to consider whether bloggers are better at blogging an opinion or viewpoint than transmitting the same point whilst teaching a class.

Network Learning Hotseat Seminars

The Networked Learning Community will be holding their Seventh International Conference on Networked Learning in Aalborg, Denmark 3rd & 4th May 2010.  In the run-up to the conference, there are several online hotseats using discussion boards to facilitate a week-long debate by some of the leading thinkers in the field.   The first session is due to commence on 28th September 2009, with Caroline Haythornthwaite, a specialist in e-learning  from the University of Illinois.  The schedule is as follows:

• Caroline Haythornthwaite: Learning in Social Networks and Networked Learning – starting September 28th, 2009
• George Siemens and Steve Downes: Impact on Learning of Networked Technologies - starting October 26th, 2009
• Charalambos Vrasidas: Networked Learning and International Development - starting December 7th, 2009
• Grainne Conole: Theories and Methodologies for Research in Networked Learning - starting January 18th, 2010
• Gabriel Salomon and Rupert Wegerif: Globalisation and Interculturality in Networked Learning - starting February 15th, 2010
  And finally during March and April (dates to be announced) there will be hot seats hosted by the conference key note speakers:
• Yrjo Engstrom and Etienne Wenger.

The hot seats are free to attend. All you need to do is sign up at the conference community website and join the online hot seat debates. Social networking sites are becoming increasingly popular for academic conferences.  Last Year, LILAC09 took its first steps using a wiki as I discussed last year in this blog plost, whereas ALT-C used CrowdVine and LT2008 ran a Ning site to promote online social interactions.
In this particular instance, the Network are using the Jomsocial plugin for a Joomla community site to organise pre-conference events and  online discussion.  Typically, conferences have used such sites to facilitate rather than direct discussions, which can lead to very low, or very high uptake depending on the persons registered, their interests and motivation.  The use of 'hotseats' this year gives a bit of scaffolding to organise the discussions.  The conference guidelines for running a hotseat suggest that:

• The chair will present an introduction to the main topic of the seminar and its broader context and relevance to the networked learning conference.
• The chair of the seminar will bring together 2 or more discussants (co-presenters) who will lead a certain perspective on the seminar theme based on their own work/ research.
• The chair will moderate and organise the online seminar discussions.
• The chair is also responsible to bring the various discussion threads together and summarise the findings in relation to the theme of this seminar.

 So, hopefully the online events will not only facilitate and promote discussion, but also generate interest for the actual conference itself for those who can or cannot attend.

2009/10 Conferences

For those with a brand-new academic diary this summer, here are some dates for forthcoming conferences in 2009/10:

LILAC will be from 29-30 January 2010 in Warwick, with a submission deadline coming up very soon on 18 Sept 2009.  This conference will mark the 10th anniversary of the HEA's subject centre network.

The dates for the 25th annual BILETA conference are 29-30 March 2010, the week before Easter.  The University of Vienna are hosting the event in the Austrian capital.

The 45th ALT conference will also be the week before Easter from 29-31 March 2010 at Clare College, Cambridge and the SLSA will be in their 20th year with their conference in Bristol at the University of the West of England (30 March - 1 April) immediately before the Easter weekend, so it promises to be a busy Easter again!

All the law conferences seem to have some significant milestone in 2010, whether this be 10, 20, 25 or 45 years!

Later in the year, ALT-C is to be held on 7-9 September 2010 in Nottingham, shortly followed by SLS in Southampton (13-16 Sept), who already had their centenary conference recently in 2009.

As usual, the UKCLE diary contains many other events and has an RSS feed to keep you up to date.  Listed elow are 10 forthcoming events:

Annual review - who's been reading this blog!?

As term time approaches, I thought I'd take a quick look through the statistics available through Google Analytics and the Feedburner RSS feed for this blog.  The full analytics report is available here, but I'll make some comments in this post, and add some extra grpahs and images not in the automatically generated report.

Visitors

Over the year (1 Aug 08 - 31 Jul 09) there has been 1,881 visits with 3,169 page views coming from a staggering 77 countries, the bulk of which being from the UK, but representing all continents and a vast array of legal systems:

Those of you in the UK may well recognise you're own location in the map below if you're a regular, although I'm suspicious that not every visit is recorded accurately as Analytics uses the visitor IP address, which may well be registered in England, even though the user is in Wales or Northern Ireland etc.

    

Search engine arrivals are overwhelmingly from Google, and from people using Windows, Internet Explorer, with a T1 or DSL connection.  Unsurprisingly over 90% are java supported, yet with a variety of flash versions installed.




Pages

The most popular postings during the year are listed below.  They were all, save the second and the last, written within the review period, yet the most popular page is only 5 months old.

1    23 Apr 09 BILETA 2009 Conference
2    02 Apr 08 UKCLE E-learning Event Videocasts (previous year)
3    26 Nov 08 What McMaster did for medical training, can York do for legal education?
4    18 Feb 09 Legal Education and Technology II: An Annotated Bibliography
5    17 Sep 08 ABA Legal Technology Survey Report
6    21 Oct 08 Does(n't) science meet the law? And does law meet the scientists?!
7    06 Nov 08 Unsuitable Jurors v Unsuitable Students!
8    23 Jan 09 LILAC09: CSI meets Murder, she wrote!
9    23 Jan 09 LILAC09: Going ‘beyond text’, ‘out for a walk’ and ‘telling a couple of stories’
10  07 Nov 07 UKCLE's 1st e-learning seminar (previous year)

Our top referring sites for visitors arriving at Digital Directions are unsurprisingly UKCLE, Google (.co.uk), LILAC09 wiki (now archived) and Google (.com).  Less frequently used links come from a variety of other sites such blogs (cearta.ie, Terranova, and BPP college), other websites and even a few from Twitter!

The top keywords are mainly names, however Digital Directions does review a number of conference presentations, blog posts by other authors and reports/papers etc from individuals, so that is not surprising.  Other common terms are BILETA, Ardcalloch, GIKII, UKCLE, Second Life, LILAC etc, which pretty much represent the blog posts over the year.

RSS Feed

Elsewhere, Feedburner tells me that 46 people subscribe to the RSS feed, mainly using Google Reader:

Let's see how, or if, things change in the coming year.

The 'Hype Cycle' for education, 2009

According to today's Times Higher, Second Life is out as techies embrace cloud email as reported by Zoë Corbyn.

It would seem that Virtual worlds - such as Second Life - have passed their "peak of inflated expectations" and are now set to slide into the "trough of disillusionment" unless they happen to become obsolete before even decending into that valley of possible death.

Some interesting readers' comments already made on THES, but further analysis on Microblogging, Twitter and Hype Circles can be found on Jeffrey Mann's blog - within the Gartner IT advisory firm's website - the origin of the report.

The full forcast for current technologies is displayed below, and has aparently generated a bit of a twitter backlash, which is the next technology (as an example of microblogging) set to tip over the 'Peak of Inflated Expectations', but as Mann observes, everything must dip into this trough - the main issue is how long a technology must remain in the trough and whether it will weather the storm.

22 Tweets! Interviews with practicing lawyers who tweet...

I've just discovered Lance Godard's website 22 Tweets where he conducts real-time Twitter interviews with practicing lawyers who tweet.  There are 22 questions and answers each no longer than the standard 140 character tweet message.  Launched in March 2009, I've recently come across it as Glasgow solicitor, Brian Inkster, will be interviewed on the site tonight at 8pm (UK time) as the sixth lawyer (and second in the UK) to take part.

In July, Christopher J Sherliker founding partner of Silverman Sherliker LLP took part, and I note  his final reply:

22.   That’s a positive message. What advice do you have for people going to law school today?
        Learn web marketing skills. Do your own thing. Do something different.Take joy in service.  Love your clients, (even the mad ones!)

Many of the previous interviewees also seem to mention business or marketing skills as part of their 140 characters of advice.

You can follow the twitterview live this evening or at anytime afterwards at: www.twitterfall.com/22twts.