Digital Directions

The End of Lawyers?

Apologies for being late on this one (I blame Christmas and end-of-semester essays), but it does rather help to make the point..!

The other week, Andrew Marr's Start the Week programme on Radio 4 featured Richard Susskind. The podcast could be downloaded for one week following the broadcast as per the BBC's policy on archiving. I'd already copied the file to my hard drive to listen to later, but this doesn't help blog readers who've already missed the boat, so to speak.

It is available on the list of previous STW programmes (for about 6 months it would seem) so it can still be downloaded as I write this post, but it depends on when you read this.  I also requested one of our library services (The Spoken Word is a JISC funded project) to archive a copy in their respository should anyone wish to use or relect on it in the future.  In sum, the programme considers:

"in this period of financial difficulty, can we afford lawyers? RICHARD SUSSKIND thinks that the legal services have not previously had enough pressure on them to keep up with technology and have become worryingly inefficient. He argues that by harnessing Web 2.0 technologies lawyers will become cheaper, thereby enabling justice to be available to more people. The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services is published by Oxford University Press and Richard Susskind will be giving a lecture on 2 December at 4.00pm, Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre, Faculty of Law, University of Oxford."

The remainder of the programme features Chris Bishop and John Dupre who comment on DNA in particular.  Returning to Susskind, Nick Holmes gives a useful overview of his latest book - in particular how lawyers conduct their business and how improved access to justice can be achieved.  If it's on your christmas reading list, please comment here!

I've also been subscribed to Radio 4's Law in Action series (although the programme is currently taking a winter break until January 2009) and the podcasts pose a similar life-span issue if you don't download them immediately, or automatically... and then they are only for personal use. I've found several to be useful for teaching with topics such as paternity, witness memory and forensics covered in the recent past, but there is no archive that I can see with the actual audio content.  Another job for the Spoken Word services then!

To twitter to who?!

Seeing as the last two posts mention twitter, in some way or another, and several blogs are making mention of this social networking tool (and it is aimed at social, not professional networks) I thought some more comments were worthwhile.

As Nick Holmes reports in BinaryLaw, twitter can have some legal usage, citing Bob Ambrogi with his sixteen reasons to tweet for lawyers.  It has obvious uses for keeping up-to-date, not only with colleagues and associates, but also with services and government.  The courts in Philadelphia have tweets relating to news and recent decisions, but these are all usually available as email, RSS alerts or plain old html news sites.  Even the US government tweets according to one twitter fan!

I'm not sure if I'd want to be twittering to my students (I don't see the point and I'd rather be more formal in an email or blog post) and I'm sure I'd rather not receive their tweets either.  As tweets are much less formal they have the associated risks of informality and inappropriate contents as the Running Librarian observes:

Follower X – What a lovely day I’m thinking about eating a cream puff
Follower Y – Oy oy I fancy a bit of your cream puff
Follower X – Oh you naughty boy
Follower Z – You promised that cream puff to me
Follower X – We can share
Follower Y – Can I watch?

Holmes makes the distinction between blogging (as a publishing tool) and tweeting (conversation and networking) which would suggest that tweeting would work well for students to support themselves in groups, but I'm still not sure I'd want to read them:

Student X – I'm really struggling with this group assignment
Student Y – oh, I'm in the library, what's up?
Student X – Looking for Roe v Wade
Student Z – I thought I was researching that case?
Student X – We can share
Student Y – Can I help?

Perhaps in a PDP or pastoral context, summer law firm placement or during the course of a dissertation the value of twitter could be envisaged as having some staff-student benefit.  CharonQC provides an overview of some legal twitterers for those interested in what the academics and practitioners have to say.

LILAC gets WIKI with it!

The forthcoming LILAC 09 conference is getting very social and sophisticated with a wiki for use by both presenters and attendees!  Their wiki site already has details of the papers which can be commented upon in advance and each speaker will have their own wiki page to develop and manage.

For the wiki novice (or complete beginner), there is a handy User Guide to get you started; and if you're a Presenter - here's how you can add tags, new pages and customise your profile.

Of course, blogs and wikis aren't new for conferences - recently Tony Carrer posted on his blog about Conference Wikis, and has some good examples on his blog if you're interested to see how well they can work.

The ALT-C 2006 had a conference wiki that didn't really take off, although one particular ALT-C 2008 workshop organised a wiki for a Digital Divide Slam - for those (including me) who don't know what a 'slam' is:

A slam is a brief performance piece/ creative work that captures people's experience of the digital divide. The vivid expression of your ideas and the impact of your performance is more important than sophisticated use of technology. We need to have the performance captured digitally because we can't all be in the same place.
Your slam can include text or audio narrative or poems, drawings or cartoons, song, dance, mime. We are delighted to accept anything that you can capture in digital media and publish or link to from this Wiki, and that someone can view within a reasonable time, typically 1-3 minutes.

Some conferences, such as Hertfordshire's Blended Learning Conference 2008 have used a Ning social networking site for both pre and post discussions of events.  The Learning Technologies 2008 Ning Site is open for all to acess, and seems to be a good example of how Ning can be used.  A quick search indicates that there could be approx 1,400 conference sites in existence on Ning.  The ALT-C 2008 conference used CrowdVine, which is a similar idea that can be viewed here and even some YouTube clips were generated of the Gala Dinner.

The Cetis 2008 conference also had a wiki, but seemed to use Twitter more effectively on the day as shown by their Twitter Account and their Tweme (twemes are twitter messages from anyone who adds a particular tag to their twitterings).  Likewise, ReLIVE08 twittered with delicious and flickr built-in.