Digital Directions

UKCLE Daily News

Read all about it!

Twitter is great for short messages (140 characters or less), sharing urls, interesting links, images, etc, etc, but sometimes it would be nice to see more than a very short exerpt or have to follow the link to find out what its really all about - after all, how many abstracts of 140 words have you read that don't really sum up the actual paper?!

Welcome to paper.li, a new service that came out in March 2010 for absolutely anyone, whether a twitter user or not, that creates a newspaper style production:

"Twitter is currently a simple and fast way to point others to content of interest on the web. Twitter users do so millions of times a day, effectively giving their followers a glimpse of what they think others should see or read. Next to having followers, any Twitter thus follows others, generally a group of people they deem of interest and want to keep track of what they have to share. Any Twitter user is thus a kind of editor in chief, with the people they follow being trusted journalists. The sum of what is shared by them is thus a unique perspective of what is deemed of interest on the web on any given day. A bit like a newspaper.

Having a list of links that are being shared on a given day by a user and those he/she follows is not enough. We analyze all links for topic (Politics, science, technology...) using semantic text analysis tools, extract the content (text, video, images, pdf, ...) and rank them for probable pertinence. With all of that info we are then able to create a newspaper front page. If such quick scanning is not enough, you are also able to access a table view of all links shared in the last 24 hours by a user and those he/she follows."

As an example, the @HEA_UKCLE twitter feed follows over 300 other twitter users - they all tweet very interesting stuff but we can't always share it all with you.  Rather than re-tweeting the good bits, and still having the problems mentioned earlier of being restricted to 140 characters and no visual images, the UKCLE Daily is a collection of topics and content that paper.li has sorted and organised for us automatically:

But, there are downsides to using this type of automatically-generated-content gadgetry: where's the editorial control?  Here are the issues:

• Our account (@hea_ukcle) is the editor-in-chief - therefore all the accounts we follow, are our 'trusted journalists'.  Therefore, we need to make sure we trust the content they tweet about.
• Topics - will paper.li identify and organise the relevant topics that we want?  Education and #law are probably relevant, but really we want the nexus between the two.
• Likewise, 'probable pertinence' sounds highly technical, but also a little vague and dubious!  Surely paper.li needs to know what we would consider pertient, not what is popular or of interest to the world at large.
• Daily is quite frequent - twitter is all about the here-and-now - and whilst this provides a reasonable overview of the day's content

Perhaps some things for paper.li to consider:

• Would a weekly round-up be attractive?  A smaller list of accounts that are more trustworthy might not generate enough content for a daily newspaper.
• Can we augment the 'probable pertience'?  If I could delete one or two things from each daily newspaper, would the software be able to 'learn' from my choice of what not to include?
• How about defining what topics we would like for our Daily news?  That way I could keep out the interesting but less relevant 'Arts and Entertainment' section.

There is a greater degree of editorial control but restricting the Daily news to one of the twitter lists that an account holder has made.  As an example, I've created a paper from the twitter accounts of other HEA subject centres and other related higher education sources:

This version is less about law and legal education, but is quite neatly tailored towards higher education in the UK.  I've also see other users on twitter using this gadget, in particular John Harman's Law Daily from the Director of Media at the College of Law, and the IP and Technology Daily from Andres Guadamuz, aka TechnoLlama at Edinburgh University.

Perhaps we might see greater functionality from paper.li in the future, and a more robustly edited or less frequent newspaper might arise.  In the meantime, feel free to look at the UKCLE Daily, but please note that this is just a pretty way of showing you the content provided by people we follow on twitter:

No endorsement!

No editorial!

No control!

Re-Blogging & Re-Tweeting: Copyright Issues?

A few blogs that I read have recently made mention of copyright issues, including myself in a recent re-blog experience earlier this month in my 'New Realities of the Legal Academy' post.

I was singularly un-impressed with TypePad's re-blog function, yet carried on as I assumed I had implicit licence from the original blogger to reproduce their work... they had made that functionality available, so use it I did.

Lilian Edwards also caught my eye with a snappy post on PanGloss following a Keith Chegwin twitter incident that caused some debate and commentary on twitter regarding copyright for jokes and/or twitter posts:

"Jokes - and especially tweeted jokes - are often quite short, vaguely familiar variations on a theme, and don't look much like the public conception of a "literary work", which is the applicable category of copyright (for written down jokes anyway). But the law as usual is not as simple as ordinary common sense.

Copyright exists only in works which are "original literary works". But case law has set a very low bar on such protection. A "literary" work has been held to include a long list of extremely unexciting written-down "things", eg, exam papers, football coupon forms, and a large number of meaningless five letter words used as codes. Looking at rather short literary works, it is generally acknowledged, eg, that some particularly pithy headlines might well engage copyright, though slogans are more contested, and usually protected by trade mark. There is the famous Exxon case, Exxon Corp. v. Exxon Insurance Consultants International Ltd [1982] Ch. 119, in which the English court held one word was too short to be a literary work. But 140 characters is somewhat longer..."

I now feel at great pains to make sure I acknowledge all sources here, especially for this post!

Dinusha Mendis also gave a presentation at GIKII, but I don't see anything on their website, and only a paper-to-be-published note on her website.  Clearly academics are starting to look at the IPR implications of new technologies such as twitter.

More recently, David Hopkins brought up the subject of 'blogging plagiarism' at Don't Waste Your Time, following comments from Sue Waters at the EduBlogger back in March 2010, where the author's permission was the key concept that Sue was making - which as I mentioned above, is probably implicitly granted in the re-blog facility, where available.  But, where it is not available, Sue is making a very good point.  We should, however, keep in mind concepts such as freedom of speech and of the press to report when dealing with quotes, minor exerpts etc, yet still uphold the moral netiquette of seeking permission for longer, more substantial or entire repetition of content.

David did bring to my attention the neat little functionality tool Tynt that can be added to a blog, which will then mark-up any 'use' of that blog's content elsewhere.  David descibes it better and in more detail on his blog!

I've added this as a widget to the Digital Directions blog - not that I'm too concerned as you'll notice that the blog already has a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License, but this would ensure the 'attribution' aspect of the licence is applied for those who wish to make use of it.

Although, as Tynt's FAQs states, the user can simply delete the 'suggested' attribution after they have cut and paste, but at least the effortless attribution and weblinks are created automatically and a moral choice is to be made.

As we move into the new academic year, we should perhaps think about how our students use blogs and other 'unconventional' sources of information - I spoke about this at the last LILAC conference and really need to get the paper written up properly, but the slides are available on slideshare and one or two blogs get a mention - attributed of course!

The gist of my presentation was that many academics shun the use of internet sites and resources in student essays - and quite often rightly so.  After all, we wouldn't cite wikipedia or westlaw as a source.  I examined two year's worth of final year student essays to look for proper bona fide references to blogs run by academics or practitioners that contained valid referenceable commentary that would not be found elsewhere - if these were not referenced by the student, then the charge of plagiarism (hence the copyright issue) could be raised.

Mapping Online Legal Education Communities

As a tribute to XKCD’s ‘Map of Online Communities’, Flowtown decided to re-create their own, updated version of this map. The numbers are taken to reflect many new developments in the social networking communities, including Facebook surpassing Myspace as the preeminent online community.

Practising lawyers, I would suggest, are currently navigating their flotilla in a decisive and fashion between the Twitter peninsula (wisely avoiding the island of FourSquare, but occasionally making treks into the Facebook mainland); making occasional stop-offs at various archipegalos and isles of apps that spew from the iPhone volcano; observing the wild and IPR infested Wikimedia territories from a respectable distance; as they head for the respectable and sheltered bays of LinkedIn where they may even gather offerings from the nearby Google empire, cragged with media mountain ranges!

Academics, law schools and universities are perhaps less confident or clear in their navigation, often floundering in the sea of desperation as they attempt to build colonies in YouTube; establish contact with their students in the distant lands of Facebook and Twitter; maintain some out-posts in Flickr and Blogspot; and grow increasingly concerned about storms brewing in the sea of personal information.

Far safer, perhaps, is the parallel universe of virtual learning environments where the United Nations of Moodle and the Blackboard - WebCT Empire battle for VLE supremacy.

Guided somewhat by the 2010 Horizons Report and the Hype Cycle for Legal Education, I now present a somewhat cruder Atlas for Legal Education!  Any additions or suggestions are most welcome!

#FollowFriday - USA Theme

This week, #FollowFriday features some US law schools as they prepare for their new intake for the 2010/11 academic session.  Several law schools that our twitter account @HEA_UKCLE follow are currently gearing up for students starting mid-August - see the full list of the American law schools we follow.

The following tweets this week stood out as worthy mentions, either for current news or some aspect of legal education or scholarship, and therefore receive an entry in this week's #ff:

tjsl Aug 05, 11:44pm Thomas Jefferson School of Law

Our faculty is prolific in its scholarship and their work is among the most downloaded on the Internet: http://tinyurl.com/2dwvd69

UChicagoLaw Aug 05, 9:09pm University of Chicago Law School

Congrats to former prof Elena Kagan, just confirmed by Senate to SCOTUS; one of her former students reminisces here: http://bit.ly/cEmA7s

UVALaw Aug 04, 4:09pm University of Virginia Law School

In the News: Neil Duxbury Elected to the British Academy http://bit.ly/9DXata

sjquinney Aug 03, 10:38pm SJ Quinney College of Law, University of Utah

Attorney-Student Mentoring Program Kicks Off August 19 http://bit.ly/brraHo

NCCULAW Aug 03, 9:51pm North Carolina Central University School of Law

NCCU Law unveils its Virtual Classroom w/ much fanfare. Face 2 Face delivery of legal education -from any distance. Welcome to the future. (see: http://web.nccu.edu/law/news/2010%20-%20July/virtual_classrm.html)

"The New Realities of the Legal Academy"

The title of this post is the title of this intriguing new paper by Larry Solum available via SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

This short paper is the Foreword to Brannon P. Denning, Marcia L. McCormick, and Jeffrey M. Lipshaw, Becoming a Law Professor: A Candidate's Guide, American Bar Association, Forthcoming.

One of the great virtues of Denning, McCormick and Lipshaw’s guide is that it reflects the changing nature and new realities of the legal academy.  Not so many years ago, entry into the elite legal academy was mostly a function of two things -- credentials and connections. The ideal candidate graduated near the top of the class at a top-five law school, held an important editorial position on law review, clerked for a Supreme Court Justice, and practiced for a few years at an elite firm or government agency in New York or Washington.  Credentials like these almost guaranteed a job at a very respectable law school, but the very best jobs went to those with connections -- the few who were held in high esteem by the elite network of very successful legal academics and their friends in the bar and on the bench. The not-so-elite legal academy operated by a similar set of rules.  Regional law schools were populated by a mix of graduates from elite schools and the top graduates of local schools, clerks of respected local judges, and alumni of elite law firms in the neighborhood.  In what we now call the "bad old days," it was very difficult indeed for someone to become a law professor without glowing credentials and the right connections.

via lsi.typepad.com

Typepad Re-Blog

This is my first attempt at a 're-blog' post, and I was expecting something a bit more exciting!  There is a link (above) to the Law School Innovation blog where I read this post, but the re-blog function doesn't make this original ownership particularly obvious!

Review

The paper makes some interesting points regarding elitism, "the bad old days" and the changing landscape of how American law professors are hired.

The table of contents for the full book - Becoming a Law Professor: A Candidate’s Guide - is also available on SSRN (http://ssrn.com/abstract=1650713) and will be published by the American Bar Association.

The book covers a range of issues in eight, occasionally witty-named, chapters:

Chapter 1. What Do Law Professors Do All Day?
Chapter 2. Where Do Law Professors Come From?
Chapter 3. Pleased to Meat You, Hope You Guess My Name: Preparing For (and
Surviving) the AALS Faculty Recruitment Conference
Chapter 4. The On-Campus Interview
Chapter 5. Which One of These Is Not Like the Others? Advice for
Nontraditional Faculty Candidates
Chapter 6. Offer and Acceptance: Handling Job Offers
Chapter 7. Now What? Things to Do Before You Teach Your First Class
Chapter 8. Converting an Unsuccessful Job Search into Future Opportunities

I don't seem able to find the title on the ABA's bookstore, but I did see a new title Social Media for Lawyers: The Next Frontier that looked interesting and a forthcoming Little Book of Coffee Law!

Annual review 2010 - who's been reading this blog!?

Last year's Annual Review of the Digital Directions blog looked at the statistics available through Google Analytics and the Feedburner RSS feed for this blog.  As usual, the full Analytics Report is available here, but I'll make some comments in this post, and add some extra graphs and images not in the automatically generated report.

Visitors

Over the year 1 Aug 09 - 31 Jul 10 (with comparisons to last year in brackets) there has been 2,078 visits (+10.01%) with 3,264 page views (+2.64%) coming from 80 different countries (77 last year), the bulk of which being from the UK, but still representing all of the continent and sub-continent regions and a vast array of legal systems:

 

Our overall increase in visitors comes from the international readership:

Continent             Change  Main Reasons
Northern Europe    -11.05%  A UK drop, but an Ireland increase
Northern America   45.29%  Large increase for both USA and Canada
Southern Asia       110.91%  Significant increase for India and Pakistan
Western Europe      63.08%  Increase from Netherlands, Austria, France and Switzerland
Australia & NZ        27.63%  A drop in New Zealand, but an increase in Australia
Southern Europe     13.16%  A drop from Greece but increases for Spain, Portugal and Italy
Eastern Asia           95.45%  A drop from Japan but large increases elsewhere (Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, China and Mongolia)
South America        59.09%  A big increase for Brazil
South-Eastern Asia 24.00%  A drop from Malaysia but increases elsewhere (Thailand, Phillipines, Singapore, Indonesia and Cambodia)
Eastern Europe      -10.34%  A drop in Romania, but an increase in Poland

Although UK traffic in general has gone down(-12.57%), the number of cities remains more or less the same at 140 (-2.78%), although I'm still 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.  The top 20 cities are:

Traffic Sources

Search engine arrivals are still 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.

Our top referring sites for visitors arriving at Digital Directions are UKCLE, GoogleBlogSpot, home.comcast.net/~richards1000/, learningcircuits.blogspot.com, and lilac10.wetpaint.com.  Less frequently used links come from a variety of other sites such blogs (cearta.ie, Terranova, and BPP college), other websites including Twitter (all from @HEA_UKCLE or @m_bro) and for the first time, FaceBook!

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.

Pages

The most popular postings viewed during the year are listed below.  They were all, apart from number 8, written within the review period: as were last years (bar 2) which shows that blogs are treated more like news than archived information sources.

1    20 Aug 09 The 'Hype Cycle' for education, 2009 *
2    11 Nov 09 Free US caselaw... just google it! *
3    29 Jan 10 LILAC10 - Student Feedback, E-bay style *
4    03 Nov 09 The value of social media
5    26 Nov 09 LILACnet - wiki and social networking site for LILAC 2010 Conference
6    29 Mar 10 BILETA 2010 - Re-entering the e-conveyancing Matrix
7    11 Aug 09 22 Tweets! Interviews with practicing lawyers who tweet...
8    23 Jan 09 LILAC09: Project Panacea – Yes Minister meets Fantasy Football!(previous year) *
9    12 Nov 09 Pro Bono Week, Strathclyde's Law Clinic and Legal Education
10  07 Oct 09 Blawg Review: On blogs and 'accidental' legal education (teach your children well...)

However, only 4 of these entries are in the all-time top-10 posts made since the blog started in May 2008 (shown with *).

RSS Feed

Elsewhere, Feedburner tells me that 56 people subscribe to the RSS feed, mainly using Google Reader:

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