Digital Directions

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.

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!

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.

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!

Unsuitable Jurors v Unsuitable Students!

Frances Gibb in the Times Online reports that the 'internet generation' is not used to listening for long periods and therefore could be unsuitable as jurors, according to the Lord Chief Justice.

Lord Judge said that many young people are “technically proficient” and obtain “much information from the internet”.  That meant that they were “not listening, they are reading,” he said in a lecture to the University of Hertfordshire.  “One potential problem is whether, learning as they do in this way, they will be accustomed, as we were, to listening for prolonged periods.”

Does this relate to students too?!  I'd be more than happy if my students would make their own enquiries and read around the subject matter addressed in lectures and seminars - but clearly this would be undesirable for jurors to be googling away on their blackberries in the privacy of the jury room or anywhere else for that matter!

Earlier this year, Dennis Coxe had an interesting blog post entitled "Let me tell you about...Excuse me, what were you saying?" about the general public's attention span - and if you're still reading this post, well done, and keep going!

According to Killian & Company, we're all starting to lose interest, and perhaps our students can be added, along with jurors, to the low-attentive YouTube audience at the bottom of this graph.  Perhaps the Courts are still in the Dickensian era (despite recent attempts to modernise court dress), and rather than spin out a prosecution case over three days, we should have a blog post from the CPS where the defence can comment and reply!

But on a serious note, I was in court a couple of weeks ago and a joint memorandum was submitted to the jury in relation to the evidence of a fire arms expert.  I would have liked to hear the evidence (as I was sat in the public gallery), but I wondered if the jury would take more interest in the written submission than they would if it was done orally?  Likewise, I wonder if my students would prefer a reading list, podcast and the occasional session for Q&A?!?

25 Nov - Follow-up: it seems that a juror at Burnley Crown Court has been discussing details of a trial on FaceBook - see The Guardian and The telegraph for details - it seems she posted a poll to ask friends how she should vote as she couldn't decide either way!