Digital Directions

Hype Cycle for Education 2010

Last year, I reported on the 'Hype Cycle for Education 2009' from Gartner IT, which has been the most viewed page from this blog!

This year, the Hype Cycle for Education, 26 July 2010 states:

"The priority for education institutions in 2010 is to continue balancing organizational efficiency with personal productivity. IT is driving change in many ways: first and foremost by the proliferation of delivery mechanisms that threaten to bypass the CIO. CIOs need new tools to stay in control."

So, what's new in Education for 2010?  Open Source is mentioned at just about all stages of the cycle: open source portals and e-learning applications are climbing the slope towards the plateau.  Likewise, social media, e-portfolios and wikis are climbing the slope too.  Blogs, on the otherhand, have entered the plateau, so expect to see more solid use of those if the future.

Sliding into the trough are: e-textbooks, microblogging, virtual worlds, e-learning repositories and mashups.  At the peak is mobile learning and other low-midrange handsets.

Additionally, the Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2 August 2010 notes that:

"High-impact technologies at the Peak of Inflated Expectations during 2010 include private cloud computing, augmented reality, media tablets (such as the iPad), wireless power, 3D flat-panel TVs and displays, and activity streams."

A pdf presentation from the report's author, Jackie Fenn, describes the 2010 hype cycle and notes some of the significant changes.  On the up, from trigger to inflated peak, is augmented reality (AR) - which seems set to replace Second Life and other such virtual worlds.  The clear benefit of AR is that an entire new world does not need to be re-created - just use the real one and superimpose anything new that you need!

Earlier this year, I saw an excellent presentation by Minhua Eunice Ma from the University of Derby on Virtual Reality and 3D Animation in Forensic Visualisation.  This example of the use of AR for forensics can be expanded into several areas of legal education where students can undertake experiential learning with more 'reality' than is possible with current virtual reality (VR) software which, along with the other public virtual worlds are still languishing in the trough of disillusionment with 5-10 years to wait until mainstream adoption.

Microblogging, which includes Twitter, continues along the cycle towards mainstream adoption within 2/3 years.  It has not, however, passed through the trough so it still has some inflated expectations that need to die out.

Of the 100 or so Hype Cycle Reports from Gartner, one of the six new additions for 2010 includes Business Use of Social Technology:

"This Hype Cycle complements the "Hype Cycle for Social Software, 2010" and was initiated to provide our perspective on the accelerating adoption of social technologies for specific business functions and within selected industries. As reflected in the clustering of technology profiles in the early stages of this Hype Cycle, the business use of social technologies is just emerging. We expect adoption to accelerate and to expand across business functions and industries. Even where overt social-media initiatives are not planned, examination of social technologies will become an imperative where key business participants (such as employees, customers, constituents and partners) engage in social interactions outside of structured or sanctioned enterprise technology solutions."

This, of course, has relevance for law firms, their delivery of services or advertising through social media.  Many law firms have a subject area blog and several law firms are using twitter to communicate news, ideas and thoughts to others in the legal community and the world at large.  I would argue that law firms are further along than 'emerging' into business use, but agree that 'imperative' use is some distance away.  I read somewhere on the Gartner site that potential customers are more likely to look for reviews and advice on social networking sites before purchasing... this, then, may well extend to include both individual and commercial clients looking for legal services in the not too distant future.

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!

Open Educational Resources - Simulation Learning

UKCLE have a project that is part of the Higher Education Academy/JISC Open Educational Resources Programme: SimShare.

3 workshops across the UK are scheduled, and the first took place recently in Cardiff.  Still to come are York (21 April) and Edinburgh (19 May) and places are still available.

The workshops aim to offer and experience where you will:

• Learn about OER and how you can be a part of it.
• Have access to a wealth of free resources for teaching.
• Have help in getting started in using simulation as a form of teaching, learning and assessment.
• Practise assembling a simulation on paper and have access to online resources to help you do this.
• Know how to download and upload resources to our OER website.

The slides from the workshop are available online and can be clicked through below.

Cardiff OER slides

View more presentations from Paul Maharg.

Paul Maharg has also blogged about this event at Zeugma and you might also be interested the SimShare blog at http://ukclesimoer.edublogs.org.

Information Snacking

The 'Big Question' for last month from Tony Carrer's blog was this:

"Instruction in an Information Snacking Culture?"  There are a lot of aspects to this question:

• Has there really been a shift? Are people changing their information consumption? Are they really snacking more?
• Do we need to think about instruction differently? Is it a matter of better design so that people are engaged beyond a snack?
• Is this a problem? I feel like it's harder to get a deep conversation going, especially in a twitter world. But maybe that's me. How can we effectively work and learn in an information snacking world?

I'd like to tackle the question with legal education in mind, and consider how students (or at least mine in particular) snack on information, and where they get their snacks from.  This links a little to my LILAC presentation on web2.0 and unconventional sources last month when I considered how both staff and students are equipped to evaluate the value of blogs as possible reference sources for essays and publications.

In relation to the first part, I'm not sure there has been a shift, but perhaps things are shifting.  My rough-and-ready review of student essay reference material found only a few 'unconventional sources' but this question targets how students find the material irrespective of what it actually is.

However, I do think there is an issue regarding the quality of the snack - the sat-fat and cholesterol-rich Google results (or even a basic Westlaw / Lexis search) need to be sifted through to find the leaner and more healthy morsels within.  My other problem is the sheer vastness of information available - journals and cases from every jurisdiction you can think of, and more from others you can't even think of.

As for the second part, I tend to agree with one of the comments from Bill that the hook or 'attention grabber' is more important than the bit-sized chunk that is presented - so, if the bait looks attractive, then the content will be digested irrespective of whether it is only several lines or more substantial at several pages.

Lastly, is it a problem? For me - yes!  I've nearly 400 unread items in my RSSaggregator that have been piling up since the Christmas break, most of which need to be skimmed and probably discarded, but there may be one or two healthy snacks to keep me going... that's if I get around to skimming them all.  Is it a problem for students?  I tend to think not... I've been providing RSS feeds within my VLE site from blogs and other sources of news, so I like to think that I'm providing a healthy diet for them.  The deep conversations are still emerging in the seminar room, occasionally provoked by one of these snacks.  What is nice is that the students are informing me of recent developments I hadn't yet seen, yet I placed the link there (in their minds)!

Betsy McKenzie has recently posted something on the Out of the Jungle blog about "Google Making Us Stupid?" but I'll digest and blog about that some other time...

The 's-mode' of legal education

Digital Directions has been rather quiet over the winter vacation - but then so has news on legal education!

A colleague brought my attention to an article in The Times Online yesterday, by Richard Susskind.  He describes the 's-mode' of learning where 's' stands for supervised (yet another to be added to the list of e- and m- learning) that is used in a some law schools.  On balance, he concludes:

Sceptics protest. They say that a law lecture should be a communal event at which students are professionally socialised. It would be regrettable, of course, if law students were never to experience the thrill of assembling with peers in a fine hall and listening to an outstanding live performance. But we should not preserve the old ways in the delusion that such performances are commonplace. Unless the lecture is genuinely outstanding (a rarity, students say), the convenience and flexibility of e-learning will trump the benefits of the communal learning experience.

Conventional lectures can be, and indeed are, replaced by electronic materials, but the hardware, software skills, effort and expense required often prevents some law schools from taking full advantage of the technologies available.

The article also links to Susskind's 5 year review of e-learning in The College of Law, which further elaborates on s-learning.  Here, technology is used to move away from the typical one-to-many style of teaching that the traditional classroom offers, and is more akin to the one-to-one style tutoring that is commonly associated with Oxbridge.

It is interesting to note that the student feedback tended to be less positive from students who have no previous direct experience of studying under the s-mode.  This may suggest then, that Susskind's examples of BPP, College of Law and GGSL may benefit from increased use of s-learning blended into the undergraduate curriculum of other law schools.  Indeed, law firms may adopt s-mode for trainee and in-house CPD purposes, increasing further the need for undergraduate providers to adopt, adapt or even pioneer s-mode so that students are both capable and comfortable in this mode of study, yet not disadvantaged by graduates from other institutions who may have a head-start in this style of learning.

Susskind concludes his review with recommended enhancements, which include the use of synchronous communication modes such as skype, other messenger services, or even, dare I add, face to face!

LILACnet - wiki and social networking site for LILAC 2010 Conference

A guest post from Ann Priestley, consultant for UKCLE, and general technical-whizz!

UKCLE has just launched LILACnet (http://lilac10.wetpaint.com/), a combined wiki and social network for LILAC10 (http://www.ukcle.ac.uk/newsevents/lilac/index.html), the forthcoming UKCLE conference at the end of January. We have added the 40 plus abstracts for the papers which will be presented at the conference and invited presenters to add their papers or any other materials as they wish. All the slides from the conference will be added to UKCLE's slidespace (http://www.slideshare.net/ukcleslidespace).

So far, much the same as for LILAC 2009. What is different this time is that LILACnet is geared towards comment and discussion. LILACnet members can create a profile page and communicate with other members, either one to one or by contributing to a discussion. They can look for members who perform the same role as themselves, who are involved in similar projects or who simply have common interests. Networking is frequently highlighted in feedback as one of the conference highlights, and we hope that law teachers will take to an online network with as much enthusiasm as they do to F2F networking at the
conference every January.

There is anecdotal evidence that law teachers are using the big social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn - or at least if I run my address book against these services a lot of names come up!, but how are they using them, and what role could UKCLE play? Niche services like Academia.edu perhaps offer more value to academics - see Michael's profile (http://gcal.academia.edu/MichaelBromby), but it seems to be more institution than discipline focused.

A recent post on the Nature Network (http://network.nature.com/people/franknorman/blog/2009/10/30/social-networks-are-they-useful-or-pointless) asked Social networks: are they useful or pointless? At the heart of the question is how they can become part of an academic's everyday routines - but the same questions were asked regarding email a few years ago, and who can do without emal now?

We hope that LILACnet will act as a small pilot and offer some more evidence on how law teachers could use social networks. LILACnet is geared to the conference life cycle, however anyone is welcome to join in, so please do sign up!

Ann Priestley

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.

Digital Britain and Web 2.0 for research/teaching

I wasn't planning on mentioning the Digital Britain report released earlier this week - it's rather lengthy, uninteresting from the legal education perspective, and many other commentators have covered the interesting aspects of creative technologies, IPR and other rights management (see TechnoLlama, panGloss, Charles Arthur, Chris Marsden, and TorrentFreak), and covered them well.

However, the National Centre for e-Social Science are "investigating the extent to which Web 2.0 tools represent useful means of communicating, sharing and disseminating research ideas and outputs for researchers across different disciplines, with a view to exploring implications for the future of scholarly communications".  And I thought this kind of fitted with the idea that new technologies are pervasive within the education system and that we might expect newer (and especially younger) researchers to be embracing such web 2.0 tools, more so as time goes on.

"The study is aimed at:

(i) Informing researchers, institutions and funders on the effectiveness of these new resources as means of communicating, sharing and disseminating research ideas and outputs
(ii) Advising research institutions and funders about the possible implications of the use of these resources for the recognition and reward of research outputs
(iii) Providing librarians, information professionals and publishers with a view about how they might develop their roles in the scholarly communications process in order to complement the evolution of new means of sharing information in research communities.

To what extent are Web 2.0 tools are being adopted as a scholarly tool in different institutions and departments across the UK, in different subject fields and disciplines, and at different stages of the scholarly communications process?

• -Which tools are being used, for what scholarly purposes and to what degree?
• -What are the demographic characteristics of researchers who use these tools?
• -What factors influence researchers to adopt and use Web 2.0 tools?
• -Are there specific skills and training needs relevant to the adoption of Web 2.0 resources by researchers?
• -Is there evidence that Web 2.0 tools are changing researchers' behaviour in significant ways?
• -How do perceptions about quality, scholarly merit or permanence of content affect researchers' use of Web 2.0?
• -Is there evidence of impact on perceptions and practices of how research can be peer reviewed?
• -What are the ethical and legal implications of disseminating information via Web 2.0, with regard to ownership of information, etc?
  
• -What is the relationship between Web 2.0 resources and established search and discovery services?"

Prompted by the chance to win a new i-pod touch, I completed their survey!

Whilst the Digital Britain report concentrates mainly on the HEI provisions for supporting the development of a digital nation (i.e. graduates in ICT areas - see Chapter 6: Research, Education and Skills for Digital Britain), little is mentioned about the general use of web 2.0 tools within HEI - although there is some mention of embedding skills at primary and secondary level education.

I look forward to seeing some of the data generated from the NCeSS survey, particularly as some of the earlier questions asked about subject areas (and the relevant RAE 2008 subject codes) which might give some interesting comparisons not only for the research and teaching community, but regarding usage within disciplines (such as law) as well.