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.

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.

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.

Let’s all blog (and bring down a government)!

Jaspal Kaur gave an interesting presentation within the ‘Internet Content’ stream, just before lunch.  Her PhD research at Aberystwyth is looking at citizen written media and ‘amateur’ investigative journalism conducted through the use of blogs and other social networking tools in Malaysia.  This country has a highly regulated and controlled official media – it also has a good level of information technology infrastructure: 3G and broadband are increasingly common in households.  The denial of the 2/3 majority government in the March 2008 elections was widely reported as caused by an increase in the use of new media and ‘cyberdissidents’ who spoke out against the previous government and who carried increasing credence.

Some of the resources mentioned by Jaspal might well be useful for academic blogs – the New York blog Huffington Post promotes citizen written blogs, and Reporters Without Borders is almost a handbook for blogging and avoiding censorship (maybe not quite what Digital Directions needs), but nevertheless a useful resource for hints and tips on style, content, how to target your audience etc.

There appears to be a large number of citizens using new media in Malaysia.  Over 500 thousand use LiveJournal within a population of 27 million.  Their website illustrates that just short of 20 million LiveJournal accounts have been created since 1999, although many will be unused.

Legal Blogs - where is the profession blogging?!

This week, the Times reports on Legal blogs: isn’t it time British lawyers staked their claim in the blogosphere? which illustrates the apparent 'lack' of blogs maintained by professional lawyers in practice.

Some pros and cons are listed (along with some useful links to several blogs) but it appears that blogs don't necessarily bring in work, but it gives a good corporate image of success, knowledge and expertise.

Recently, Google Reader pointed me in the direction of the Inner Temple Library blog as a 'Recommended Feed' - this is a bountiful one-stop-shop for a whole array of legal news: http://innertemplelibrary.wordpress.com/ with daily, of not hourly updates.

THE BEST OF THE BLOGS (According to the TimesOnline):

Ipkat (www.ipkat.com): excellent source of information on all things IP

The Magistrate’s Blog (http://thelawwestofealingbroadway.blogspot.com/): musings from a JP

Naked Law (http://www.nakedlaw.typepad.com/): one of the best

Baby Barista (http://timesonline.typepad.com/baby_barista/)

Human Law Mediation (http://humanlaw.typepad.com/): very informative resource on mediation

Bloody Relations (http://bloody relations.blogspot.com/): “Where there’s a relative there’s a bloody good argument to be had,” says Jacqui Gilliat’s family law blog. We’re not arguing

GeekLawyer (http://blog.geeklawyer.org/): ranting by anonymous scribe

Law and Tax (http://robertnewey.typepad.co.uk/law_and_tax/): it’s good. Honest

Laurence Kaye on Digital Media Law (http://laurencekaye.typepad. com/laurence_kayes_blog/): always insightful IP comment

Interestingly, most of these blogs (and many other law blogs) are IP, IT or technology-slanted blogs.

Making e-learning more engaging?

Most Universities in the UK are now experimenting with the use of social networking tools in teaching and learning. The communication, knowledge sharing and collaborative capabilities of such systems make them a potentially powerful means to facilitate informal learning by students and to invigorate the provision of higher forms of learning.

For years now the ideal of student centred learning in Universities has become increasingly difficult to deliver across the board as student numbers have climbed, diversity of student population has broadened and the unit of resource has declined. Despite the difficulties in achieving what we would like and know is right, universities generally continue to fail to see or exploit the opportunities afforded by online technologies to change the nature of delivery from ‘sage on the stage’ to ‘guide on the side’ and in so doing rely on the student doing more with their peers. Whilst the past 5 years or so have witnessed a massive uploading of ‘stuff’ into ‘VLE vaults’ very few staff have been brave enough to shake the tree and get their students out of attempts at knowledge absorption (aka classroom boredom) and into knowledge creation (aka being more responsible for what you learn and showing how you can contribute). Although there are a number of ‘islands’ of exemplary activity in most Universities that demonstrate enhancement of learning through technology use, and a monumental mountain of published evidence as to the efficacy of a wide range of technology based approaches, by and large staff stick to what they are comfortable with. Students on the other hand are very comfortable generally with new(er) technology and they may soon start voting with their feet if institutions continue to underwhelm them with the degree to which they exploit ICT.

A system like Connect, being piloted at the University of Westminster and which uses Elgg (which is a kind of social networking systems that exploits bits of Web 2.0), puts much greater control into the hands of a student who wants to discuss their work with students across subject areas. They don’t have to ask their tutor to set up a discussion forum for them - they can do it themselves and the community they create is not (as is the case with a VLE like Blackboard) restricted to their immediate classmates.

I believe that Connect or a system like it, could in the future revolutionise the way our students, and we as staff, work together. It is quite likely that social networking systems will work alongside a VLE like Blackboard with each system having very different purposes but complementing one another to provide an effective and more personal online learning environment.

The University of Brighton are currently leading in the UK on the use of a social networking systems alongside their VLE. Attached to this blog post is a diagram (shamelessly based on a diagram produced by Stan Stanier at the University of Brighton) which shows how the VLE (Blackboard) and Connect could complement one another.

Scholarly law blogs...

Georgia Harper - a copyrigh attorney in Texas, has some interesting comments about blogs as scholarship for the legal community.  Indeed, BPR3 (Bloggers for Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting) has a tag for such things; but many of these fall within the science disciplines.

In her most recent post, Georgia illustrates her points with reference material which includes a number of legal blogs.  Last year, Brian Leiter discussed why blogs are bad for legal scholarship in the Yale Law Journal.  The site also includes an number of other useful sources, links and bookmarks.