Digital Directions

Free US caselaw... just google it!

Earlier this month I read a blog post at Out of the Jungle, an interesting US blog on legal education, about why Lexis and Westlaw should NOT be like Google.

"For the first time, I had a student write in my Advanced Legal Research class that they wished that Lexis and Westlaw could be more like Google. I had heard other librarians moan about this but had just not run across it til now. It really gave me pause to have it in hand. And it made me think, it challenged me. Why should this student not get her wish? If I sat down with this young woman and had a conversation, what would I say about why I disagreed? There must be more than just a knee-jerk revulsion against the transformation. What would be my reasoned argument to her?"

The blogger, Betsy McKenzie, suggested that Google 'flattens' information from the web and is not so good at discriminating sources (and reliability) of legal information and went on to discuss some of the critical thinking that students may not undertake if they rely too much upon Google search results.

This week, news from the BIALL blog tells me that Google have indeed launched themselves into the world of legal research with a range of US case law being made available.  My first thoughts were that we already have BAILII in the UK, and other Legal Information Institutes elsewhere with vast repositories of open-access documents - the Google Blog does acknowledge these pioneers in their launch statement.

There is already a lengthy list of other bloggers who have reported on this, I read some about the advanced search functions, and whether it will give Lexis a run for it's money (probably not, for now).

For those who are well able to use Lexis or Westlaw, this may come as no particular benefit but as Google seems to be increasingly the search engine of choice for students, there is merit in that the cases are available freely.  I have to agree with Betsy McKenzie in that Google have flatten that value of "cited by xxx" as there is no discimination in this (potentially) long list - but then is can encourage the critical thinking skills - and for this type of research, there's always the subscription services!

At the moment, it does mean that I can provide some quick and easy VLE links to US cases without the hassle of an additonal login.

Enhancing Legal Education in Scotland Event - part two

 Kevin Kerrigan from Northumbria University and myself ran an afternoon session at the UKCLE event in Edinburgh on Developing the Undergraduate Law Student Experience (see blog post: Enhancing Legal Education in Scotland Event for the morning session).  Kevin spoke about how Northumbria, Westminster and others have sought to combine their undergrad substantive law programmes with the one year vocational skills course and the two year practise-based traineeship.  Bringing aspects together from each of the previously separate entities there can be a more logical progression from, for example, criminal law to procedure to advocacy; or land law to conveyancing.  Students are still afforded the opportunity to exit with a traditional liberal-arts style LLB and must do so unless they secure the traineeship-syle placements necessary for the remainder of the 5 year programme at a particular stage.

This reminded me of the problem-based learning approach adopted by York University (see previous blog post: What McMaster did for medical training, can York do for legal education?) last year, and of course, the recent development of the clinical LLB at Strathclyde more recently discussed in the post below.

My own presentation looked at some of the less radical means of enhancing the undergraduate experience that may not require a complete refocus of the programme, or financial / time consuming clinics – both of which can be highly commended, but require enormous effort.

I illustrated my talk with three examples: work-related learning, which includes clinics, simulations, and problem-based learning.  Some of which may be time or resource intensive, but on occasion can be a short 2 day simulation package.  Secondly, the internationalisation of staff, students and the programme; and thirdly, examples of tools and technologies that universities should perhaps be adopting to equip our students with skills for the 21^st century.

The slides from this, and from other presenters on the day, will most likely appear on the UKCLE website’s Scotland Pages in due course, but for now - mine is below.

Developing the undergraduate student experience

View more presentations from UK Centre for Legal Education.

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.

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.

What's in a Wordle?

I recently came across a rather interesting java applet at www.wordle.net that seemingly counts up how many times each word is used in a bit of text, and then presents a visual image of all the words - the more frequent the word, the larger the font.  There are other bells and whistles to change the colour scheme, layout etc.

Created by Jonathan Feinberg at IBM, I saw this as a bit of a gimmick that might be useful for putting together a pretty picture for a module handbook, or perhaps just a look at the popular words used in a journal paper or a bibliography.  It will even do RSS feeds - I bring you the words of Digital Directions:

Seems I have a facination with Google!

However, in his blog, Feinberg has created a few visual comparisons of inaugural presidential speeches, which made me think about comparing a few judicial speeches in HL cases.

I haven't got the colour scheme right, as I think the feature to compare texts is not yet available to the general public, but this is a visual representation of the Shogun Finance Ltd v Hudson (FC) [2003] UKHL 62 text:

Nothing special, one might expect to see words such as 'contract', 'person' and 'goods' appearing frequently.  But, compare now the individual speeches of the Lords.
Nicholls and Millet dissenting:

Hobhouse, Phillips and Walker affirming the Court of Appeal:

There are some differences - Hobhouse and Walker both mention the word 'contract' far less than the others.  Walker is the only one to mention 'principle' to any great level, and he also uses the word 'Lord' extensively, but then he does concur with and make many references to Hobhouse's speech.  Nicholls and Hobhouse both refer quite often to a 'crook' and a 'rogue' respectively, but only Hobhouse refers to 'Patel' the innocence third party in the case to any great extent.  Phillips makes more use of the word 'contract' than anything else, whereas the other Lords often make similar usage of other words such as 'person' and 'agreement'.  I could go on, but I'm not quite sure what this analysis tells me.  There may be some merit in looking at the words 'face' and 'written' but when the context is removed, it's not particularly analytical.

I may have some more thoughts on this for deeper analysis; but I thought it might be fun, and perhaps useful for the occasional seminar.

Legal Education and Technology II: An Annotated Bibliography

Paul Maharg's blog, Zeugma, has recently highlighted the second edition of Pearl Goldman's annotated bibliography.

The first edition in 93 Law Libr. J. 423 (2001) reviewed the impact of technologies on law schools between 1970 and 2001.  This second edition includes the year range 2001 to 1 March 2008, thus illustrating the need for an update on the number of articles, commentaries, conference papers, essays, books, and book chapters.

Goldman categorises the bibliography into seven key themes: specific technologies, curriculum, distance education, pedagogy, law schools, the future of technology in legal education, and miscellaneous.

In total, 554 entries are made in the 2008 edition compared to the initial 221 entries made in 2001, representing a good 50% increase; although some of the entries are duplicated under two or more categories.  Nevertheless, this does represent a useful and well organised set of resources - just a shame it's not hyperlinked to HeinOnline, Google Scholar, other databases, or even, dare I say, Del.icio.us?!

Is it Okay to be a Technologically Illiterate Law Teacher?!?

Tony Karrer's Big Question for July (I know, it's nearly August) follows from Karl Fisch's Edublog 'post of the year' in 2007, and seems to be still running.

But is it okay for law teachers?  If you're reading this, you probably have a reasonable level of technical competence - hey, you're on the Internet!

Last month, the UKLCE held a Creativity event at Aston university in Birmingham - but creativity doesn't have to be technologically driven - yes it can be, and sometimes the students may expect some technology to feature on their curriculum.  The perennial question - Is this module on Blackboard? - gets asked frequently as students expect electronic materials, and the non-techie members of staff quite often grumble that their students are pushing for similar delivery in other modules, but this isn't law specific.  The UKCLE event reminded me that a creative teacher is probably more important than a technology-driven strategy that perhaps doesn't harness the technology in the right way.

For graduates who wish to enter the profession,technology is ever more prominent - not just in areas such as IPR and e-commerce, but also in criminal law where sanctions exist for grooming children in chat rooms; in conveyancing where electronic title exchange may take place; for tax law (consider e-bay and other sources of online income; and even for jurisprudence as technology occupies such a prominent place in society that we cannot ignore it for any part of the law curriculum.

So, it's perhaps more important that the law teacher is technology literate for substantive content rather than for pedagogical delivery mechanisms, although the two can sit together quite nicely.

Top 100 Tools for Learning - or, Disney Teaches Copyright!

The Centre for Learning and Technology's top 100 tools have recently been listed for 2007.  Firefox made the top slot, with Google at joint-third place showing that search engines and research tools are the most popular.  But, what other tools are available, useful, easy or worthwhile to use?

Online learning for healthcare law and ethics

I've been experimenting with problem-based learning for healthcare law and ethics and using online discussion boards as a replacement for classroom seminars.  I presented on this at BILETA in Hertfordshire earlier this year (see paper), and more recently, I gave a paper at the Caledonian Academy on the feedback mechanism and the requirements for tutor input / involvement.