Digital Directions

LILAC social networking site

The LILAC conference is taking place next week in Warwick - and I see already that the logo has been adapted to recognise the 10 year anniversary of UKCLE, and the HEA subject centres in general!

So far, the wiki social networking site has details of the conference papers, including the parallel sessions, keynote speakers, posters and the cybercafe.

A number of attendees have already registered on the site, and started discussions relating to papers, travel (someone is offering a lift from central London!), and other things.

A limited number of the papers will be recorded as podcasts, so they will be available after the conference.

Sign-up at http://lilac10.wetpaint.com/ for further details.

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.

LILAC gets WIKI with it!

The forthcoming LILAC 09 conference is getting very social and sophisticated with a wiki for use by both presenters and attendees!  Their wiki site already has details of the papers which can be commented upon in advance and each speaker will have their own wiki page to develop and manage.

For the wiki novice (or complete beginner), there is a handy User Guide to get you started; and if you're a Presenter - here's how you can add tags, new pages and customise your profile.

Of course, blogs and wikis aren't new for conferences - recently Tony Carrer posted on his blog about Conference Wikis, and has some good examples on his blog if you're interested to see how well they can work.

The ALT-C 2006 had a conference wiki that didn't really take off, although one particular ALT-C 2008 workshop organised a wiki for a Digital Divide Slam - for those (including me) who don't know what a 'slam' is:

A slam is a brief performance piece/ creative work that captures people's experience of the digital divide. The vivid expression of your ideas and the impact of your performance is more important than sophisticated use of technology. We need to have the performance captured digitally because we can't all be in the same place.
Your slam can include text or audio narrative or poems, drawings or cartoons, song, dance, mime. We are delighted to accept anything that you can capture in digital media and publish or link to from this Wiki, and that someone can view within a reasonable time, typically 1-3 minutes.

Some conferences, such as Hertfordshire's Blended Learning Conference 2008 have used a Ning social networking site for both pre and post discussions of events.  The Learning Technologies 2008 Ning Site is open for all to acess, and seems to be a good example of how Ning can be used.  A quick search indicates that there could be approx 1,400 conference sites in existence on Ning.  The ALT-C 2008 conference used CrowdVine, which is a similar idea that can be viewed here and even some YouTube clips were generated of the Gala Dinner.

The Cetis 2008 conference also had a wiki, but seemed to use Twitter more effectively on the day as shown by their Twitter Account and their Tweme (twemes are twitter messages from anyone who adds a particular tag to their twitterings).  Likewise, ReLIVE08 twittered with delicious and flickr built-in.