UK Centre for Legal Education is the Law Subject Centre within the Higher Education Academy.
This blog will provide a forum for legal academics to discuss issues surrounding e-learning.
This will be the final review of the Digital Directions blog, as the UKCLE will cease to exist from the 31 Jul 2011, and therefore the review comes slightly earlier than usual!.
Over the year 1 Aug 10 - 20 Jul 11 (with comparisons to last year in brackets) there has been 3,802 visits (+89.72%) with 5,081 page views (+61.10%) coming from 117 different countries (80 last year), the bulk of which being from the UK, but still representing all of the continent and sub-continent regions and a vast array of legal systems:
Our overall increase in visitors comes from the international readership, with net increases to all sub-continent regions, in comparison to last year which saw drops in both Northern and Eastern Europe:
Continent ChangeMain Reasons Northern Europe 6.09% Only a 1.65% UK increase, but a 42.55% Ireland increase Northern America 107.13% Significantly large increase for both USA and Canada Southern Asia 85.59% Increases for India and Iran, but a 40% drop in Pakistan Western Europe 202.86% A drop in Austria, but increases in all other nations Australia & NZ 107.69% Increases in both Australia and New Zealand Southern Europe 340.48% Increases for all nations, particularly Spain and Italy Eastern Asia 130.95% A 40% drop from Hong Kong but large increases for South Korea and China South America 138.24% A big increase for both Brazil and Columbia SE Asia 1,154.84% A massive 4,560.00% increase from Singapore and elsewhere (Malaysia, Phillipines and Indonesia) Eastern Europe 260.00% Large increases for Russia and Ukaraine, with only Bulgaria dropping
Visitors to the blog have come from every American State, apart from South Dakota. Visits from California were up 218.00% and from Massachusetts by 533.33%. In Europe, visitors came from 37 countries (all but Montenegro) including all European Union states.
Although UK traffic in general only marginally increased, the number of cities has increased from 140 to 229 (+63%), although I'm still 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. The top 20 cities worldwide are:
Traffic Sources
Search engine arrivals are still overwhelmingly from Google (but a 42% increase for Bing) and from people using a Windows operating system (drop from 83% to 75%), although Macintosh users have gone up slightly from 11% to 19%.
In relation to browsers, the use of Internet Explorer has dropped from 45% to 34% and Firefox has only slightly increased. Bigger changes are seen with Chrome and Safari, most likely arising from mobile Internet access. Connection speeds have also changed, possibly due to mobile computing as last year's predominant DSL (30%) or T1 (28%) connections are knocked into second and third place by an outright majority of 'unknown' connection speeds (56%). Java supported browsers have also dropped slightly from 89% to 82%, probably another effect of mobile browsing.
Our top referring sites for visitors arriving at Digital Directions are similar to last year, but slightly reordered as Google outranks UKCLE, followed by Netvibes and Twitter which has made a 70% increase with a variety of users re-tweeting our links. FaceBook has a 128% referral increase, and last year was our first referral from Facebook. Other significant traffic comes from learningcircuits.blogspot.com, cearta.ie, bestpracticeslegaled.wordpress.com, and a range of other blogs and university sites.
The top 50 keywords used in search engines are not names of people (unlike last year), but the top 5 are:
function of reblogging
hype cycle for education
copyright
oscola 2010
digital directions
Pages
The most popular postings viewed during the year are listed below. They were all, apart from number 3, written within the review period: as were last years (bar 1) which shows that blogs are treated more like news than archived information sources.
However, 6 of these entries are in the all-time top-10 posts made since the blog started in May 2008 (shown with * and their position) compared to 4 last year.
RSS Feed
Elsewhere, Feedburner tells me that 39 people subscribe to the RSS feed, fewer than last year (56) mainly using Google feedfetcher:
The blog will be archived and no longer supported by Typepad, so a further announcement will be made later this week regarding the future of Digital Directions.
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!
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.
Over the year 1 Aug 09 - 31 Jul 10 (with comparisons to last year in brackets) there has been 2,078 visits (+10.01%)with 3,264 page views (+2.64%)coming from 80 different countries (77 last year), the bulk of which being from the UK, but still representing all of the continent and sub-continent regions and a vast array of legal systems:
Our overall increase in visitors comes from the international readership:
Continent ChangeMain Reasons Northern Europe -11.05% A UK drop, but an Ireland increase Northern America 45.29% Large increase for both USA and Canada Southern Asia 110.91% Significant increase for India and Pakistan Western Europe 63.08% Increase from Netherlands, Austria, France and Switzerland Australia & NZ 27.63% A drop in New Zealand, but an increase in Australia Southern Europe 13.16% A drop from Greece but increases for Spain, Portugal and Italy Eastern Asia 95.45% A drop from Japan but large increases elsewhere (Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, China and Mongolia) South America 59.09% A big increase for Brazil South-Eastern Asia 24.00% A drop from Malaysia but increases elsewhere (Thailand, Phillipines, Singapore, Indonesia and Cambodia) Eastern Europe -10.34% A drop in Romania, but an increase in Poland
Although UK traffic in general has gone down(-12.57%), the number of cities remains more or less the same at 140 (-2.78%), although I'm still 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. The top 20 cities are:
Traffic Sources
Search engine arrivals are still 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.
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.
Pages
The most popular postings viewed during the year are listed below. They were all, apart from number 8, written within the review period: as were last years (bar 2) which shows that blogs are treated more like news than archived information sources.
These look at how law firms can use social media effectively to promote the firm. No journalistic hype or platitudes here: Jordan brings a wealth of experience to bear.
By Nick Holmes, 9 April 2010
Jordan laments that the following is what a typical law firm Twitter account contains, and to some extent, Law Schools (if they use social media, do the same):
copied-and-pasted headlines from the firm’s press releases, with a link thereto;
copied-and-pasted headlines from the firm’s newsletters or blogs, with a link thereto;
news that a lawyer at the firm has appeared in a media outlet, with a link thereto;
news that a lawyer at the firm has received an award or designation, with a link thereto;
news that the firm has successfully completed a client engagement, with a link thereto.
His plain and simple advice is to keep two things in mind: (1) it’s all about the clients, and (2) it’s
not all about the firm. Updates deliver breaking news of interest to
the firm’s clientele, or provide links to reports of interest and
importance to clients’ industries, or spread the word about upcoming
events and opportunities that could deliver value to clients.
This may be sound advice for the law school and universities in general. I follow my university's twitter feed, but it contains much the same as the weekly news bulletins that staff receive via email, and pretty much the same things that Jordan Furlong rejects for law firm tweeps. I suppose this rather much depends on the intended audience that each group wishes to attract.
I follow quite a few law firm tweets, but mainly for the news headlines, PR hype and other news that I would otherwise not find unless I browsed their website directly, and regularly. I'm not a client of the law firm, so do I agree with this approach? In a way, yes, because I will only follow a feed if the content is of interest and importance, and I get value from the news or links within - so therefore I fit within Jordan's plain and simple advice. Even though I'm not a client receiving legal sevices, in a way I am a client of their twitter feed so this definition of content should apply to me.
On the other hand, universities may have a variety of clients - including the ubiquitous student. Do they wish to follow a twitter feed from their alma mater? Whether they do or not is another matter entirely, but a twitter feed should be able to accommodate such a diverse audience, and the content should perhaps follow more closely Jordan's second rule of not always being about the firm/university.
So, perhaps social meejah is not only for the kids, but should include 'clients' in the widest sense!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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