Law School 2.0

Presentation at Rocky Mountain LW Conference

This weekend I will be attending and participating in the Rocky Mountain Legal Writing Conference, which will be hosted by our friends at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder.  I had the privilege of working on the program committee, and helped with an early version of the program, so I know that this is going to be a great conference.  I am really looking forward to it.

I will be presenting on Saturday afternoon about a topic I have been thinking about for some time.  I find that sometimes I write conference proposals that are not necessarily something I know much about, but rather something I want to think about more.  This is one of those.  I am calling it: “Escaping Flatland: A Thought Experiment.”

The concept of escaping flatland comes from Edward Tufte, the great and fascinating expert on the best forms and methods for the expression of complex information.  In his book Envisioning Information (1990) he writes: 

"Escaping flatland is the essential task of envisioning information.  All the worlds (physical, biological, imaginary, human) that we seek to understand are inevitably and happily multivariate in nature.  They are not flatlands."

As legal scholars, I think it is fair to say that part of our job is to help our community (however defined) fully envision the information that we are presenting in our scholarship.  It has often concerned me that the form that legal scholarship typically takes at publication – the law review – is a flatland.  It is obviously two-dimensional. And while a typical law review article is full of footnotes – which at least are connections outside of itself – they are dead links, that is, not clickable. I hope that our scholarship will - at least some of it - become more multvariate. If it does, It seems doubtful that the old style law review as a vessel for our scholarship will survive much longer into the 21st Century.

Even as we are transitioning to SSRN and such systems, we typically upload a PDF of the print file, where the links (footnotes) are once again dead, even though at that point, they could be clickable.  That is enough of an issue, and not especially difficult to solve.  But a deeper issue it seems to me is implicit in Tufte’s concept of “escaping flatland.”

For example, if we have an article about appropriate fonts for legal writing, we should be able to interact with the subject matter to more fully understand it.  If we have an article that includes musical notation, we should be able to click a button and listen to the music.  If (perhaps most importantly) we have an article that includes empirical scholarship, we should be able to interact with the underlying database. (I showed an example of this sort of "open" database from Gapminder).

So this is what I will be talking about on Saturday.  Here is a link to the Prezi I will use with my talk:

Snow Day? University Closed? Class is in Session.

Last Thursday evening, the University of Denver announced it would be closed on Friday, February 3.  A massive snow storm was coming in overnight, and indeed it was not a false alarm. In the morning, the roads were treacherous, and it snowed all day Friday and into the night. When it finally cleared on Saturday, we had two feet of snow in our front yard. 

One of my colleagues once said about the frequency of University closings: "It usually takes a direct hit by an asteroid." Meaning, it never happens.  But the University was right to close.

But why also cancel classes? We have to make them up at some point, and that can extend the semester too late. And with "integrated" law school skills classes - like the Discovery Practicum course I teach - it is very disruptive to postpone a class.  It is not like a typical "doctrinal" course, where each class is essentially the same - going through cases in a casebook.  Skipping one class just doubles up material in another, or adds a class to the end of the semester, or the end of semester material is skipped or compressed.  It doesn't much matter to most law school courses. But it does matter to the Discovery class I teach.

So I conducted class online on Friday.  The technology to support this is in place in almost every class: Blackboard, or a similar courseware system. I wrote to my students on Thursday evening to let them know that I would like to conduct class online the following day. To their credit, they seemed willing to go along with this - I was clear that I was not requiring them to participate, since the University was closed, and if they would rather go sledding, they could certainly do that.  I prepared the class in the morning, and conducted it in the Lexis Webcourse site (basically, Blackboard) that comes with the textbook for the course (Discovery Practice, described elsewhere in this blog).

Like most classes, there was advance reading in the text and online, as well as a pre-class quiz (online) about the reading. I prepared a PowerPoint that went through the doctrinal material for the course (our subject was Answering Interrogatories), and then set up several discussion threads.  The PPT made reference to those threads in several places, and it was there that we had the class discussion. The class extended the full class period - actually, it started before 1:30, and ended after 4:00 p.m., which is the usual class period (since we only meet once per week). I followed the discussion threads as they developed over the course of the class, and asked questions and added my guidance when it seemed helpful. At the end of the class, there were 110 postings made to seven threaded discussions over the course of 2.5 hours.

All but two of my students were able to attend the class, and they will be able to catch up - asynchronously - over the next few days when it is convenient for them. And, we all stayed safe and warm. Even better, last night I received an email from one of the students in the course, which read as follows: "I just wanted to say that I was initially apprehensive about the online idea but I am pleasantly surprised and impressed with how it turned out.  Thanks for exposing a law school class to the new era!"

It was really simple to do, with technology that has been available to us for many years. What teacher today doesn't know how to use PowerPoint, an online courseware site to upload a file, and participate in online discussions? Sure, I worked all day when it might have been nice to enjoy the unexpected day off. But given this type of class, it was much better to conduct class online and stay on track.

It is perfectly appropriate to close the University when it is unsafe to travel, but I am becoming increasingly convinced that it has become an anachronism to cancel classes.

Trip to LA to Speak with Loyola LRW Faculty

I was in Los Angeles earlier today to give a talk to the LRW Faculty at Loyola Law School.  My esteemed colleague Arnie Siegel is the Director of the writing program at Loyola, and he asked me to come to speak with his faculty about how I have used CaseMap in teaching legal writing.  

I was very impressed with the group of faculty at the meeting - their questions were very thoughtful and probing, and I hope I was helpful to them.  Last year, they used CaseMap in the spring semester, but we discussed how they might use it in the fall semester, and how that might help them lay a foundation with their students for the spring.  

Much of what I presented can be found in greater detail in the article published here on SSRN.

What is it about Twitter?

This is a question on the mind of many, particularly since Oprah joined Twitter.  And of course, the answer is different for everyone.  This post is really just about what Twitter means to me, and perhaps what it might mean to other law professors.  

To start off, what is Twitter?  It is a microblogging service.  What is microblogging?  It just means that instead of having a blog with long ponderous posts of dubious interest to others (perhaps like this one!), that you can quickly post short - no more than 140 character - posts.  The founding question of Twitter is: "What are you doing?" On first glance, this is idiotic (and the subject of much derision).  "Making Pad Thai with Shrimp. Serving a nice Pinot Blanc."  I mean, who cares?  Really, who cares?

Here is a video about how Twitter works.

 

 

OK, so you can keep up with the details of what your friends are doing. That's nice. It would be even nicer if we all had that kind of time.  So far, it is hard to see what the thing is with Twitter.

But wait. You mean that I can follow anyone who is on Twitter, not just my friends? Yes. What about people who are really interesting, and thinking about interesting things that interest me?  Yes.  OK, now we're getting warm.

Any reader of this blog knows that I am interested - well more than just interested, rather, engaged as a scholarly pursuit - in the subject of changes in education being facilitated and advanced by technology (particularly in the legal education space).  OK so far.

For me, what is interesting about Twitter is that there are other people I do not know personally who are also interested in the same issues. Some of them have been leaders in the field of Web 2.0 and community-based learning for many years.  Among them Howard Rheingold (@hrheingold) and Tim O'Reilly (@timoreilly).  Howard wrote one of the most important early books on the subject (The Virtual Community), and Tim O'Reilly actually coined the term Web 2.0 (and is the publisher of many excellent tech books under the imprint O'Reilly Media).  Also on Twitter are Guy Kawasaki (@guykawasaki - the first Apple Evangelist), and Steve Wozniak (@stevewoz - one of the founders of Apple). (Oh, by the way, those "@ names" - those are Twitter "handles" - it is how you find those people, and subscribe to their "tweets"). Here are pictures of Tim O'Reilly and Howard Rheingold:

So by "following" these folks, I get to see what they are thinking.  Are they tweeting about what they are making for dinner?  Sometimes, unfortunately (in my view), yes, you have to wade through some of that stuff.  But most of the time they are posting about things that are going on in their heads about this topic in which I share an interest, and often they are accompanied by links to sites on the internet that have more information.

Woah, right?  Because this is where Twitter really starts to make some sense - at least for me.

From my point of view, I have recruited these really influential thinkers as my personal "knowledge network" - for free!  They help me find information I would not otherwise find.  They teach me things I would not otherwise know or have thought on my own.  Or they affirm things I am already thinking myself (which is really gratifying, since - unlike me - they are so incredibly smart people).

As if that were not enough on its own, here's another thing that Twitter does for me.  It helps me meet people I don't even already know about (like the examples I gave above) who also are really smart, and who also share the same (or related) interests. And I get to see what they are thinking.  (And, what beer they are drinking, which has limited utility, I agree.  But there is an aspect of Twitter that is intentionally "humanizing" of its citizens, and that is not all bad).

Let's flip the coin.  A related matter is that my being a part of Twitter has allowed people who are interested in what I am thinking to follow me.  Woah.  

I did publish a book this year.  It is called Law School 2.0 - if you are on this blog, you have probably heard of it!  One of the amazing things about Twitter is that you can search the massive database of twitter postings.  So, suppose I searched for the title of my book, what would happen?  What happened is this: I found people who were reading my book and posting comments about it.  OK, that sounds powerful, and interesting too. To be able to view what others were saying about my book while they are reading it, well, for a writer, it doesn't get much better than that in terms of a real-time feedback loop.  And, of course, if they are reading my book, they are probably people who are interested in the subject - change in legal education and the role technology can play in it. So those are probably people who also have interesting thoughts related to the same subject.  Without Twitter, it would have been very hard - if not impossible - for me to find them, much less hear what is going on in their heads.

Can Twitter be a time suck?  Sure.  Just like any new technology, we have to figure out for ourselves where the cost/benefit ratio exists.  For you, there may be too much cost for the benefit. Just like how we use Twitter, this will be different for everyone.  But so far, I recommend Twitter for law professors who want to connect with folks with whom they share scholarly interests, and who they might otherwise not find.  The folks you start following might just post something you would not have seen or thought otherwise, and it will expand your thinking on the subject you care about.  And by posting your own thoughts, you can do this for others.  And they can give you almost instantaneous feedback on what you just said (through what is called a "retweet" or a direct message, a "DM."  This is new. 

In my view, this is where Twitter shines.  And it is what makes it worthwhile. 

There are all kinds of interesting questions about how a law school teacher might actually use Twitter in her teaching.  I am giving this one some thought, and following closely what others in undergraduate institutions are just beginning to do with this.  More on that topic later.  For now, it is a great "knowledge network," but it has potential to do much more for us in our teaching role.  A new way to communicate with students? A "backchannel" during class? A way for students to collaborate on group projects during or after class?  Hmmm...

To create an account on Twitter (oh, go ahead, you know you want to) go here: Twitter

To view my page on Twitter (to give you an idea of what I post): @dicthomson

If you would like to learn more about Twitter, here are two articles that I recommend:

Fear of Twitter, by Greg Downey

Twitter Literacy, by Howard Rheingold

A Week with the Kindle

I have had about a week with the Kindle, so here are some early impressions.

This thing - while just a fairly simple electronic device - is a significant development for readers everywhere.  (Lawyers are, by training and temperament, voracious readers).  I believe this is a significant development on a number of fronts.

First, it works for books.  This basic element is no small feat.  I actually have some considerable experience with electronic books, having tested one of the first ones in the law school environment in the fall of 2004.  My students were all provided with a USB drive that contained three of their law textbooks for the year at no extra cost.  All of them purchased the physical book as well.  Some were glad to have the eBook version.  But note taking - which law students do a lot of - did not work very well.  And ultimately few used the electronic version of the book.  

But the Kindle has many advantages over that early experiment.  Perhaps the most important of these is the eInk technology, which really does look like a book page, and is easier on the eyes than reading on a computer screen.  There have been other eReaders with eInk technology but the Kindle has a big advantage in that it is connected with the Amazon website, and the wireless connection is on all the time, and that feature is free.  In one of the many elegant touches in the Kindle it arrives at your home already connected to your account on Amazon.

This means that if you ever are stuck somewhere and would like to read a book - which perhaps sounds preposterous to some, but happens to me all the time - you can.  You simply browse the Amazon Kindle store, and select a book, and it is downloaded within the minute.  Their catalog of Kindle books, at over 260,000, really is just more than the “popular novels” like Stephen King - there is, for example, a good selection of books that I am reading a lot of lately: commentary on the new digital disorder (such as Here Comes Everybody, Grown up Digital, etc.)  Even smarter - if you find a book you think you would like to read, but you’re not sure, you can download a free sample - also within a minute.  With a physical book you have to wait a couple of days to get your hands on it, so having it instantly is a big plus.  But with a physical book there is no way to read a sample.  They won’t FedEx the first 30 pages to you.  Having a sample - which are generous samples in terms of length - you can tell whether you really want the book.  I have a few books I have actually purchased in print form that I downloaded the samples for.  I have had the physical book for a while, but have not been able to get to it.  I have already found with one of these that I have read the sample on the Kindle, and have been drawn back to the physical book.  This back and forth is new. 

And there are many things that are new with the Kindle.  I have already commented on the usefulness of the iPhone for Kindle app.  I may not have the Kindle with me at all times, but I do have my phone.  So I can read a book I am reading on the Kindle for a few pages.  What’s really well designed is that when I go back to the Kindle, it is synced to where I left off on the iPhone.  That’s just smart.

  

As for the reading experience itself, it works better than I thought it would.  Clicking the “Next page” button becomes second nature (as turning a physical page does) and you get used to timing it out so that you are finishing the page, and changing it just as the page is refreshing, so it seems in some ways less of a delay between pages than with a physical book.  

Added to all of these capabilities is the ability to have the book read to you with a computer voice, but a very good one, in either male or female voices.  And if you have a few audiobooks you have not gotten to on your iPod (as I do) you can download them to the Kindle for that boring night in a hotel out of town, or long airplane flight.  I now have about 8 books, 6 sample books, and four audio books on the Kindle.  (I also have a copy of my own book that I have ginned up - just to see how to do it.  I have asked Lexis to officially publish it on the Kindle, and they are currently considering it).

So, in terms of books, the Kindle is an important development.  But what about textbooks, which is important to legal educators?  In that regard, the stock of books available is thin, and I am not sure even this better technology will work that much better for a law school casebook, at least not soon.  You can certainly read a case in your Contracts casebook on the Kindle.  But the problem with those casebooks is that they are limited to that sort of instruction.  I describe in my book how textbooks need to migrate to a hybrid model, with some print, and some online - and the online portions being more interactive and engaging than just a case.  In this respect, the Kindle is behind - it will display a case just fine, but it remains limited to text.  I have a few words below about what I think the future looks like for the Kindle, and that will go a long way towards addressing what is needed in the world of textbooks, but for now, the Kindle is lacking in this respect.

Another thing I have found astonishing about the Kindle is how it works with newspapers.  I have to start this part by noting that I have been a voracious consumer of newsprint since I was 11 years old.  I grew up with the New York Times arriving at our New York City apartment doorstep every morning at 7.  Over the last dozen years, I have gotten up early every morning to read always two, and usually three, print newspapers.  Recently, it has been the New York Times and the Rocky Mountain News, the latter of which, unfortunately folded (after nearly 150 years in continuous publication) just a month or so ago.  The Rocky subscription automatically switched to The Denver Post, so now I am reading that paper.

I have always felt that the proper reading of a newspaper inextricably involved the physical act of turning the pages, and scanning the headlines, and folding it to focus on a particular story.  We all have developed a series of imperceptible acts in reading a newspaper that amounts to a form of “editing” for our own interests, and we do this quite quickly.  We personalize the newspaper for our own interests every time we read it.

I was, admittedly, skeptical about the ability of the small screen on the Kindle to replicate the physical act of reading and scanning a newspaper - one that is so ingrained in me, and has been for many, many years..  So I subscribed to one of my favorite newspapers that I can’t get delivered to the door - The Washington Post - on a 14 day free subscription (they offer these 14 day freebies for every newspaper available at Amazon, which numbers some 20 or so papers now).  I lived in Washington for five years - when I was an attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice - and I grew to love the reportage of the Post in those years.  But I have missed it for now nearly 20 years.

Now, every morning, I read the Denver Post, The New York Times, and then pick up the Kindle to read the Washington Post, which has been automatically downloaded to the Kindle while I slept.  I am, quite simply, astonished at how well the newspaper works on the Kindle.  It takes a bit of explaining (which I will skip), but once you get used to it, flipping the “pages” is quick and easy.  You can still scan the article headlines and move to what interests you.  The lack of physicality does not matter - at least not to me.

I had this odd epiphany one of these mornings last week.  I often wake up around 4:30 in the morning when I hear the newspaper delivery.  I hear the car coming down the street, and then slow down, and then the “thunk” of the paper, and then the car drives away.  For some time, I have been thinking about, and reading about, the struggle that newspapers are having to find a financial model that works - once Craigslist took away classifieds (always a cash cow for the papers) it made life very difficult for them.  

And suddenly - reading the Washington Post on the Kindle, and it’s working, and I’m glad to have “back” a paper I have missed - something shifted.  At least it did for me.  The cost of purchasing newsprint, the cost of the ink, the presses, people to run them (and keep them running) the environmental impact of those efforts, combined with the car and the gasoline and the pollution of running the car to drop the paper on my lawn… and - well - it just shifted.  Significantly.  Why are we doing this?  Why all the effort and cost and impact to drop the paper on my lawn when I can read it automatically on this quite effective device?

Is it perfect?  No.  The screen could be bigger, and should be (and apparently, that’s in the works).  It really should be in color.   That would make the photos pop, and become more useful and informative as a result (right now you can tell what they are, but the impact is lost in 16 shades of grey).  But the “killer app” will be when video can be embedded in the newspaper story, much as they are on the web.  Do you remember the newspaper in the Harry Potter movies?  Where the pictures move?  That’s what we need, and it is not too far off.

And then we get back to textbooks - where the case can be read and annotated, and then linked to a video, and an interactive exercise.  THEN we will have effective textbooks that work on this sort of device.  Until then, not so much.

Two final notes: The Kindle also works well for blogs.  I have subscribed to a blog (which is ridiculously cheap: $0.99 per month).  It updates all day, and I can check in with it several times a day.  Yes, I can do this on the iPhone and I can do it on the Web.  But it is useful to have it integrated with my other regular reading on one device.

Lastly, you can PDF documents to your Kindle.  This is cool on a number of levels, but I will mention two.  One, you can do research in Google books (which is finally getting to the size that it is becoming very useful for scholars) and download a PDF of something fairly obscure (but important to you).  Then, E-mail it to your Kindle and read it there.  Second, I have asked my faculty services librarian at our law school - the incomparable and irreplaceable Diane Burkhardt - to E-mail me documents on my research topics that she thinks I need to read.  I asked her to send it to my regular E-mail address (as she always does) but also to the Kindle address.  So over the summer, when I am working on my research projects, I will have the Kindle with me, and I can see that she has sent me things she thinks I need to read.  

Oh, one last thing.  It even works on the web - it has a very rudimentary browser.  Not great.  Slow.  But useable in a pinch.  Very helpful to look up something on Wikipedia, just for a quick reference.  And the built-in dictionary is more helpful than I thought it would be.

Enough for one week of observations about using the Kindle!  If I have more, I will post them.

The Amazon Kindle

I have been thinking about getting a Kindle since Amazon announced the first one.  I have my doubts about the idea that digital books are going to take over print books, and I explain those doubts in my book.  For many books - and particularly law school text books - I just think a combination of digital and print is going to be  the better choice.  For example, I think it is indicative of the market for the Kindle that the picture on their website is of the Kindle leaning against a shelf of popular novels:

That sort of book is the perfect application for the Kindle.  And since I don't read that much Stephen King (where's the time?) I have postponed the purchase of a Kindle.  Also, last fall it was clear that Amazon was developing a second generation Kindle, so I thought I would wait.  But I did read with great interest the reviews of the new one when it came out - it seemed like they had addressed many of the version 1.0 complaints about the first Kindle.

When Amazon released Kindle for iPhone last month, I downloaded it, and before my flight back from Orlando a few weeks ago, I purchased the Kindle version of Malcolm Gladwell's interesting book Outliers.  To my considerable surprise, I found the experience of reading that book on the iPhone quite pleasant and useful.  I am one of those people who is nervous if they don't have something handy to read at all times, and I always have my iPhone with me.  So this made an impression on me.

And then when I went to Steven Johnson's talk the other day, he spoke about having purchased the Kindle a few weeks ago and then being in Austin out to dinner by himself.  He quickly and easily purchased a book he wanted to read on the Kindle, and then read the first few chapters during his dinner.  

So Steven put me over the edge, and I ordered a Kindle.  It arrived this afternoon, and it really is a beautiful thing, and very well thought out.  Not perfect - it is still an emerging technology.  But it does some things excellently.  The wireless feature is one of the things that really sets it apart.  And if I stop reading Outliers (or any other book I have purchased through Amazon) at a certain page on the Kindle, when I turn on my iPhone a few days later in an airport, it is on the same page where I left off on the other device.  Automagically.  

BTW, I am not one of those people who fetishizes the "Out of Box Experience" - look them up on YouTube: they actually take videos of themselves opening the box of new tech purchases (again - where's the time?).  But I did note that the OOBE was extraordinary for the Kindle.  For example, when you pull the strip on the box containing the device the strip reads: "Once Upon a Time..."  A lot of thought went into every aspect of this device.  I will have more here later as I get used to it.  

Visualization of large data sets

I write in the book about the importance of some of the work being done on visualization of large data sets (at p. 84).  Especially with the rise of electronic media, I think this work is very interesting, and exceedingly important to the future for lawyers.  The most immediate example of how important large data sets are becoming is the burgeoning field of electronic discovery. 

Each chapter of the book begins with a Wordle, which is a form of visualization of large amounts of text.  To create a wordle for text that you have, visit www.wordle.net.  Here is a Wordle that was generated from the text posted to date at the Law School 2.0 blog:

- Click the image above to see a larger version on the Wordle site -

With thanks and appreciation to www.wordle.net.

New Clickers Book

Interesting interview in today's issue of Inside Higher Education about clickers in the classroom.  It announces that there is a new book out called Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: Creating Active Learning Environments by Derek Bruff at Vanderbilt, and contains a short interview with Mr. Bruff.  He describes some of the benefits of using clickers, such as working with a large class.  He notes that students don't really appreciate the use of clickers just to administer a quiz, but notes that there are many other, more substantive uses of clickers in the classroom.  I have found this to be true as well, and describe my own experience using clickers when teaching administrative law in the LS2 book (on pp. 94-97).  

After the article, scroll down for a comment posted by Bill Goffe, a Professor at SUNY who has some experience with clickers.  He has some good links to additional resources about clickers in the classroom.

Social Media for Attorneys

Interesting article on Lawline.com that describes reasons for attorneys to use social media (such as Facebook, Linkdin, Digg and YouTube) in their practices.  It touts the benefits of using social media for networking, brainstorming, learning and promotion. You will find part 2 of the article here, and part 1 here.

Software for Creative Thinking

I have been working on the Law School 2.0 book in some software designed for large writing projects called Scrivener, and I have found it to be terrifically helpful.  Using Word for large scale projects is hard because it acts like a fairly dumb "bucket" of words.  But Scrivener, and similar writing software, supports the creative process in numerous ways.  It has a "corkboard" where you can move "index cards" of ideas or chapters (or both) around and see how they line up.  You can save your research within the program, and thus switch from the research and back to the writing easily.  And you can make the program disappear, and leave you with only the writing "surface" on the screen.  At some point, I will have to export the work into Word - so it can be accessed by editors.  After that, it will have to stay in Word.  Fortunately, Scrivener has a highly customizable output feature to Word, so it is easy when you are ready to leave the program to transition back.