Quotes, Quotes and More Quotes

from Natalie Tarenko, Texas Tech School of Law’s Writing Specialist:

• Repetition is the mother of learning.  Russian proverb
• Skill is not won by chance.  Growth is not the sport of circumstance.  Skill comes by training; and training, persistent and unceasing, is transmuted into habit.  The reaction is adjusted ever to the action.  What goes out of us as effort comes back to us as character.  The alchemy never fails.  ‘Let no youth,’ says James, ‘have any anxiety about the upshot of his education whatever the line of it may be.  If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working day, he may safely leave the final result to itself.  He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation, in whatever pursuit he may have singled out . . . .’  The main quotation is from a 1925 commencement speech at Albany Law School by Justice Cardozo titled “The Game of the Law.”  Cardozo attributes the inner quotation to James, probably Henry or William.

 from Norman Otto Stockmeyer, Professor Emeritus, from Thomas M. Cooley Law School:

• Writing is thinking made visible.  Joe Kimble
• The beginning of knowledge is learning to call things by their proper names.  Chinese proverb
• The point of a question is to get you to think, not simply to answer it.  What Smart Students Know
• You are entitled to your own opinions.  You are not entitled to your own facts.  Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan
• Assumpsit happens (Prof. Stockmeyer teaches Contracts.)
• If you can’t say it clearly, you don’t understand it.  John Searle
• To know the law is not merely to understand the words, but as well their force and effect.  Justinian
• We do brain surgery here….You enter with a skull full of mush, and leave thinking like a lawyer.  Professor Kingsfield in Paper Chase
• Teachers open the door.  You enter by yourself.  Chinese proverb
• There are no answers without questions.  Fidelity Investments advertisement
• “Learn” is an active verb.  Dennis Tonsing’s 1,000 Days to the Bar – But the Practice of Law Begins Now
• Out of the facts arises the law.  Old adage

from Amy Jarmon, Assistant Dean for Academic Success Programs
Texas Tech Univ. School of Law:

• If you study to remember, you will forget; but, if you study to understand, you will remember.  Unknown
• You’ll never plow a field by turning it over in your mind.  Irish Proverb
• Borrowed brains have no value.  Yiddish Proverb
• Learning is not attained by chance, it must be sought with ardor and attended to with diligence.  Abigail Adams
• Every step you take is a step away from where you used to be.  Brian Chargualaf
• There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving…and that’s your own self.  Aldous Huxley
• You will never find time for anything.  If you want time, you must make it.  Charles Buxton
• It’s not the time you put in, but what you put in the time.  Burg’s Philosophy
• Dost thou love life?  Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff that life is made of.  Benjamin Franklin
• Yesterday is a cancelled check.  Tomorrow is a promissory note.  Today is the only cash you have, so spend it wisely.  Kim Lyons
• The leading rule for a lawyer, as for the man of every other calling, is diligence.  Leave nothing for tomorrow which can be done today.  Abraham Lincoln
• If you nurture your mind, body, and spirit, your time will expand.  You will gain a new perspective that will allow you to accomplish much more.  Brian Koslow
• Finish each day and be done with it.  You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can.  Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.  Ralph Waldo Emerson
• You can eat an elephant one bite at a time.  Chinese Proverb
• To succeed, we must first believe that we can.  Michael Korda
• Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.  Thomas A. Edison
• Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.  Confucius
• Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition, there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes.  George Soros
• A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.  John Burroughs
• Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.  Thomas A. Edison
• We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.  Martin Luther King, Jr.
• Remember, no one can make you feel inferior without your consent.  Eleanor Roosevelt
• Hold fast to dreams for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly.  Langston Hughes
• Stress is an untransformed opportunity for empowerment.  Doc Childre and Howard Martin
• It’s not stress that kills us, it is our reaction to it.  Hans Selye
• People who cannot find time for recreation are obliged sooner or later to find time for illness.  John Wanamaker
• Laugh every day.  It is like inner jogging.  Unknown

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Timely Survey Results

As I prepare for my presentation on Podcasting at Albany Law School for our Spring ETG meeting, John Mayer posted the results of CALI’s 2007 Legal Podcasting Project Student Survey.

The results of last year’s survey were intersting, but the new trends are even more so:

• More students used portable MP3 players to listen to podcasts than before (24% vs. 17%), but the PC was the primary listening device.
• More students listened to podcasts from other professors (15% vs. 8%), so awareness of podcasting professors is growing.
• Podcasts as attendance-supressors seemed to decline with this survey. 2% said they attended less classes vs. 7% last year. 11% said they skipped classes vs. 12% last year.

Most of the student comments are very positive and repeatedly stated that they wished more professors podcasted their classes.  The comment below embodies their feelings:

“I wish more classes/professors offered this opportunity. It’s such a great idea and a wonderful tool so that you can go back and make sure you are clear on a particular topic, plus, since you can put it on your MPS or iPod, you can listen to it anywhere (while at the gym, in the car, on a walk), so you don’t necessarily have to be attached to your computer or an internet connection (once downloaded) to listen to it. I think it definitely increases access to information for students, since it is accessible anywhere at anytime for use anywhere, anytime, and I think it also is helpful for students who learn better audially, rather than visually, so that come review time you can do more than (or other than) simply read books and review notes, but relisten to the material. It’s a wonderful tool technology has given us as students!”

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Legal Education and IT:Oasis or Mirage?

This is the theme of the upcoming CALI conference.  John Mayer offers this explanation for the theme:

“ IT in legal education is becoming irrelevant  — either through outsourcing, technology-shifting to the ends of the network, malaise or lack of vision. I never really subscribed to the ‘technology for technology’s sake’ approach and what with the law  school’s traditional resistance to change, it’s hard to introduce new  tools, ideas or services that make things more efficient or help law  schools achieve their purpose.  This is the mirage. IT slowly disappears into the email that can be had from Yahoo, the research that can be had from Google and so on.

There is another angle to the theme. IT is becoming so pervasive or  ”built-in” that IT thinking must shift its focus away from plumbing and  closer to the actual goals of legal education. This new type of  thinking affects priorities, job skills and decision-making all over the place. You can no longer be simply in charge of the computers or in  charge of the lab or in charge of the network – you have to be a collaborator and coordinator of services to the people that use the  computers, labs and network. This is the oasis – it’s just there, it just works, it nourishes existing activities instead of impeding them.

Finally, there is the strategic. This too is part of the oasis. It’s a somewhat distant, but reachable promise that IT can make things possible that were not possible without it. I really am astounded by the power  of the tools we have available today, but I think we are only just  beginning to figure out how to use them effectively. As we all know, IT has not always been equal to its hype. Where is our natural language search? AI? … and what about the problems it has created? Spam! Viri! Phishing! Information Overload!  This too is the mirage - a promise not kept or a hope not realized.”

Definitely sounds like it will be an interesting conference and although I cannot attend, I plan to  check  out many of  the presentations through their handouts and podcasts.

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YouTube in Law School

“Nancy Shurtz, a Univ. of Oregon Law School professor who teaches tax law, mentioned to her Federal Income Tax class that it was her dream to hear a tax rap song. 2L Jumane Redway remembered her request while studying one day, and filed a set of edu-taining rock and roll lyrics. ..Prof. Shurtz’s inspiration provided the spark that produced a tax anthem that will resonate through the walls of Fed Tax classrooms for many fiscal years to come.”

Click here to watch the video.  Get the words here.

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There.com, an alternative to Second Life

In a previous post, I was exploring Second Life and its use in law schools, found out that it is blocked here at Albany Law.

While reading this issue of Campus Technology, I discovered There.com:

There.com (Makena Technologies), which boasts about 750,000 members worldwide, is “an immersive 3D environment.” But of all the virtual worlds, There  is the most user-friendly, and even New York Law School holds classes within it.

So I dowloaded the software, created an Avatar (I’m DSC59 in There and Evelyn Shabazz in SL) and it works so far.

“Currently, New York Law School cosponsors an offshoot of There.com: the State of Play Academy, or SOPA, an entire academy built in a virtual world. Users can take courses in patent law, copyright law, virtual world law, and municipal WiFi policy, among others. The classes are scheduled at a wide variety of times; law professors, journalists, and technologists line up to teach them.”

I enrolled in the State of Play Academy and found a large selection of papers, conversations and how-to’s offered this semester related to law and technology.

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