Technology in Legal Education Bibliography

posted at: http://lsi.typepad.com/lsi/2008/07/technology-in-l.html

To help legal educators locate materials that inform and enrich their teaching and writing, Nova Southwestern law prof Pearl Goldman offers an annotated bibliography of articles, commentaries, conference papers, essays, books, and book chapters that examine the impact of technology on legal education in this 100-plus page article (pdf) The article was published in the Summer 2008 issue of Law Library Journal.

Blawgs matter!

Professor Patty Salkin received this email regarding her Law of the Land blog:

The United States Library of Congress has selected your Web site for inclusion in its historic collections of Internet materials related to Legal Blawgs. The Library’s traditional functions, acquiring, cataloging, preserving and serving collection materials of historical importance to the Congress and to the American people to foster education and scholarship, extend to digital materials, including Web sites. We request your permission to collect your Web site and add it to the Library’s research collections. We also ask that we be allowed to display the archived version(s) of your Web site.

The following URL has been selected: lawoftheland.wordpress.com

With your permission, the Library of Congress or its agent will engage in the collection of content from your Web site at regular intervals over time. The Library will make this collection available to researchers onsite at Library facilities. The Library also wishes to make the collection available to offsite researchers by hosting the collection on the Library’s public access Web site. The Library hopes that you share its vision of preserving Internet materials and permitting researchers from across the world to access them. If you agree to permit the Library to collect your Web site, please click the following link to signify your consent. This link also includes a separate consent for permitting the Library to provide offsite access to your materials through the Library’s Web site.
http://www.loc.gov/minerva/display_crawl_acceptance.php?id=OTA3Nzc=&pos=bGF3b2Z0aGVsYW5kLndvcmRwcmVzcy5jb20=&con=cHNhbGtAYWxiYW55bGF3LmVkdQ==&tc=TGVnYWwgQmxhd2dz

at your earliest convenience. For more information about other Web Archive collections please visit http://www.loc.gov/webcapture

For several years, the Library of Congress has collected Web sites within certain themes or topics for which we were required to seek permission for each new collection developed by the Library, even if permission had been granted in the past. As our collections have grown, we have had to contact some Web site producers repeatedly. To reduce this duplication and to save site owners from having to respond to multiple requests for information, we are now requesting permissions for the Library to collect, over time and in varying frequency, sites of research interest. Your site has been identified as a Web site of interest related to Legal Blawgs. If you grant this permission, we will capture your site for inclusion in our Legal Blawgs Web Archive and may also include it in any future collections. If in the future you no longer wish to be included in the Library’s Web archives, please contact us and we will cease collection of your URL.

Our Web archives related to government and law are important because they contribute to the historical record of national events, capturing information that could otherwise be lost. With the growing role of the Web as an influential medium, records of historic events could be considered incomplete without materials that were born digital and never printed on paper.For more information about our Web Archive collections please visit our Web site at (http://www.loc.gov/webcapture/).

If you have questions, comments or recommendations concerning the Legal Blawgs Archive project, please e-mail the Library’s Web Capture team at webcapture@loc.gov at your earliest convenience. For more information about other Web Archive collections please visit http://www.loc.gov/webcapture

 

Laptops in the Classroom

In a post on the Best Practices blog, Alfred Mathewson explains:

 …In Contracts this fall, I plan to experiment with bringing my laptop to class rather than using the big screen for Power Point presentations. I will use a TWEN course site. They will be able to annotate the PowerPoint but they will have no need to spend course time copying the slides. They will, however, have to use the laptop to see the PowerPoint. As I see it, we must prepare students to practice in an era far more technologically advanced than the one in which we were educated.

and Jaime comments:

This is a good attitude. Like calculators or anything else, I think the key is to sift good uses from bad…

as well as Rob Schwartz:

…Of course, I applaud Alfred’s truly creative efforts to find out the best uses for these and other forms of classroom technology. Should he succeed in finding such uses, it won’t be the first time that my teaching practices will change as a result of his innovation.

The key is to find GOOD uses for laptops rather than just banning them.

TWEN Gets Updated

Read an article entitled: “Socializing the CMS” in this month’s Campus Technology magazine, reminded me of the some of the changes in our CMS – TWEN.

So far, these are some of the changes:

• New Course Home Page – cleaner and easier to integrate pictures, documents and links to other media on your homepage. Drag and drop content modules give you more flexibility when it comes to arranging the materials on your home page.
• Document Pages – folders will replace categories; new icons will mark the document type (e.g. Word, WordPerfect, PDF); batch upload will be available for uploading multiple files; new PowerPoint viewer will allow you to page through the slides instead of scrolling down the page; click and drag page items for custom sorting.
• Forums – posting rules set by the administrator will be explicit on the forum; easily review chronological threads on a single page rather than clicking to view postings; each forum will have Reply, Quote and Print options.
• Gradebook / Assignment Drop Box – you will have the ability to batch download all of the most recent submissions to a single assignment; late submissions will be marked in red to easily determine at a glance which submissions were not turned in on time.
• Enhanced Text Editor – on the new forums, document pages and course home page, with Black’s Law Dictionary terms added to the spell checker.
• Upcoming Events List – quick glance at seven days worth of calendar events on the TWEN home page.

Coming in August will be:

• RSS Feeds – anyone using an RSS reader can add a TWEN forum topic to their RSS reader to keep up to date on new postings.
• Sign Up Sheets – you can share sign-up sheets across your other TWEN Courses making it easier to schedule things such as office hours.
• Custom Polling – create multiple questions with the ability to have an unlimited number of answer boxes.