June 30, 2007 • 10:22 pm 0
At TED 2007, a demo of Seadragon and Photosynth:
Trendalyzer software:
Journey into the Center of the Earth:
This is from TED 2006 Multi-touch inter-sensing:
I wish all these technologies were class plaform! [read: on a MAC!!]
Filed under: General
June 25, 2007 • 2:37 pm 1
Video taken from http://barillari.org/blog/computers/howtowaste.html on 6/25/07.
HLS moved three historic houses this past Saturday, in order to make room for a new construction project in the NW yard. If you would like to read more about the move, visit the Boston Globe. Here is the Law School’s Web page detailing the plans for the new building. The model looks very impressive! If all goes as planned, ITS (the department where I work) should be relocated to the basement of this building in 2011…
Filed under: General
June 23, 2007 • 4:12 pm 0
Dr. Scott McLeod gave the primary keynote at the annual CALI conference this year. He started by showing this video and followed with a discussion about how well we are preparing our children to be equipped for the jobs in the US. The highest paying jobs will be in the “creative” arena while service and skill based labor will continue to be outsourced overseas.
Did You Know? is licensed by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod, and XPLANE under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike license
Filed under: General
June 20, 2007 • 4:26 pm 1
Rob Curley delivered the second keynote at the CALI 2007 conference yesterday. He is a vice president at the Washington Post, but his irreverent style, self-admitted red-bull addiction and child-like demeanor would never peg him for the role normally reserved for stuffed shirts in neckties. While I kind of wished his talk tied back to legal education a bit more–overall, it was a funny, witty and a completely fresh look at how to conceptualize not only how to go about integrating all these new technologies that keep emerging, but also how to manage your own career. Unfortunately, there is not a video yet of his talk, but as soon as it becomes available I will post it here for you all. He highlighted a few of his projects that he explains under the terminology of being “hyperlocal”, or using all of these great technologies to magnify local events to an level never seen before. He says hyperlocal is so local you can’t print it because if you did there would be too many pages. He credits his success in part to his extensive use of the “technology” Internology. This is the practice of getting a whole lot of interns to do a lot of work for very little to no money. He also credits his success with getting a bunch of “MENSA Nerds”, surrounding yourself with them and then getting out of the way. Rob also loves databases and applications that are driven on databases. When you can’t find the information or people won’t give you the information, get creative. He tried to get stats of players from one of the local universities and they wouldn’t release the information. Therefore, he simply called the players mothers who were happy to supply them with everything they would ever need to know and more on each player every Wednesday.
Here is a list of some of his team’s accomplishments. Here are a couple of my favorites:
If you want to know more about Rob right now, read this great interview from Frontline or watch this video of a keynote he gave in April 2006 by clicking on the picture below:
Filed under: General
• 3:51 pm 0
John Mayer announced on June 19th that there is a new collaboration between HLS and CALI that is resulting in the establishment of a new research fellowship. The Legal Education Commons debuted at last year’s conference, Rip, Mix Learn, is known as “elangdell” after the first Dean at HLS, Christopher Columbus Langdell. This will be a place where faculty and students can begin to eliminate the publisher in the middle of the equation. Faculty can now offer students open, uncopyrighted course materials like course packs, casebooks, video and audio. Gene Koo, a graduate of HLS and current Berkman Center Fellow, has been named the first person to receive this fellowship. Gene recently wrote a white paper on better preparing students for practical lawyering. He centers on:
If you haven’t read this paper and are in the business of creating lawyers like we are, you should take a minute to read this. I also would like to congratulate Gene on being the first pioneer in eLangdell!
In addition, John Mayer announced that the Berkman Center and CALI will be focusing on research and the development of legal instruction tools to advance practical skills like client interaction, negotiations and trial advocacy.
( from http://caliopolis.classcaster.org/blog/legal_education/2007/06/19/elangdell on 6/20/2007)
Filed under: General
June 13, 2007 • 6:45 pm 0
The Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) is holiding its annual conference next week in Las Vegas. New this year is a conference Wiki with all of the conference sessions outlined. I am interested in the following, to name a few.
Web 2.0 Applications in Education Today
New Skills, New Learning: Legal Education and the Promise of New Technologies
Stay tuned next week as I will be blogging on some of the sessions I attend. For now, I will leave you with John Mayer’s keynote from last year that was fantastic.
Here is a great blog that breaks down his talk.
Filed under: General
June 5, 2007 • 11:46 pm 1
What Side Do You See?
Recently I had a conversation with someone about instructional technology who was focused on figuring out a baseline standard for service and usage for faculty. This person was trying to look at instructional technology through the same lens as you would apply standards to desktop support and training. The opinion offered was that it is just a matter of time before faculty would not have a choice whether they could choose to use technology or not—that, once the up-and-coming ‘digital native’ students hit the shores of Cambridge all faculty would be forced to embrace the holy grail that is technology adoption in their instruction. This person also believed that, soon, the pressure exerted on faculty from students would be so great that they could no longer individually deny using the technology in their teaching.
I, personally, have to respectfully disagree with this.
While I see the merit of this particular person’s point of view (from a view point of management and strategic planning), I find the point of view flawed in practicality. For one, I don’t think all students born into the digital era are automatically ‘techies’ ready to protest the absence of certain expected technologies—especially those coming to the Law School. In fact, I strongly believe that if a technology isn’t supported by the school, they won’t necessarily demand it from the administration. They will, to quote Harvard CIO Dan Moriarty from a recent campus workshop I attened, “vote with their feet”. They will build it themselves or find it out on the Internet in the land of Web 2.0. We, as university administrators, have to figure out whether that is undesirable, and if so, why. Another thing to consider, is even though these students may now all have Facebook pages, instant message clients, cell phones and know how to use a computer, they may not natively know how to increase their understanding through the use of a computer. Do they feel the same passion for using technology with their learning that they do with their socialization and entertainment? Playing games and socializing using technology is one thing, but learning is a whole other arena.
If there needs to be a baseline standard anywhere for usage, it may lie with the students, over the professors. I envision our law schools need to try to help better prepare our law students to have more practical skills using technology. It would be great to have standards like being able to practically draft a contract electronically or execute a dynamic presentation in a courtroom. Even with student standards on usage, you can’t apply a “one size fits all” mentality.
I don’t think there should ever be a set of instructional technology standards for usage that is forced upon any teacher or professor. I am from a school of thought that sometimes the best teaching occurs in the absence of technology—especially in law where there are teaching methods like the Socratic Method. While I agree that having these baselines for service may be desirable in instructional technology, producing baselines for usage is a slippery slope. For example, I was just talking to a Harvard professsor (not at Harvard Law School), and we were discussing my upcoming thesis. She took me to task because I waited so long in my paper to address the point of technology relevance to the faculty member. I do eventually address this point, but she felt it is so important it needs to be presented as one of the first and main themes of the argument for instructional technology usage. She stresses the importance of the ‘technology expert’ that consults individually with a faculty member one-on-one in order to to demonstrate how the technology is going to be useful to her. She needs to see how it specifically ties in with what she is trying to accomplish in her classroom.
I happen to wholeheartedly agree.
(Image retrieved on June 5, 2007 from http://www.youramazingbrain.org/supersenses/necker.htm)Filed under: Educational Technology, Instructional Technology, Legal Education
June 4, 2007 • 5:49 pm 0
Here is another quick video that sums up Web 2.0 which is great!
Video By:
Michael Wesch
Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology
Kansas State University
Filed under: Educational Technology
• 5:45 pm 0
I love this breakdown by Ethan Zuckerman…
Filed under: General
June 3, 2007 • 3:39 pm 0
This speaks for itself:
I heart SJ and Apple.
Filed under: General
