BUILDING AWESOME LIBRARY WEB APPS WITH OPEN SOURCE

Presenter(s):

Tom Boone, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles

Jason Eiseman, Yale Law School

From the CALI conference session Web site:

Historically librarians have viewed themselves as information gatekeepers. But as users come to expect information ubiquity, librarians must learn to unleash, aggregate, and even create content and push it out by creating their own applications. Open source technologies offer the opportunity for librarians build useful web applications. Presenters will show real library applications created with open source technologies and the tools used to create them. You’ll see how complex web design problems, technological limitations, and economic realities were overcome to deliver useful and awesome web apps.

If you’d like access to the presentation materials, please visit the CALI conference Web site. You can obtain the presentation links at the presenter’s diigo site.

Filed under: General

Law office technology: Why it needs to be in your school’s curriculum and how to get it there

Presenter(s):

Wayne Miller, Duke University School of Law

Kenneth Hirsh, University of Cincinnati College of Law

David Whelan, Law Society of Upper Canada

From the CALI conf. Web site:

The importance of information technology for the legal profession is beyond question. The panelists in this session will examine the history of technology in law to generate an argument for what students should know about technology in order to function well in today’s legal environment. Building on that argument, the panelists will present, on the basis of their own experiences, an idealized course as a set of modules that expose students to that set of information and those skills needed. There will be ample time for discussion. Co-presenters are Wayne Miller, Ken Hirsh and David Whelan.

You can download the materials from this presentation at the CALI conference Web site.

Filed under: General

Crowdsourcing and Open Access v2.0

Timothy K. Armstrong
Assistant Professor of Law
U. of Cincinnati
timothy.armstrong@uc.edu

Improving access to scholarship and primary source materials.

Many open-access repositories exist:

• single institution (Harvard, one day; Duke, OCU)
• cross-institution (SSRN, Expresso, LexOpus)

Faculty adopting open-access mandates

• Harvard (but John Palfrey says compliance is an issue)

Law reviews going open-access, too

• Open Access Law Program

The Durham Statement (2009)

Going Digital has four steps. First, scanning the documents–actually getting into some kind of digitized format into the computer. How, then do you get the text into a readable format? Then, you need to proofread and correct text. Finally, how do you distribute it in a way that is “findable” and “searchable.”

It is important that you do not try to do these four steps by yourself. Look outside of your institution for help. A lot of this work has already been done so why recreate the wheel? For example, the Google Books, Internet Archive, Library of Congress–places to go that have already cleared one of these hurdles. Once you have the scans there are various free Web sites that  offer services will ocr the text for you (Any2DjVu). Now we start get into tasks that scale. There are two

Distributed Proofreaders (affiliated with Project Gutenberg) and Wikisource (a sister site of Wikipedia). The pros of DP are they are very large and supportive and is fast, at least in the early rounds. The cons are that is it bureaucratic & hierarchical, new users cannot add texts and few texts of interest to the legal community. With Wikisource, the pros are that any user can add or edit any work, there is an easier user interface and many legal texts are already available. The cons are that they are much smaller than DP or Wikipedia and slower to complete proofreading projects.

You can collect his slides on his Google docs page.

Filed under: Educational Technology, General, Instructional Technology, Legal Education , cali09

IT and Faculty as Partners in Education: Basic Tools For Change

Greg Clinton

James Beckwith

North Carolina Central University

From the CALI Web site session description:

NCCU School of Law has had tremendous success with the faculty adapting and embracing technology. Currently over 90% of the faculty uses technology for instructional purposes. This session will discuss the technology environment at NCCU and hear from faculty about their usage of technology to include, classroom capturing solutions, clickers, smart classrooms, group study rooms,etc. IT and faculty have become more like partners in the deployment and usuage of technolgy. This session will discuss this partnership as the basic tool for change.

You must know the benefit from the faculty member’s point of view.

See Raising the Bar.doc.

Filed under: Educational Technology, General, Instructional Technology, Legal Education , cali09, faculty

Cool Gadgets, Software and Utilities Every Faculty Member Should Have

Sydney A. Beckman
Dean and Professor of Law
SydBeckman@gmail.com

Duncan School of Law – Lincoln Memorial University

Syd Beckman

See the list of gadgets he discusses on my delicious page. You can also download his powerpoint from the CALI conference Web site.

Filed under: Educational Technology, Favorite Tech Sites, General, Instructional Technology, Legal Education, My Teaching , cali09, gadget

Publish or Perish: Publish or Perish: Online Reformation to

Carl F. Berger, Emeritus, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

provide tools for scholars

• zotero
• diggo
• sakai

These tools may be reused in the future for things far more powerful. Can we support at the technical level (does it work) and support level for the millennial scholar (in use/practice)?

change recognition and reward structure

1. Formally recognize the scholarly value of academic technology
2. Create a body to evaluate the scholarly merit of academic technology efforts
3. Revise policies concerning intellectual property rights as they relate to the creation of computer-based instructional tools and resources
4. Facilitate the publication and/or distribution of computer-based instructional tools and resources

• see http://carat.umich.edu/carat/reports

change in publishing

• Supports research on intersections of content, pedagogy and edia
• includes multimedia documents
• peer reviewed by colleagues
• publication interactive and multimedia
• development of community

support a paradigm shift

• share publication tools and sites
• encourage intersections
• encourage research on intersections
• lobby administration
• build in assessment
• disseminate studies
• share resources
• completely reform publishing

Watch the session.

Filed under: General

From Knowledgeable to Knowledge-able @ ELI

This presentation is given by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. The description states “It took tens of thousands of years for writing to emerge after speech, thousands more before the printing press was invented, and a few hundred more for the telegraph to arrive. Today, new ways of relating are constantly created and a new communication medium emerges every time someone creates a web application—a Flickr here, a Twitter there. How can we use new media to foster the kinds of communication and community we desire in education? This presentation will discuss both successful and unsuccessful attempts to integrate emerging technologies into the classroom to create a rich virtual learning environment.”

This kind of classroom of today is saying “to learn” is to acquire information, information is scarce and hard to find, trust authority for good information, authorized information is beyond discussion, and obey authority. Some of the people criticizing the  “back to basics” critique of new media literacy are saying we are pandering to students, neglecting basic literacy skills and it is difficult to implement. The response to this is that the critical folks of back to basics are the ones pandering to students, neglecting basic literacy skills (b/c basic skills are now including being digitally literate) and difficult to implement.

“Back to Basics” includes asking good questions (or one big question) instead of questions like, how many points is this worth?, how long does this paper need to be?, what do we need to know for this test?, etc. This new media scape all around us is challenging these assumptions. Information is everywhere, its not about authority its about good discussions, authority needs to be transparent, and learning is dependent upon participation and discussion (not just obeying authority). To learn is to share information, discussing, critiquing and ultimately creating new information. The old notion of your mind is container that needs to be “filled up”, it is creating meaningful connections of significance. So as educators, how do we create significance? How can we create students that can create meaningful connections?

1. Engage real problems (that matter to students)
2. Engage with students in this process

He is arguing that there is a lot of talk about Digital Natives, but there are no natives here. With the exception of Google, most of these new Web 2.0 technologies are less than 4 years old. So in essence, we (students & teachers) are all learning together. He suggests utilizing portals (looks like a combination of Wetpaint and Netvibes) with RSS feeds (from scholars all over the world engaging in the same subject matter), collaborative video (see his Youtube video for Library of Congress and his Twitter and World Simulation video), diigo (share links, highlight any page anywhere and add sticky notes), feed from wiki (logs edits, immediate feedback who is editing what, photos on left with pictures that get bigger with more participation), students share lecture notes, and discussion sections. His focus is on different ways of creating learning communities in his classroom through exploiting some of these technologies.

“Nobody is as smart as everybody”-Kevin Kelly

Filed under: Educational Technology, General, Instructional Technology, web 2.0

Educause Learning Initiative: U.S. 2009 Horizon Report

I am at the Educause Learning Initiative (ELI) for a couple of days. My current session is debriefing the technologies, trends and challenges of the 2009 Horizon Report (also see the workspace Wiki for the Horizon Project). The report has been downloaded over 45,000 times so far. The following is from a handout they gave out during the session (2009, The New Media Consortium):

Technologies:

• Mobiles
• Cloud Computing
• Geo-Everything
• The Personal Web
• Semantic-Aware Applications
• Smart Objects

Trends:

• Increasing globalization continues to affect the way we work, collaborate, and communicate.
• The notion of collective intelligence is redefining how we think about ambiguity and imprecision.
• Experience with and affinity for games as learning tools is an increasingly universal characteristic among those entering higher education and the workforce.
• Visualization tools are making information more meaningful and insights more intuitive.
• As more than one billion phones are produced each year, mobile phones are benefiting from unprecedented innovation, driven by global competition.

Challenges:

• There is a growing need for formal instruction in key new skills, including information literacy, visual literacy, and technological literacy.
• Significant shifts are taking place in the ways scholarship and research are conducted, and there is a need for innovation and leadership at all levels of the academy.
• We are expected, especially in public education, to measure and prove through formal assessment that our students are learning.
• Higher education is facing a growing expectation to make use of and to deliver services, content and media to mobile devices.

You can watch the session in full online.

Filed under: Educational Technology, General, Instructional Technology, web 2.0 , eli

Collaboration Tools

I am attending a Boston area Ed Tech group that meets periodically to share ideas around instructional technology in higher in education. Today, we are discussing real time collaboration technology.

The first speaker (Peter Hess, MIT) is discussing different Web conferencing software. The first technology, Yugma, wasn’t working well (due to network issues) so we skipped it. It is a free web conferencing technology so feel free to check that out at a later time. We are looking at ooVoo, a free online video chat and video conferencing.

The free version provides:

• 3-way live video chats
• Unlimited 1-minute video messages
• Share and send files up to 25MB each
• Video effects

Moving on to Vidyo, we have another Web conferencing software to demonstrate. This company is the first to take advantage of the most recent enhancement to the H.264 standard for video compression.

People in the meeting are now introducing themselves and discussing what they are doing with Web conferening efforts at their own school. We hear people are using WebEx, Elluminate, Adobe Connect, Radvision, Wimba, and Saba Centra.   Many are still in an evaluation stage and some mention they aren’t satisfied with the results (e.g., performance issues).  People are using Web conferencing for faculty consultations with students, conferencing, meetings, online video technologies for the library and distance learning.

Phil Knutell from Bentley is talking about their 17M library renovation. You can see his slides from the Nercomp Web site. View some of the new rooms on the Bentley Web site. People in his class are required to do presentations. Students are required to give feedback to people about their presentation via the class Wiki (located on Blackboard). Peer evaluation is done using survey tool in Google spreadsheets. He states it is simpler to use than Perseus SurveySolutions or SurveyMonkey. He also creates a syllabus in Google docs means he does not have to upload or download the file. He simply inserts links to published doc from the course Bb site.

• Hybrid class support team:
  • Got tired of tracking versions/revisions & not being able to edit if checked out
  • Wanted public URL on web server so TAs could view, but uploading to web server or using SharePoint a hassle
  • Inviting collaborators, assigning permissions, & learning to use very easy (95% of most-used Office 2007 features)
• Library wiki and blog allow entire staff to contribute

Daniel Jamous from FAS asks about student privacy issues. Phil states it can become an issue if you let it become an issue. Google states they are a higher education focused server. Yes, the student information is stored on their server but they state they don’t have any interest in accessing it.  For K-12 and higher ed, google applications is free. Are their FERPA issues? Possibly. He is impressed with the company’s commitment to privacy.

Filed under: Educational Technology, General, Instructional Technology

CALI 2008: Using Animation in Class-Bring your Hypos to Life

Marjorie A. McDiarmid, Professor of Law @ West Virginia University College of Law

Teach about 125 students Evidence in Fall. Students have difficulty thinking of applying how Evidence works in practice. It is like learning how to play chess without ever seeing the chess board. She uses turning point technology to group responses based upon the original decision to sustain or overrule. You can see if people made a mistake on the first question whether that mistake carries forward. What we are doing is giving people a slice of a courtroom example. In her view, she doesn’t need a complicated 10 or 15 role play to get to the point where she can get to with this technology.  The other pro is that you can put something like this together in 15 minutes. It is much more labor intensive to build a role play. The advantages of using this methodology, is that it is more attention getting and in some fundamental way, more concrete. The students are seeing how those questions get asked in a courtroom setting and she can teach the students the skill of how to hear it. It has to involve not only training of the mind, but absorption of the materials as they come and reaction time. 

Vox Proxy is the software she uses to create the animation within PowerPoint (see a demo PPT here). The high price is around $200, but there is educational pricing that is much less. There is also a thirty day free trial. Vox Proxy does not work on a MAC. She did a quick demo of how you can add characters, movement and dialog to the simulation.  If you are looking for something a little more advanced, I did a quick search and found someone who stated Antics is like “Vox Proxy on steroids”. She feels the animation makes concrete the situations that students may have trouble visualizing. Then, she can get the audience engaged when she employs the TurningPoint technology.

Filed under: General