Teknoids

"Please Pay Attention" is the working title of the new podcast series. We would love to get suggestions from listeners to name this podcast.

Elmer Masters and I talk about legal education-related IT topics several times a week and we have threatened in the past to turn some of those conversations into podcasts because we believe that others might benefit. Alternatively, others might listen and set us straight.

So we have followed up on our threat and recorded the first in a series of podcasts. The general topic area is IT in legal education/law schools. We don't expect to be the only voices on this podcast as we will be inviting "guest speakers" - that is - real IT folks who work at real jobs in real law schools.

But for this first podcast, we decided to keep it between just me and Elmer and talk about Drupal (Elmer attended DrupalCon in Boston last week), Drupal, the massively popular open source content management system and related topics on law school website design, development and administration issues.

We have a theme!!!

"Transforming Legal Educaction" is the theme for the 2008 Conference for Law School Computing.

We'll be posting links for registration and putting out a call for speakers soon. All of these links will be here.

Before the interior of sub-Saharan Africa was known, mapmakers would leave it blank or dark and so Africa was known as the "Dark Continent".

This graphic from 2005 shows that Africa is still the Dark Continent in terms of Internet accessibility.

This map shows the reason why ...

Although this map is from 2004, it's illustrative of the problem. Here's a closer look at Nigeria where I am most interested...

My travels took me to the Abuja campus which is the largest of the four campuses of the Nigerian Law School. There are 1600 students enrolled here and the picture above shows just about all of them.

Because the room is so big, I took three pictures and stitched together. If you click on the picture (or here), you can see a larger version.

I can't imagine teaching to such large classes. It's more like a rock concert or a church service and the parallels are not far off in terms of individual interactivity between the teacher and student. This is the problem. To the hapless students sitting in the back row, they can learn just as well from a tape recording of the lecture - perhaps better because they can pause and rewind, listen over and over and choose the time and place to listen.

Yesterday, I visited the Kano Campus of the Nigerian Law School. Kano is in the north of Nigeria and is NIgeria's second most populous city after Lagos. The law school is a long way away from the city center and resides on a large and beautiful campus of a former conference center/resort.

My estmeed host, Professor Nasirdeen Usman took me on a thorough tour of the place which is undergoing much renovation (and much needed). We interrupted a class on Evidence that was being taught to the 400 students and since it was Monday, I took a picture to contrast to the "casual day" picture from my last post.

As you can see, the status quo is black suites, white shirts and black ties. Women dress in business black for class. The temperature in the room was around 70 degrees Farenheit - actually cold to the Nigerians. During the rainy season, it can get quite hot and damp. The students were not "kids" either. Most looked to be in the their 30's or 40's and upon questioning I learned that this is true of most law students at the Nigerian Law Schools. Many government officials, policemen and former military go to law school.

The picture above was taken during my visit of the Enugu campus of the Nigerian Law School this just past Friday. This was my second stop of four. I am visiting all four campuses of the Nigerian Law School - Lagos, Enugu, Abuja and Kano.

While touring the Enugu campus, we dropped in on a Property class in progress and I was asked to say a few words on the spot.

I looked out over the 1000+ students (which is how they each law in Nigeria) and was dazzled by the colorful clothing. Many students were wearing traditional outfits and so I complimented them on the brightness of their clothing and urged them to mirror that brightness in their studies of law.

I am off to the airport in a few short hours to travel to Lagos, Nigeria for nine days visiting the four campuses that make up the Nigerian Law School. All lawyers who hope to practice in Nigeria must complete a year or more of study at one of the campuses of the Nigerian Law School.

I have been asked to visit the facilities and provide some advice on ICT-related matters. I have never been to Africa and although I won't have much time for looking around, I am thrilled by this opportunity to expand my horizons.

I hope to blog some of my experiences as well as some of my thinking. It's a tall order to be asked to consult on an entire country's legal education system in any capacity and I feel the weight of that responsibility.

In early discussions with my hosts, I find that they have the same questions and concerns that I have heard over and over from U.S. law schools and law faculty. One of their biggest concerns is how to "interest faculty in technology who are not interested in using technology" ... a very familiar concern to me. This concern about motivating faculty was very comforting to me. I was concerned that I would be going into a situation with no common ground and instead find that the issues may be quite similar to the ones I address every day with CALI.

The 2008 Conference for Law School Computing will be held on Thursday - Friday, June 19 - 21, 2008 at the University of Maryland School of Law in Baltimore, MD.

We haven't set up the website or even put out a call for speakers yet because I am stumped on deciding a theme for this conference. After AALS, I was thinking of something like "From MacCrate to Carnegie: Back to the Future", but it doesn't have that much to do with Law School IT.

We ARE planning to have a dedicated track just for law faculty with all sorts of innovative presentations on technology that are specifically aimed at the classroom and teaching, but I can't really figure out how to make this work theme-wise.

So....

Below you will find some mockups for themes. Take a look and send me a note (jmayer@cali.org) with your suggestions or whether or not you especially love/hate any of these. I currently have comments turned off due to frequent comment-spam attacks.

CALI's Director of Membership, LaVonne Molde has pointed out that in my talk at AALS and in my slides, I list CALI as having only 206 U.S. law school members when that number should actually be 208!

Click here for the complete list and if you are a student or faculty at a law school that is NOT a member ... please tell me why not.

Here is the link to the screencast version of my talk at the 2008 Annual CALI Members Meeting held on Friday, January 5, 2008 in New York during AALS.

I had previously posted the podcast/audio recording and Powerpoint slides.

Here ...

AALS2008Carnegie.mp3

... is the recording of the AALS Session: Rethinking Legal Education For The 21st Century. The speakers included...

• Moderator: Edward L. Rubin, Vanderbilt University Law School
• Speakers: Vicki C. Jackson, Georgetown University Law Center
• Robert Mac Crate, Esq., Senior Counsel, Sullivan and Cromwell, New York, New York
• Martha L. Minow, Harvard Law School
• Suellyn Scarnecchia, University of New Mexico School of Law
• William M. Sullivan, Senior Scholar The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Palo Alto, California
  

Here is the recording of my talk at the 2008 Annual Membership Meeting for CALI during AALS in New York, NY on January 5, 2008 ... AALS2008CALIBreakfast.mp3

Here are the slides ... 2008AALSBreakfast_final.ppt

I will be posting a screencast version soon and posting more information about ELangdell into the future.

The Family was over to the house to celebrate Christmas yesterday. One of our many annual traditions is to sing the 12 days of Christmas with different individuals/groups handling each "number". Others are tasked to try to confuse them with alternate lyrics ... hilarity ensues.

Here you go... MayerFamily12days2007.mp3

Paul Caron, blog-emperor and CALI Board Member asked me to contribute to the fascinating thread about "Advice to Erwin Chemerinsky".

The biggest constraint was the 250 word limit.... here's my advice...

As the Executive Director of CALI, I read a lot of feedback from students that pertains to their perceptions of legal education. The single biggest thing that students crave is more feedback. Imagine if you took a job where you were paid at the end of 15 weeks based on your performance -better performance= more pay, but you weren’t told how well you were doing until the end of the 15 weeks. That’s law school. Students are studying hard, but they aren’t sure that they know what they know until the results of the final exam are in.

I would advise Dean Chemerinsky to mandate that all classes provide some form of personal feedback to all students. This doesn’t have to be graded, but it should be substantive. This could be in the form of midterm exams, quizzes or even students evaluating each other’s mini-essays or shared collections of multiple choice questions. The technology tools exist so that this isn’t an undue burden on the instructor or require the hiring of teaching assistants for every class.

It is worth noting that feedback can be bi-directional. The aggregate results of weekly quizzes can tell the instructor where she has lost the students and should provide some additional instruction. If instructors want to read really excellent final exams, then you have to make sure that students are on track throughout the semester. The surprises you get reading the finals are no less disconcerting than the surprises that the students get when you grade it.

I am so excited to make this post.

Here's the press release.