As part of my PhD research I am interested to reflect on the epistemologies of the critical legal studies (“CLS”) and law & society movements (“LSM”) in locating where my own project might be situated in the context of law research. Here are two videos, Part One and Part Two that are my ‘concept maps’ of the elements of these two ‘critical’ movements.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized by PleagleTrainer. Bookmark the permalink.It seems to me silly now, that it has taken me so long to realise this, but Prezi makes an excellent mind-mapping or concept-mapping tool.
I tend to use mind-mapping as I do my literature review, to give me a graphical overview of a topic or idea. One of the frustrations with mind-mapping is that larger, more complex ideas, can make for very big maps. Yes, one of the ‘disciplines’ of using mind maps is to aim for very concise representations of the idea, but in the course of accomplishing this it is handy to start with a wide-ranging, sometimes messy, whiteboard approach, to draw out all the threads before you condense them into key concepts.
What I am liking about Prezi (a dynamic alternative to the ubiquitous PowerPoint presentation software) is that you start with a blank canvas or light-board and you can toss down frames, images, text where you like, and then draw paths between them. You can zoom in and out and pan as if you are moving around the light-board. You can then run it as a presentation.
I have not long returned from the beautiful city of Vancouver in Canada, having attended the eighth International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic and Social Sustainability. What has been interesting about the conference has been the capacity of quite diverse academic and professional disciplines to converge in terms of their theoretical approach. That is to say, each presenter at the conference offered the opportunity to re-imagine an aspect of our world in terms of sustainability.One aspect of thinking about sustainability that struck me in particular from a number of presentations is the dimension of what I'll call professional thinking. For example one speaker discussed the effect of sustainability assessment tools in architecture competitions on the design of sustainable buildings. Her point, as I understood it, was that a more 'checklist' approach to architecture may detract from a more wholistic or qualitative approach. The latter approach would take into consideration factors that could impact (positively) more completely in terms of sustainability or eco-design.
Another speaker discussed the role of tertiary education in teaching our teachers. Amongst his points was that our graduates need humility and gratitude: teaching involves gratitude for the opportunity to serve and is humbling in the recognition of the centrality of the teacher's role. Such attitudes, in conjunction with a keen sense of community, lend themselves to a philosophy and approach as a professional that embody interconnectedness and engagement with both community and the natural world - preconditions for educating youth in and for sustainability.
Both these discussions resonated in terms of legal education and indeed the practice of law. The revision of the LLB at my own institution involves embedding sustainability as an overarching concept: a lens through which to learn the content mandated by our professional bodies. But importantly, it also provides a pedagogy or a strategy or approach for teaching that aligns with what I took from the two discussions above.
The legal profession in Australia has for some years been asking why so few women are partners in private practice; why there are so few non-metropolitan practitioners; why (law) student wellness is such an issue; why there are high reported rates of practitioner mental unwellness...
Based on these now well-known issues, there are moves in legal education to incorporate different ways of teaching law: methods of teaching that encourage resilience, a reflective approach to practice and self-management. These intersect with a greater emphasis on ethics - a move away from a traditional approach to ethics as a set of professional regulatory rules, to a more embedded approach that incorporates also 'soft' skills in communication and a more qualitative understanding of the nature of professionalism. It seems that the academy and the profession is in agreement about the need for a new approach (see eg here).
And so to what I took from the speakers at the sustainability conference. If we continue to teach our law students rules without context, and abstracted legal reasoning without attention to self, we run the risk of leaving a profession that is unsustainable. One which cannot support the justice system and serve society. One in which it is not sustainable for individuals to continue to practise. Sustainability is a complex concept and poses particular problems for lawyers who prefer to have a tight definition; and who see sustainability in law merely in terms of environmental regulation.
Sustainability is much more than this. It relates to our world and our place in it. It relates to law as justice in both human, environmental and ecological terms. It relates to our profession and to society; practitioner and client. It relates to our personal and our professional self. All of these aspects are inter-related and it is our responsibility to educate professionals who have the capacity to understand this and to experience these facets in a wholistic way.
Knowing laws does not make a professional and as with criteria for an architecture competition, adherence to a checklist of laws will not address wider and contextual issues that represent the essence of lawyering. As with teacher education, humility and gratitude embody the intersection of personal and professional, or two sides of the same coin. Our students deserve the opportunity to engage in their development during their study of law, and our profession and society deserves graduates who have this capacity.
First year law students are invariably regaled with the mantra of learning to think like a lawyer: that law school is all about developing this skill. As some have identified, 'thinking like a lawyer' is a nebulous concept at best, or at worst, a 'self-aggrandising sham...to justify the existence of a...special lawyer class'.There is however a mounting body of evidence to show that the culture of the law, including the way that lawyers think, is linked to stress experienced by law students and legal practitioners alike. (For example, see here and here.)While this creates issues for the sustainability of the legal profession as it sees an exodus of early- and mid-career practitioners, and women in particular, I believe it also takes a toll on the personal lives and relationships of lawyers.
Thinking Like a Lawyer at Work
I did not question the way I thought until I worked in community legal services alongside social workers. I was shocked to learn that there was another way of doing things. This stood me in good stead as I learned to work in a Native Title Representative Body, adopting different ways of thinking. However talking to other lawyers we would revert to our comfortable legal discourse and thinking like a lawyer.
Working with legal academics is akin to my years in the profession. We behave in similar ways and address problems in a similar way. I have observed though that engaging with academics from other disciplines has sometimes involved a degree of suspicion on their part and some observations about our ‘peculiar’ modes of thought: argumentative, adversarial, questioning, rule-based and obsessed with detail. (I remain unconvinced however by allegations of conservatism.)
These observations are pertinent, and cause me to reflect on the way in which others perceive me – including my students. Is the way in which I constantly question deemed to be an argumentative and adversarial (and therefore undesirable) mode of personal engagement? This question I think is relevant to legal education especially bearing in mind the role of emotions in learning.While there are many who have questioned the personal in terms of the culture of the profession (see for example here; here; and here) and the academy (see for example here and here). I also think that there is an additional dimension of ‘thinking like a lawyer’ – its impact on the personal in a lawyer’s personal life.Thinking Like a Lawyer at Home
I have shared my home life with a litigation lawyer for over 20 years. We are comfortable both talking law and talking legally. (‘You have my undertaking to fix the shelves on the weekend.’) Our approaches to relationships, life and parenting probably take a distinctively legal flavour. (Upon witnessing an ill-thought out U-turn, three year old says: ‘mummy isn’t that unlawful?’ The nine-year old in a first attempt at umpiring an under-eight hockey match, blows the first infringement and makes the bewildered five-year old player walk. The only conclusion I can draw is that our children are lawyers also.)
Explaining to my students that the law will take your brain apart and repackage it so you see the world differently is, I believe, no exaggeration. There isn’t a television program that can be watched at our place without discussion of the legal implications or deficits in argument from a legal perspective. (Watching a nature documentary: ‘Look at the whales frolicking in the Great Barrier Reef!’ Hmmm. I wonder which agencies approve a licence to get that close to those whales?)
I was recently talking with a friend from the profession about their new relationship. To a casual observer, we would probably have sounded as though we were discussing a legal matter in terms of our language and tone. It transpired that my friend had been using this language in discussing these personal issues with their new partner. It dawned on me that the tenor of this language could have seemed somewhat threatening to a non-lawyer – they were not speaking in a language that their new partner could understand. Instead of occurring in the professional arena though (as in the cross-disciplinary university context) this could affect the non-lawyer listener on a much more personal and emotional level.
In addition to the way in which we use language and problem-solve in every day life, there are other flow-on effects from our work. The first is the impact of our ongoing risk-assessment based on our experiences in the law. (I’ve met many, many lawyers who will not wear new clothes without washing them, as a consequence of reading Grant v Australian Knitting Mills.) Secondly, for those of us who see the worst in human nature through criminal and family law practice, there is potentially associated emotional trauma. Inevitably, this impacts upon one’s personal life.What are we doing about it?
Since the landmark ‘Courting the Blues’ Report in 2009, there has been a lot of work in the academy and in the profession to develop and implement strategies to transform the way we think about lawyering and legal education. I see this as a multi-layered and contemporaneous transformative process.We need to develop the capacity in our students for resilience and reflective practice. At the same time, we need to promote cultural change in the profession to accept diversity and more collaborative modes of practice and working arrangements. The lynchpin in this is the legal academy. It is our job to undertake the research to support such change in the profession and in legal education; and to educate the lawyers of the future in a way that will facilitate emotional literacy and self-management strategies to minimise the down-side of thinking like a lawyer.Post Script
There has been some interesting discussion on Twitter in response to this post - see here.
Image By Danieljamesbarton (Own work) [CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
July is the cruelest month for recent law school graduates. State bar exams next week are make-or-break affairs, determining how many will be allowed to practice law. Those exams once set a graduate on the path to a lifelong career. Not anymore.
I was having dinner this spring with, among other folks, a couple law school professors who taught at a good state school in the Midwest. I asked them if they had fears and trepidations like lawyers and business people do as to what they future may hold.
One of the law prof’s said absolutely, online education.
Last year he attended a online class on artificial intelligence co-taught by Stanford University computer science professor Sebastian Thrun and Google’s Peter Norvig. He was one of more than 160,000 students who took the class.
What made him most afraid was his belief that we were going to see rockstar professors being paid handsomely for teaching huge online classes. If we can have rock star athletes like LeBron James making millions, he said why not professors making millions by attracting large enrollment.
The U.S. News & World Report’s Ryan Lytle (@rlytle) reports that it’s not just law professors, a recent study reflects that college professors as a group are fearful of online education growth.
The report, which surveyed 4,564 faculty members, reveals that 58 percent of respondents “described themselves as filled more with fear than with excitement” over the growth of online courses within higher education.
The fears of college faculty are sustained by the consistent rise in popularity of online education during the past decade. The number of college students enrolled in at least one online course increased for the ninth straight year, with more than 6.1 million students taking an online course during fall 2010—a 10.1 percent increase over fall 2009, according to a separate Babson report.
Despite the majority of professors believing online classes have resulted in inferior education, 40 percent of full-time professors reported that online courses have the potential to match in-class instruction for learning outcomes.
Like in face-to-face learning environments, the success of the course is dependent on the quality of the instructor, Julanna Gilbert, executive director of the Office of Teaching and Learning at the University of Denver, told Lytle.
Per Dan Johnson, a senior lecturer at Wake Forest University, in order for faculty members to fully embrace online education in traditional settings, they must stop resisting these changes in technology.
The Internet has proven to be a disruptor for all industries and professions. Looks like college education, and law school in particular, is going to be no exception.
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ISSN 1445-6249
Introduction to Special Edition
Special Edition on Legal Education - Introduction
Articles
Using Sustainability to Inform Renewal of the LLB Foundation Curriculum: Knowledge, Skills and Attitudes for the Future
Kate Galloway, Mandy Shircore, Nichola Corbett-Jarvis, Rachel BradshawFrom Confusion to Confidence: Transitioning to Law School
Susan Armstrong and Michelle SansonManaging Distraction and Attention in Diverse Cohorts: 21st Century Challenges to Law Student Engagement
Anne MatthewLogical, Critical and Creative: Teaching 'Thinking Skills' to Law Students
Nick JamesReality Bytes: Using Technology in Mooting
Jennifer Yule, Judith McNamara and Mark ThomasBeyond the Whiteboard: E-Learning in the Law Curriculum
Rita ShackelBetter to Light a Single Candle than to Curse the Darkness: Promoting Law Student Well-being through a First Year Law Subject
Rachael Field and James DuffyPower in Legal Education: A (New) Critical and Analytical Approach
Matthew Ball
By James M. Lang
In January 2011, a trio of researchers published the results of an experiment in which they demonstrated that students who read material in difficult, unfamiliar fonts learned it more deeply than students who read the same material in conventional, familiar fonts.
Strange as that may seem, the finding stems from a well-established principle in learning theory called cognitive disfluency, which has fascinating implications for our work as teachers.
As the researchers pointed out in their article in the journal Cognition, both students and teachers may sometimes judge the success of a learning experience by the ease with which the learner processes or "encodes" the new information. But learning material easily, or fluently, may sometimes produce shallower levels of learning.
By contrast, "making material harder to learn," the authors wrote, "can improve long-term learning and retention. More cognitive engagement leads to deeper processing, which facilitates encoding and subsequently better retrieval." In other words, when students encounter cognitive disfluency, and have to put in more work in processing the material, it may sink in more deeply.
To test that principle, the researchers compared the learning results of two groups of subjects in a lab at Princeton University. Both groups were asked to memorize information about three (fictional) species of aliens that was presented to them in a way designed to mimic the biologic taxonomies they would learn in a typical introductory science course. One group read material in a common black font (Arial), and one read it in more unusual and difficult gray-scale fonts (Comic Sans MS and Bodoni MT).
The subjects had 90 minutes to memorize as much of the material as they could. Following a 15-minute delay, they were tested on their recall. The group that had read the alien taxonomies in unusual fonts scored, on average, 14 percentage points higher than the group that had processed the material in the more familiar font.
To find out if their results were more than a laboratory anomaly, the researchers produced a second experiment with the cooperation of a high school in Ohio.
They asked teachers in six courses to send in their supplementary materials for a unit, such as worksheets and PowerPoint slides. In each case, the instructor was teaching two sections of the same course. One set of materials, for the control group, was returned unedited to the teachers; the other set was manipulated into the more difficult fonts. After the unit was completed in each course—time periods that ranged from a week to a month—the researchers looked at how students had performed on tests of the material.
Once again, the results suggested that the difficult fonts produced better retention of the content. Although the contrast was not as striking as what the researchers had seen in the lab, it was statistically significant.
In their book The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us, the psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons recount the results of an experiment by another set of researchers. It offers an equally fascinating example of how disfluency during the learning process can produce greater retention of learned material. In this experiment, learners were shown two pairs of sentences:
- "Joey's big brother punched him again and again. The next day his body was covered by bruises."
- "Joey's crazy mother became furiously angry with him. The next day his body was covered with bruises."
A clear causal connection exists between the first pair of sentences. By contrast, as Chabris and Simons point out, "To understand the second pair of sentences, you must make an extra logical inference that you don't need in order to make sense of the first pair." And the result of the extra work you have to do in processing the second pair of sentences leads to the creation of a "richer and more elaborate memory for what you've read."
To put this as (over)simply as possible, learning material in fluent conditions—easy-to-read fonts, clear causal connections—is like driving to the grocery store on cognitive automatic pilot. You get from Point A to Point B, but you are not really paying close attention, and, hence, are unlikely to remember your trip in any detail later.
Learning material in disfluent conditions would be like driving to a grocery store in England if you are an American, having to navigate an unfamiliar route from the other side of the road. Getting the job done in such challenging conditions compels you to slow down and think more carefully, and so you are much more likely to remember details of the experience.
If we want our students to form what Chabris and Simons call a "richer and more elaborate memory" for our course material, the implication seems to be that we should find ways to force them out of their normal learning and processing modes and into states of cognitive disfluency. Print all of our course material in strange fonts, leave logical gaps that students have to close, or find other ways to push them out of automatic pilot. Make them drive on the wrong side of the road.
But, of course, if we push them too hard toward disfluency, we may end up discouraging them and shutting off their learning altogether. After all, if someone hands me a book in an eye-straining font, I may decide it's too much trouble to read. If I find someone's explanation of a difficult topic full of logical holes, I may write it off as not worthy of my time to consider.
The challenge that we face, then, is to create what psychologists call "desirable difficulties": enough cognitive disfluency to promote deeper learning, and not so much that we reduce the motivation of our students.
I have been puzzling over that challenge for months now, ever since I encountered the concept during the research and writing I have been doing about key principles of cognitive theory and their implications for college teaching.
Rather than continue to bang my solitary little head against the wall, I decided to pose this challenging puzzle to the participants in a workshop I was leading last month at the Institute for Pedagogy in the Liberal Arts, a gem of a teaching conference held each May on the campus of Oxford College of Emory University.
I asked the group to identify strategies that would be grounded in specific courses they taught, but generalizable to a wider variety of disciplines. After proposing many approaches, we noticed that we could group them together into a small handful of techniques, the top four of which are as follows:
- Ask students to process or translate course material using unusual rhetorical or expressive modes. I have always listened with skepticism to accounts of teachers asking their students to translate course concepts into 140-character status updates. But my workshop participants argued that having students take concepts and rework them in the form of a text message, or a Twitter update, or even visual representations or performances, could have the same defamiliarizing effect that might be achieved by a change in fonts.
- Require students to argue on behalf of unfamiliar positions. One of my participants was a political scientist who asks her students to debate issues in the Arab-Israeli conflict—and routinely requires them to argue against their personally held convictions. Another participant, who teaches a course for medical students on abortion, does the same. In both cases, they observed, students are forced into the uncomfortable and defamiliarizing position of having to look at a well-trod debate from a new angle.
- Ask students to find or identify mistakes. A professor of architecture noted that he occasionally makes mistakes while doing calculations on the board, and that his students had learned to watch out for those errors and correct him. A math professor then pointed out that he would sometimes deliberately seed mistakes into assigned problems and ask students to find them. In both cases students were nudged out of the mode of simply observing or running through the problems on automatic pilot. That may seem like an artificial technique, or like playing games with students—but only until you stop and think about how many jobs require people to review presentations, problems, performances, or communications and make sure they are mistake-free.
- Plan for failure. A faculty member in chemistry said you can wake students up by asking them to undertake short experiments that are designed to fail. Rather than simply going through the motions of a lab, and finding the expected result planned for them by the teacher, students learn what every experienced researcher in the world knows: that experiments, like scholarly research of any kind, almost never proceed exactly as you planned them, and that you can learn a lot from your failures.
I suspect that my workshop participants and I barely scratched the surface of techniques that might push students out of their familiar ways of thinking.
I invite readers of The Chronicle to continue the conversation we started, and offer their own suggestions for creating cognitive disfluency in the classroom. (For a fuller list of suggestions from our workshop, and a list of the faculty members who developed the ideas described here, please see my Web site, at www.jamesmlang.com.)
James M. Lang is an associate professor of English at Assumption College and author of "On Course: A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Semester of College Teaching" (Harvard University Press, 2008). He writes a monthly column for The Chronicle on teaching and learning, and welcomes reader mail directed to his attention at careers@chronicle.com.
Currently presenting at a conference organized by the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. I was invited by Agusti Cerillo Martinez, the Director of the Law & Political Science Dept to speak on simulation and legal education; and I've focused on issues of the assessment of professional education.
Practice makes perfect (or as close as)Can we train for an Ethical Dilemma? I think we can.
Many of us train for emergencies or unexpected events. We have learned that preparing for adversity helps us to respond to it. We practice building evacuations, CPR, larger organisations have disaster management and recovery plans.
From a learning point of view, we know that our knowledge of information, mental procedures and psychomotor procedures can improve with practice. In sport we practice physical skills such as a golf swing to learn good habits and to ‘hard wire’ our muscle memory.
You can probably discern where I am going with this. I submit that lawyers need to practice their ethical-decision making skills as a part of their preparation for and response to ethical dilemmas.
It seems logical to me to start with undergraduate law students and to persist with this training through the practical legal training period and beyond. Older lawyers need to keep up their training too. (I am thinking of the boiling frog analogy: the ethical environment can change so slowly that the lawyer may not realise she or he has overstepped the ethical boundaries until it is too late)
I submit that working with an Ethical Decision Making Model (EDDM) is one very good tool to use as a part of our training. I emphasise that it is a tool and not a prescription for success.
The EDDM is very useful because: it provides us with ‘way points’ to pause and reflect on factors relevant to our decision-making; it is a process that can be learned and remembered with practice; the process helps us to develop a systematic or methodical approach to responding to tangible and intangible problems; and adopting such a process assists us in giving an account of our decision-making for practice management, risk management and regulatory and disciplinary purposes.
I have set out an example EDDM below. [1] There are several varieties of such models and I encourage people to choose or adapt the variety that resonates with them. [2]
The first figure shows the way points: Assess the Situation, Assess the relevant Values, weigh the material Dispositional and Character factors, make a Comprehensive Assessment of the data collected, and then express and record the Decision. This can be an iterative process with a number of cycles allowing for review and fine-tuning of the decision-making.
Fig. 1
The second figure opens up the Assess the Situation way point. We collect Facts, identify the Persons involved or affected, consider possible Alternatives in responding to the situation, investigate the immediate Consequences of each alternative and the longer-term consequences of the alternatives.
Fig. 2
Figure 3 explores the Values waypoint. We identify the Values material to the situation and to us. Values may include humanist values such as respect for life, ideas of justice and fairness, and the keeping of promises (covenantal integrity). Values would include professional values derived from the written and unwritten professional rules and also the relevant law. In considering values we should also investigate the consequences if the proposed decision were Universalised – what impact would that have long-term for the community generally and what are the implications for processes and procedures. Would the proposed response be procedurally sustainable?
Fig. 3
Figure 4 shows the Dispositional/Character factors way point. For lawyers that might involve asking ourselves “What kind of lawyer do I want to be?” The same question could be expressed more broadly: “What kind of law firm do we want to be?” “What kind of community do we want to be?” Then we can consider how our propose response to the ethical dilemma fits with our dispositional or character factors.
Fig. 4
At figure 5 we arrive at the Comprehensive Assessment way point. Here we examine and reflect on all the data we have gathered so far from each of the previous way points. As part of our assessment we may prioritise or give great weight to certain factors over others. We must provide reasons for doing this. We should test our assumptions and also verify or validate the data we have collected. We may be ready to frame a decision. Having done that, we would test that proposal for its fitness. Is it the most fitting decision given everything we know so far? Can we explain why? (If we cannot provide a plain language written explanation we may have a problem).
Fig. 5
The figure belows follows on from the previous statement. If called upon to do so, can we give an account of our decision? Can we show that the decision is not only desirable but feasible? Is it practical? Is it sustainable?
Fig. 6
Now we may be ready to express the decision and to proceed. Alternatively, through this process we may have identified potential gaps or blind spots in our data. If so, we should cycle through the process again, until we are confident we have executed the process using good material data.
Fig. 7
At first, this process may seem arduous. However, like learning times tables at school or evacuating a building, practice soon allows us to use such processes as second nature and it no longer seems too difficult. That said, each way point demands full attention and intellectual rigour; those are habits we can practice until they become second nature too.
Fig. 8
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1. I have drawn heavily on the model in Preston, N., Understanding Ethics. 3 ed. 2007, Sydney: The Federation Press.
2. See for example the DECIDE model in Le Brun, M., Enhancing Student Learning of Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility in Australian Law Schools by Improving Our Teaching. Legal Education Review, 2001. 12(1 & 2): p. 269-285.
THE economics of legal education are broken. The problem is that the cost of a law degree is now vastly out of proportion to the economic opportunities obtained by the majority of graduates. The average debt of law graduates tops $100,000, and most new lawyers do not earn salaries sufficient to make the monthly payments on this debt.
Integrating social media into academia is not a novel idea. And since you are reading this, chances are you probably have been utilizing some feature of social media in the classroom for years. What is more interesting is asking why academia should exploit social media and, more specifically, Twitter.
Some learners are effective at self-regulation; that is, they guide their learning through metacognition – thinking about their own learning – and through strategic action and evaluation of their own progress. Research has shown that such learners will outperform inadequate self-regulators in nearly every aspect of learning. So, as educators, our goal is to infuse our learners with knowledge, but do so in a way that also improves their self-regulatory practices for future learning.
Increasing metacognitive awareness (knowing what you know, and what you don’t know) is critical for better self-regulation. Researchers have also pointed out that most learners are deficient in performing basic metacognitive skills and will not actively pursue metacognitive activities on their own. For examples of this research, see the References listed at the end of this article by Claire E. Weinstein, Jenefer Husman, and Douglas R. Dierking, and by Philip Winne. Twitter is a convenient platform to provide this type of metacognitive support.
What is a metacognitive support device?
In a paper written in 2000, Ward Cates delineates two types of metacognitive support: static/directive support and dynamic/interactive support. As you can imagine, Twitter is not static. Rather, it is an interactive tool under learner control. Further, Maria Bannert refers to a metacognitive support device that “focuses students’ attention on their own thoughts and on understanding the activities they are engaged in during the course of learning.” When used explicitly as a tool to improve self-regulation through metacognitive support, Twitter becomes very effective.
Four types of tweets
Over the course of the 2012 spring semester, I collected and analyzed 547 tweets from my English students. Using Paul Pintrich’s framework for the foci of self-regulation, I then categorized each tweet into one of the four areas. The most commonly generated tweet was behavioral (38 percent), followed by context and motivation (17 percent each) and cognition (10 percent). About 19 percent of all tweets were just plain irrelevant. (Figure 1)
Figure 1: Analysis and examples of tweets collected from students
What does this mean?
Students mainly used the class Twitter list to remind each other of due dates, seek help and feedback, and vent their frustrations. From an instructor’s perspective, Twitter offers the ability to prompt students throughout the learning process by asking them to reflect on learning strategies and time management, which ultimately raises metacognitive awareness.
While the use of Twitter only shows a slight increase in grades (about .5 percent), it substantially improves engagement and motivation, as Reynol Junco and his co-authors, and as I and my colleagues Denise Houchen-Clagett and J. Burton Browning, have found. More, Twitter enhances the social presence outside of the classroom, which leads to overall course satisfaction.
So is Twitter the magic bullet for improving grades? No. But, if student satisfaction, engagement, and metacognitive awareness are all part of your definition of a successful course, then introducing Twitter in your classroom may be an option for you.
(Editor’s Note: Readers who are eLearning Guild Members, Members Plus, or Premium Members may also wish to refer to the Guild Research Perspectives Report Smart Companies Support Informal Learning, published August 16, 2012.)
References
Bannert, Maria, M. Hildebrand, and C. Mengelkamp. (2009). Effects of a metacognitive support device in learning environments. Computers in Human Behavior, 25(4), 829-835. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2008.07.002
Cates, W. (2000). Supporting and evaluating metacognition in hypermedia/multimedia learning products. Retrieved from http://www.lehigh.edu/~wmc0/MetacognitionInHypermedia
Multimedia.pdfJunco, R., G. Heiberger, and E. Loken. (2011). The effect of Twitter on college student engagement and grades. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 27(2), 119-132. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2729.2010.00387.x
Pintrich, P. R. (2000). The role of goal orientation in self-regulated learning. In M. Boekaerts, P. R. Pintrich, and M. Zeidner (Eds.), Handbook of self-regulation (pp. 451–502). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Reid, A., D. Houchen-Clagett, and J.B. Browning. (2012). Twitter: Integration into developmental English and technology. In Cheal, C., Coughlin, J., & Moore, S. (Eds.), Transformation in Teaching: Social Media Strategies in Higher Education (391-412). Santa Rosa, CA: Informing Science Institute.
Weinstein, C.E., J. Husman, and D.R. Dierking. (2000). Self-regulation interventions with a focus on learning strategies. In M. Boekaerts, P. R. Pintrich, & M. Zeidner (Eds.), Handbook of self-regulation (pp. 727-747). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. doi: 10.1016/B978-012109890-2/50051-2
Winne, P. (2005). A perspective on state-of-the-art research on self-regulated learning. Instructional Science, 33, 559-565. doi: 10.1007/s11251-005-1280-9
Back in November, an editorial in this newspaper began by declaring that “American legal education is in crisis.” I was struck at the time by how unlikely it would be for an editorial to announce that “humanities education is in crisis,” if only because a state of crisis, along with ritual lamentations about it, has characterized humanities education for much longer than I have been alive. There would be no news there, but it was news, apparently, that the legal academy was in trouble.
In fact, that news was itself not so new. Uneasiness about the state of legal education has been around for some time, but in the wake of the financial meltdown of 2008, uneasiness ripened into a conviction that something was terribly wrong as law school applications declined, thousands of lawyers lost their jobs, employers complained that law school graduates had not been trained to practice law, and law school graduates complained that they had been led into debt by false promises of employment and high salaries. And while all this was happening, law schools continued to raise tuition, take in more and more students, and construct elaborate new facilities.
That at least is the story told in a book to be published later this year, “Failing Law Schools,” by Brian Tamanaha. Tamanaha is a law professor, a former law school dean, a prolific legal theorist and, by his own account, a malefactor who in the past did some of the things he now criticizes. Having seen the light, he feels compelled to spread and document the bad news.
Tamanaha predicts that his “pages will put off many of my fellow legal educators,” and given the legal academy’s responses (including mine) to a series of critical articles by David Segal, he is probably right. Tamanaha’s analysis pretty much tracks Segal’s, but his book is more ambitious in its scope and puts statistical flesh on the bones of Segal’s polemic. He catalogs a large number of failings on the part of law schools, but his emphasis is less on particular bad actors (although he names more than a few) than on the structural conditions — conditions put in place by no one, but affecting everyone — that generate and drive their behavior.Two such conditions can be colloquially named “the ABA made me do it” and “the rankings made me do it.” Tamanaha faults the American Bar Association for instituting policies that have the effect of forcing all law schools, no matter what demographic they serve, to model themselves on wealthy elites like Yale, Harvard and Stanford. ABA requirements that accredited law schools have state-of-the-art facilities, substantial libraries, an academically credentialed faculty and low student-teacher ratios operate to dis-accredit law schools “built on a low cost model which emphasizes teaching rather than research, relies upon a smaller number of full time faculty without tenure at lower pay, uses a large number of lawyers and judges to teach courses … possesses basic facilities and library collections, and focuses on teaching students practice skills.”
The U.S. News and World Report rankings, says Tamanaha, produce even worse deformations; in fact they produce behavior that is at least deceptive and borders on fraud. A law school dean who knows that the rank of her school will in large part determine the faculty it can attract, the quality of the applicants, the support provided by her university and the job opportunities of graduates will be tempted to fiddle with the numbers by (among other things) reporting high salaries for graduates when the pool surveyed is a tiny fraction of those who have the school’s degree, devising schemes to keep students with low test scores off the books by shunting them off to evening programs and inflating the employment rate by hiring its own for a short term.
Tamanaha finds these and other “disreputable actions” understandable if not excusable given the structural situation: “A conscientious dean who refused to engage in questionable number reporting … risked not just her continued tenure as dean but the standing of her institution.” And all of this is happening, he adds, because “a bunch of folks” are sitting around in the offices of an almost defunct magazine “brain-storming about what they will choose to count … and not count” and thus setting in motion “a phenomenon that is reshaping the internal composition of law schools.” As a result, he concludes, “the contours of a five billion dollar educational industry are being carved by a self-appointed maker of lists sold for profit.”
Tamanaha does not spare the internal practices of law schools and is particularly distressed about the amount of debt incurred by those least able to get out from under it — graduates of lower-ranked schools. He also takes aim at the claim of law professors that their high salaries and low teaching loads (relative to other academics) are justified by the revenue they forgo when they enter the academy. No, he replies. Not only is “our pay far better than that of other professors,” not only do we have lifetime security and hours of work that are “whatever we want them to be,” but “our quality of life is far better than that of lawyers and we make more money than most lawyers.”
Will these fortunate conditions persist? Can law schools keep doing what they’re doing? Not according to the statistics Tamanaha marshals, statistics that show, among other things, that while law schools produce annually 45,000 new graduates, only 25,000 openings for lawyers are projected “each year through 2018.” Not that the oversupply of lawyers means that Americans have all the legal services they need. In fact, Tamanaha reports, large populations are underserved. The paradox is easily explained: the kind of lawyering poor and disadvantaged communities require does not bring in enough money to attract newly minted lawyers trailing clouds of debt. “Law schools have created a systemic mismatch between graduates and jobs.”
And the solution? In a word, differentiation. Don’t let the A.B.A. and U.S. News call the tune. Instead, take a good look at the educational landscape, at the market, at the costs, at the demographics and come up with a flexible system that matches law school graduates to needs: “Research oriented schools will remain as they are. Practice-oriented schools will be staffed by experienced lawyers; … research institutions will be staffed by scholars mainly engaged in research; other schools will be staffed by both types.” Different strokes for different folks.
Will it happen? Tamanaha is not optimistic, and he cites the (to him) discouraging example of the new law school at the University of California at Irvine, which, he says, chose “elite status” over “affordability,” chose to enter the “ranking sweepstakes” rather than opting for a “different design.” Still, he finds hope in a number of public law schools that do “charge tuition well below $20,000.” He’s just not generally hopeful.
He also anticipates readers who will be “unconvinced that the economics of legal education are as badly askew” as he argues they are. That is no doubt correct, but even those who disagree with him and challenge his analyses will be participating in a conversation shaped by his contentions. “Failing Law Schools” does not say entirely, or even mainly, new things, but it does present a comprehensive case for the negative side of this debate and I am sure that many legal academics and every law school dean will be talking about it.
Law Schools in the US have been gripped by a perfect storm – historically high tuition ($35,000 or more at many schools), and a historically poor market for law graduates (exacerbated by some law schools accused of gaming the numbers of how many of their alumni are employed in legal career settings). This situation led a recent New York Times editorial to declare: Law Schools Face an Existential Crisis. Is the situation any different in Canada? In a word, yes!
Canadian law schools face similar challenges, to be sure. Tuition is higher than ever (though, on average, about half the cost of an American legal education), and the market for legal services, while stable relative to global peers, is far from certain (as evidenced by the Law Society’s ongoing Articling Task Force considering various reform proposals).
An existential crisis suggests law schools are questioning why they exist. In Canada, at least, the rationale for a legal education has never been clearer. We need people capable of making the justice system work in the public interest. We need problem-solvers. We need champions of economic innovation and social justice. We need leaders. Lawyers remain very much in demand, particularly to address access to justice for middle-income communities – a recent Ontario study of unmet civil justice needs is just one piece of evidence in this regard. Further, new markets for legal services are being created through regulatory change, such as the changes to the rules of professional conduct in Ontario, B.C., and elsewhere allowing for “unbundled” legal services.
While the population of Canada grew by a third between 1980 and 2010, not a single new law school was established during this period. It is, therefore, no coincidence that Canada is witnessing the first new law schools in 30 years opening up across the country (Thompson Rivers University in B.C. and Lakehead University in Ontario). In light of the articling system’s challenges, some are decrying that we don’t need more law schools, or lawyers. In my view, while we do not need more of the same law schools we have; we do need law programs that approach legal education in new ways. For example, while Osgoode has led the way in delivering part-time graduate legal education, no law school in Canada has yet designed a JD or LL.B. program to be delivered primarily in a part-time format, which would dramatically enhance the accessibility of legal education.
More importantly, while law schools provide a professional education, our graduates excel at a far wider array of career paths than legal practice. Law graduates have found success in the spheres of politics and policy (including the last 3 of 4 Canadian Prime Ministers and the last 3 of 4 Ontario Premiers), business and NGOs, academic and research careers, and a wide range of creative arts (for instance, check out U. of T. law graduate and author Andrew Pyper’s latest novel, The Guardians, or take in McGill and Osgoode law graduate and artist Marie Finkelstein’s latest opening at the Paul Petro Contemporary Art Gallery on Queen St.). We cannot ignore the career path to legal practice that so many of our students will pursue, but we sell legal education short by only asking how many of its graduates find jobs in legal practice.
The “existential crisis” in the U.S., to the extent it exists, has been driven by data that American law school graduates are unable to find meaningful work in legal fields. The notion of students spending well over $100K on a legal education only to find themselves working as a cashier at Home Depot is the image that sparked a spate of class action lawsuits against some U.S. law schools.
While this image does not reflect the situation in Canada, the underlying dynamics – the expectations of students, the changing nature of how legal services are provided, the aspirations of those involved in legal education, and the ability of law schools to be responsive and innovative cannot be ignored on this side of the border.
Each law school in Canada is attempting to meet these challenges in different ways. Osgoode’s response includes proactive steps on debt relief, such as the newly established Wendy Babcock Graduate Awards which provide debt-relief funds to graduating students in need who are pursuing social justice career paths, and by a deepening commitment to learning about law in action, including, for the first time in Canada, the commitment to ensure every student include an experiential component in their JD studies and the establishment of an Office of Experiential Education.
In Canada, the challenge is not existential angst but rather complacency – law schools needs to evolve and adapt if they are to thrive.
Like the “Global Law School,” observers and enthusiasts have been predicting the arrival of the digital law school for at least the last decade, but how much of the hype is real? Law school may have reached a tipping point where more information flows electronically (through database of cases, emails, websites, etc) than on paper, but is that what a digital law school amounts to? Has the culture or the way of thinking about legal education changed? The growth of Coursera (Stanford based consortium which now includes U of T), Edx (the consortium of MIT, Berkeley, Harvard) and others has raised the specter of entirely on-line legal education, but the future of such endeavors in law remains uncertain, where law remains for the most part a jurisdiction based, dynamic, and analytic subject area to teach. While a good on-line lecture in the 19th century novel or the nature of an algorithm may endure, a good on-line lecture on administrative law would need to be updated and overhauled every few months or so. So, the question remains, are we ready for a digital law school?
Whether or not we are ready for digital legal education, it is clear that digital legal services have arrived, and are poised to grow. At Legal Zoom, for example, incorporating a business is advertised as “fast, easy and on-line.” Lawyers need to know how to use the information economy, from apps to data management. A new Columbia Law School Clinic, for example, focuses on lawyering in the digital age, which ensures law students have the skills necessary for progressive legal practice in the information age. It is also possible that jurisdictional boundaries, which have for so long defined the practice of law, will become less relevant over time, as reflected in Osgoode’s innovative first year course Ethical Lawyering in a Global Community and International Legal Partnerships program, McGill’s Transsystemic legal curriculum and the University of Miami’s ambitious Law without Walls initiative (pairing up law students across the world to work on investigative research and creative problem-solving).
Digital legal education also has the potential to significantly enhance access – with distance law school options, people who cannot leave home communities whether because of cost or family commitments would no longer be precluded from obtaining a legal education. The cost generally of a high-quality digital education is substantially less than in-person, and perhaps most importantly, digital platforms offer the potential for new kinds of learning and evaluation. Rather than an exam, or in-class presentation, students can submit simulated work via video. Through courseware such as Blackboard and Moodle, classroom discussions no longer need to pause when the class ends – indeed, the very idea of a class bounded by time or space may be about to change. Skype and video conferencing software can allow for synchronous instruction within an on-line class environment, and social media can create new opportunities to exchange ideas and build community.
Interestingly, the Federation of Law Societies of Canada’s recent Accreditation Report responded to the possibility of digital legal education by requiring that an approved law program’s instruction must take place “primarily” in person. This requirement is clearly intended to ward off a “beamed-in” law school. While the text of the Report makes clear the intent is not to dampen experimentation with digital legal education, that may well be an unintended consequence of the current regulatory environment in Canada.
The American Bar Association (ABA) similarly limits its accreditation to schools which provide a substantial majority of classroom instruction in person. California, which accepts graduates from distance education law schools as a qualifying standard for admission, requires that upon successful completion of first year at an online law school, students must sit and pass the First Year Law Students Exam (affectionately referred to as the “baby bar”). If the quality of digital legal education is high, are such artificial distinctions justified? Further, as more in-person education includes significant digital components, regulatory distinctions between in-person and on-line legal education may become more difficult to sustain.
Whether or not the Federation of Law Societies or the ABA determines such programs meet their standards, on-line legal education already has an important foothold. The early adopters are not household names, and the students they attract may struggle to achieve career success, but these ventures are doubtlessly paving the way for others – Concord Law School in California, for example, offers what is billed as a fully interactive, online law degree program (and features both an on-line JD and Executive JD, video lectures which are available 24/7, and where student work is received, reviewed and returned all through a student’s homepage). The California Law School claims to be the only distance program to offer live Socratic-method instruction through virtual classrooms. The University of Phoenix, just 30 years old, now has over 700,000 alumni, about 200,000 more than the University of Toronto.
Even law schools with no interest in becoming distance programs have embraced platforms such as MediaSite, whose webcasting technology automates the recording, distribution, management and analytics of high-quality video and multimedia presentations. At Osgoode, many JD, lectures are already “captured,” professional LL.M. students join classroom discussions from around the country and beyond, while webinars allow for continuing professional development in real time as new cases, legislation and policies redraw the legal landscape.
That said, in-person and digital experiences may not merge seamlessly through the course of a student’s legal education, even as many lawyers’ briefcases and law student knapsacks become tablets. I recall the first time I moved to electronic materials for a class, only to find that the method of evaluation (an open book exam written on laptops whose hard drives were blocked by exam software) required all the students to print up all the materials to prepare for the exam.
The infrastructure for high quality digital legal education also requires significant investment. I was surprised to learn a few years ago that the largest repository of digitized Canadian legal scholarship was at Harvard, which had embarked on a far more ambitious project of digitizing its collection than any Canadian University. While digitizing collections, electronic journals and on-line institutional repositories are now moving forward in Canada, budget pressures and resistance to change continue to make the pace of progress uncertain.
At the end of the day, the question is not whether we are ready for digital legal education, but rather which schools will see and harness its potential to the fullest.
Wednesday 29 August 2012 by Catherine BaksiEvidence of ‘fundamental gaps’ in lawyers’ skills suggests that the current education system is not fit for purpose, according to a discussion paper published as part of the Legal Education and Training Review (LETR).
The 50-page paper, published this week, said that changes to the current system of legal education and training are likely to be required to ensure that legal professionals possess the skills necessary to prosper in the future legal services market.
It added: ‘There are gaps in core knowledge and commercial skills. More fundamental gaps have been highlighted as regards client relations/communication skills, ethical awareness and organisational skills. If this is correct, it is difficult to see that the system as a whole is fit for purpose.’
The LETR, set up last year by the SRA, the Bar Standards Board and ILEX Professional Standards, is due to report in December. The paper said evidence gathered so far indicates there is too great a reliance on initial training to guarantee ongoing competence and quality. It suggests new business models will ‘disrupt some of the traditionally distinctive ways of working associated with particular titles’, and that individuals will have to show a willingness to develop new skills.
The discussion paper is now available.
A focused workspace?
As part of my PhD candidature I must complete a 10,000 word colloquium document and present at a colloquium within the first 12 months of candidature. From my perspective it is partly a ‘gate-keeping’ procedure to ensure candidates are progressing and focusing their project, and that the research is on balance likely to make a ‘substantial original contribution to knowledge’.
My colloquium presentation is unlikely to take place until February 2013, but I thought I would start drafting the document now, given that I have already undertaken a lot of reading about the subject matter (a scholarship of teaching in practical legal training), and toward developing a theoretical framework for the project (at this stage I am drawing on Bourdieu’s theoretical tools, and de Certeau’s concept of practices in everyday life and ‘le perruque’). I have decided on undertaking a qualitative methodology, combining policy research (looking at the law and policy underlying practical legal training) and narrative inquiry (learning from PLT teachers’ narratives about how they moved into practical legal training and what they have to say about scholarship of teaching). I have also been reading up on grounded theory approaches to research and the Glaser/Strauss debate about ‘emergence’ and ‘forcing’ of theory from the data. I have undertaken some training with the NVivo computer assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS), with some more advanced training timetabled later in August 2012. I have to say that I have found NVivo very interesting to work with, and I will write a separate post about this soon.
I have found that working on my colloquium document this week has been a very useful exercise. The process has helped me to get a sense of ‘where am I up to’ since starting the candidature on 31 March 2012, and it has highlighted several strengths and weaknesses in my work and reflection undertaken so far. ‘Strengths’, in reminding me just how much reading and reflection and note-taking I have already done, and how this has contributed to my knowledge. ‘Weaknesses’, in identifying gaps and blind spots in my theorising, and also in the ‘logistics’ of my research.
I am now thinking that I should have started drafting this colloquium document much earlier and used it in conjunction with a reflective approach of memo-writing, so that the document provides a focused ‘space’ for my work. That said, I am pleased that I have started it now, 4-5 months into the candidature, rather than later. I guess that some might say there is a danger of feeling ‘locked-in’ to what is in the colloquium document, but I think that if I remind myself that it is a dynamic document in every aspect, then that should not be a problem.
So, if you are a PhD candidate, what is your approach to the colloquium document? Do you think that starting on it early as part of a reflective approach is a good idea?
The lawyers' lawyer? Tom Bingham. Photograph: David Levene
Whatever did inquiring legal minds read before Lord Bingham published The Rule of Law? This slim volume has rapidly become the book Guardian-reading lawyers are most likely to recommend to anyone interested in the profession. As Joshua Rozenberg put it: "Bingham's definition of that much-used term is now entirely authoritative and will probably remain so for the next 120 years or more. In summary, it is 'that all persons and authorities within the state, whether public or private, should be bound by and entitled to the benefit of laws publicly made, taking effect (generally) in the future and publicly administered in the courts.'
"Dear Sam, I hope you don't mind me writing to you in this way..." The only book to receive as many nominations as Bingham's was Letters to a Law Student, by All Souls fellow and director of studies at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Solicitous, authoritative and hardly discounted even by Amazon, it knows its audience - those who already have a place to read law are advised to skip the first chapters.
Welsh legal scholar Williams died in 1997, but Learning the Law lives on - though much of the rest of his prolific output is out of print. His support for legalising abortion and euthanasia, as well as his role in decriminalising suicide in 1961, earned his reputation as a reformer. But not everyone is a fan. "I read it once and I've never touched it again," wrote Stephen Clark (LLB Exeter and about to start his BPTC). "This is supposedly the standard introductory text, but I couldn't encourage students enough to stay away from it. It really won't help when it comes to knowing the law, it won't help when it comes to understanding the law and it won't impart you with the skills necessary to do well on the LLB."
Recommended by - among others - Southampton University lecturer Mark Telford, What About Law? describes the various fields of law in engaging detail, though is less forthcoming with practical advice. Opens with the legal implications of the wild party 17-year-old Laura throws while her parents are away for the weekend.
Baroness Kennedy, as listeners to her current Radio 4 series will know, is as much concerned with justice as the law. Much of this lively and highly readable book is devoted to exploring the myriad ways in which the legal system has let down women - as lawyers, victims and defendants - though there is also plenty of optimism, particularly about the ability of women to rise to the top of the legal establishment. Kennedy's Just Law was also nominated.
Somewhere in the new Rolls Building, a modern Jarndyce v Jarndyce is doubtless lumbering - or perhaps the Technology and Construction Court is hosting a particularly lengthy dispute involving tree roots. Dickens was a court reporter for four years and undoubtedly drew on his experiences, particularly at the Old Bailey, for his fiction - this coining trial may have inspired part of Great Expectations.
Other nominations
Cardiff and UCL academic Richard Moorhead: The End of Lawyers by Richard Susskind
UK Human Rights Blog editor and 1COR barrister Adam Wagner: Geoffrey Robertson's The Justice Game
Carrie Alcott: How Law Works by Gary Slapper ("Absolutely brilliant. Have just read it now, going in to my final year, and really wish I'd come across it before I began studying")
Lila Lamrabert: The Law Machine by Clare Dyer and Marcel Berlins
Michael Zymler and Jennie Evans: How To Win Every Argument: The Use and Abuse of Logic by Madsen Pirie
Jason Miller and Emma Morris: The Case of the Speluncean Explorers by Lon Fuller (Miller: "Jurisprudence isn't everyone's cup of tea but it shows a variety of legal and moral viewpoints.")
Stacey Roden: Learning Legal Rules by James Holland
Paul O'Grady: A Short History of Western Legal Theory by John Kelly
Marika Giles Samson: The Best Defense by Paul Dershowitz
Jack Gilbert: The Colour of Law by Mark Giminez ("on a purely motivational basis")
Does this guy look boring? Photograph: Joe Wrinn/AP
In an episode of The Simpsons, the juvenile delinquent Jimbo Jones helps a group which is trying to reduce crime in the community. The scheme, however, goes badly wrong. Disenchanted, Jimbo turns to another member and says "Hey man, you've really let me down. Now I don't believe in anything anymore. I'm joining Law School".
Although law is sometimes portrayed as a dull discipline pursued by ethically dubious practitioners, it is a spellbindingly vivid and varied subject which affects every part of human life.
Physics, history, Spanish, business, architecture, and other subjects are all vital disciplines but law permeates into every cell of social life. Law governs everything from the embryo to exhumation. Law regulates the air we breathe, the food and drink that we consume, our travel, sexuality, family relationships, our property, sport, science, employment, education, and health, everything in fact from neighbour disputes to war.
A university law degree is the most adaptable of academic qualifications. Only people who want to become doctors study medicine whereas people with diverse career plans study law.
Many law graduates, of course, do go on to become solicitors or barristers but, equally, many others use the qualification to become successful in companies, academic research, the media, the civil service, local government, teaching, campaign organisations, and politics - over 80 MPs, for example, have law degrees.
Being educated in logical thinking, the articulate expression of complex ideas, the composition and art of argument, and how to use evidence and rules, law graduates have an excellent record of employability. A law degree can prepare someone for work at the highest levels – many world leaders are lawyers including Barack Obama. Other law graduates such as Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Derren Brown, Gaby Logan, and Gerard Butler, chose different careers.
Historically, legal education had a bad start. The law schools set up in London in the early thirteenth-century were banned in 1234 by a writ of Henry III. He thought trouble would come from people knowing the law. Later, it was the disciples of Jeremy Bentham who launched the first degree in English law, at University College London in 1826. The first graduating class of three was in 1839.
Legal study develops organically in line with social needs. Today, areas of study and practice like sports law, media law, immigration law, human rights, and international criminal justice are very important, though they did not exist as recently as fifty years ago.
Much legal study involves reading and discussing the decisions of appeal courts. Only particularly unusual cases are appealed so the law reports are brimming with interesting and unusual human dramas.
There are over a million decisions you can study – reading them all, though, is not compulsory as your law lecturers appreciate the need for you also to engage in essential life-supporting activity such as sleep. You will learn many areas of law including the rules that determine whether a judge is being impartial, how contracts are made, and how careful the law requires people to be when they do everything including surgery, sport, science, and even manoeuvre during sex.
The courts showcase a constant run of extraordinary and bizarre cases spanning eight hundred years, and there are many colourful decisions from other jurisdictions. Recent examples have included whether you can sell your soul on the internet, a court order which forbade a man from laughing in public, a lawyer who tried to use quotations from the film The Hangover in arguing for his drunken client, another lawyer who was caught using Wikipedia for his arguments, and the question of whether a vibrating condom is technically a contraceptive or a sex toy.
Law is an organic body of rules and good lawyers help to reshape it. As one judge, Lord Denning, noted in a case in 1954, just because something has never been argued before doesn't mean it is wrong. He said:
"If we never do anything which has not been done before, we shall never get anywhere. The law will stand still while the rest of the world goes on: and that will be bad for both".
Knowing the law is empowering. The American comedian Jerry Seinfeld said that a lawyer is "the person who knows the rules of the country". He said "we are all throwing the dice, playing the game, moving our pieces around the board, but if there is a problem the lawyer is the only person who has read the inside of the top of the box". Controlling everything, law is a constantly stimulating and hugely important game.
Aug 30 2012
Last week Patrick Dunleavy discussed his experience of transferring his personal research library onto the Mendeley software package. Today Sierra Williams talks to Mendeley co-founder Victor Henning about the company’s new approach to enhancing the impacts and visibility of academic work.
Some estimates suggest that there are around 150 million ‘knowledge workers’ in the world today – that is, people who regularly undertake or utilize academic research in their daily jobs. Set against that number, how far has Mendeley come along the road that you and your co-founders envisaged for it?
We’re just approaching 2 million users for Mendeley.com. Between them they have uploaded some 270 million documents to our databases, and we are currently processing 500,000 to 800,000 new documents every day, so we are growing our server use very rapidly. I think your knowledge workers number is about right – worldwide we estimate that there are around 80 million students; 18 million academics, researchers and PhD students; and large numbers of people working in business, commercial research, media, professions and government who are deeply involved with academic work.
Posted by: Posted on August 30, 2012 by Blog Admin Tagged with: academic work, digital era, impact, MendeleyAug 29 2012
Book chapters can allow freedom to think about your work in line with broader theoretical issues, but if you’re tempted to write a book chapter for an edited collection, it might be best to reconsider. Dorothy Bishop finds that researchers who write book chapters might as well bury the paper in a hole in their garden.
Inappropriate use of journal impact factors has been much in the spotlight. The impact factor is not only a poor indicator of research quality but it is also blamed for delaying publication of good science, and even encouraging dishonesty. My own experience is in line with this: some of my most highly-cited work has appeared in relatively humble journals. In the age of the internet, there are three things that determine if a paper gets noticed: it needs to be tagged so that it will be found on a computer search, it needs to be accessible and not locked behind a paywall, and it needs to be well-written and interesting.
Continue reading →Posted by: Posted on August 29, 2012 by Blog Admin Tagged with: academic books, academic publishing, citations, impactAug 28 2012
Singing to a different tune is easier once you have the skill to complement the willingness. Phillip Vannini isn’t the only academic who is trying to make research popular. Here, he explains how he has made a rule to produce a video, blog post or popular version of every article he publishes.
“I know a little bit about biology, and a little more about psychology…”
…but as a result of my traditional social scientific training there are many things I know very little or nothing about. For example, I know little about web design, public relations, or about photography and film-making. Neither applied communication nor visual arts were included in my doctoral studies curriculum, so these days I know better than to try these activities myself, like an amateur would. Instead I make it a point of seeking out graduate research assistants who have professional training and practical know-how in information dissemination, promotion, and presentation.
Posted by: Posted on August 28, 2012 by Blog Admin Tagged with: Academic communication, digital era, impact, public engagementAug 26 2012
Will Lamb is lecturer in Celtic and Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Will talks about the books on languages, particularly Gaelic and Celtic, that tempted him away from a degree in psychology and about the folklore that has carried these languages through the centuries.
My schooling experience is ultimately responsible for my becoming an academic: between the ages of six and seventeen I used my abilities to the fullest extent possible, and succeeded in doing ‘well enough’ with the least amount of effort. As a result, I left secondary education labelled as a ‘consistent underachiever’ and with a palpable degree of parental disappointment upon my shoulders. However, when I entered university, I found that I was enjoying formal education for the first time and set about redressing my previous, unremarkable academic record. Fortunately for me, I had read widely and avidly during my childhood, and it set the stage for the time to come.
Continue reading →Posted by: Posted on August 26, 2012 by Blog AdminAug 24 2012
Unemployment, immigration and health policy are among some of the social science topics debated each weekend in your local pub. Instead of creating new knowledge as an end in itself, Martin Price argues that making findings accessible, and comprehensible, to a wider public will make academic ‘impact’ far greater.
Whenever the word “impact” crops up in relation to research in universities at the moment, it seems to be inextricably bound up in preparation for the REF. This is, to a degree, understandable. It strikes me, however, that there is more to making an ‘impact’ than just the effect of the REF.
Towards the end of 2011, I established the MYPLACE blog, with the aim of raising the profile of the project and getting our messages out. My motivation for this was not really REF inspired, or in any way linked to metrics. Rather, it was inspired by a question paraphrasing an old and familiar bit of metaphysics about falling trees, and it went thus: If researchers produce findings relevant to society, and nobody hears about them, was there really any point doing the research?
Continue reading →Posted by: Posted on August 24, 2012 by Blog Admin Tagged with: Academic communication, academic publishing, Blogging, digital era, impact, public engagementAug 23 2012
Now that research is developing an online presence, thoughts are turning to how to maximise this. Brian Kelly investigates linking strategies; from Google Scholar Citations, Academia.edu and Mendeley to a researcher’s online publications, as a way of increasing researcher visibility among their digitally-literate peers.
I’m pleased to say that a paper by myself and Jenny Delasalle, Academic Services Manager (Research) at the University of Warwick, which asked “Can LinkedIn and Academia.edu Enhance Access to Open Repositories?” was presented recently as a poster presentation at the Open Repositories conference. This paper, which is available from the University of Bath institutional repository, is based on work initially published on my blog.
Continue reading →Posted by: Posted on August 23, 2012 by Blog Admin Tagged with: Academic communication, academic publishing, digital era, impact, Knowledge transfer, open accessAug 22 2012
Universities are foolish to focus on academic superstars at the expense of staff that expand the ‘long tail’ of research. David Glance argues that increasing the numbers of academics who can publish and encouraging collaboration are better fixes than increasing the number of superstars.
In 2004, Wired Editor Chris Anderson wrote an article and later a book about how online businesses were taking advantage of the economic principles of something called the long tail. A long tail distribution is one in which the majority of the events in the distribution are attributed to a relatively small number of items. This is also referred to as the Pareto principle (after Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist who devised the concept in 1906) or the 80/20 rule.
Continue reading →Posted by: Posted on August 22, 2012 by Blog AdminAug 21 2012
Bjoern Brembs has argued that journal rank has no persuasive predictive property for any measure of scientific quality. In an attempt to set a standard for the evidence used in debates on journal rank, Brembs and Marcus Munafo release their latest manuscript assessing one of the most important infrastructures in academia.
For the better part of this year, Marcus Munafò and I have been working on a manuscript reviewing the empirical literature on journal rank and its impact on science. In early June we received a rejection letter together with three reviews from PLoS Biology. We are currently in the process of revising the manuscript in order to submit it to a different journal. In the light of the traffic and discussion on two posts about journal rank (or Thomson Reuters’ Impact Factor, to be specific), one by Stephen Curry and one by DrugMonkey, we decided to release this submitted, non-revised version (our fifth internal version) to the public with all three reviews attached at the end. By now, this version is several months old and has since already seen some revising, especially new references have been added. We release this draft manuscript in an attempt to set a standard for the empirical evidence used in any debate on journal rank, even before our manuscript has passed formal peer-review.
Continue reading →Posted by: Posted on August 21, 2012 by Blog Admin Tagged with: academic publishing, citations, digital era, impact factor, journalsAug 20 2012
A key aspect of scholarship is how you create a personal research library, find and access your sources when needed, and cite them accurately and comprehensively. Patrick Dunleavy explains how the (relatively new) software Mendeley has transformed his previous time-consuming practice in just a few days, and solved numerous other problems of accessing literature and sources wherever he is. Mendeley can offer all academics and PhDs massive productivity gains.
Until a few days ago the way I organized my research library was a bit chaotic, and doing references and bibliographies was always a huge chore that often took days at a time. Essentially I had hundreds and hundreds of PDFs, extracts from blogs and web pages, Word documents and presentations swilling around my hard drive. They were segmented into lots of different folders, sometimes with duplicates, often in the wrong place. They were variously titled depending on how rushed I was at the time I downloaded them and on how informative or useless the original file name had been. I could not overview all my literature files at once, and I usually had to remember which file I wanted and which sub-folder to look for it in order to have any hope of finding it. Sometime Microsoft’s flakey search function found a word I’d remembered to put in the title, most times it didn’t. (I still miss Google Desktop). When it came to compiling references and bibliographies, I usually had to cannibalize a previous listing (and re-format by hand for new citing requirements) and then roam around in Google Scholar and Google Books for all the extra stuff I knew I wanted but often could not find. In short, I was a referencing dinosaur.
Posted by: Posted on August 20, 2012 by Blog Admin Tagged with: digital era, impact, Mendeley, resourcesAug 19 2012
Natalya Vince is Senior Lecturer in North African and French Studies at the University of Portsmouth. She specialises in modern Algerian and French history. Natalya talks us through the books and even films that helped shape her understanding of Algeria’s many complexities.
The opportunity to contribute to this blog got me thinking about which books, recognisable across disciplines, or at least across fields, have shaped me as a historian. The enduring relevance of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition strike me every time I return to Algeria, a country where political legitimacy and social cohesion remain bound up with the construction and dissemination of a national past. E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, that undergraduate reading list staple which I read (most of) the summer before starting university, was, I now realise, key in shaping my interest in ‘bottom up’ history and ‘agency’. Because I work on a state which is not entirely democratic, where criticising the government through jokes, false rumours and gossip is a national sport with unspoken but commonly understood limits, James C. Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance helped me think about the complex nature of encounters between ‘the powerful’ and ‘the powerless’.
Continue reading →Posted by: Posted on August 19, 2012 by Blog Admin Tagged with: Academic inspiration, impactAug 17 2012
‘Impact’ can mean different things to different people yet all researchers are being faced with proving evidence of their own impact. Teresa Penfield introduces the DESCRIBE project; an attempt to find a definition common to academics, international experts and professionals.
How do we define research impact? What indicators and evidence can be used to demonstrate impact?
The DESCRIBE project has been funded by JISC and is being led by The University of Exeter in partnership with Brunel University, to look at some of the challenges facing research institutions in defining and capturing research impact. DESCRIBE plans to review the current understanding of impact definitions and indicators, drawing on international experiences and deliver recommendations of how we might develop a cross-disciplinary approach to research impact evaluation which will assist with the development of systems for capturing the full spectrum of research impact.
Continue reading →Posted by: Posted on August 17, 2012 by Blog Admin Tagged with: government, impact, Research Excellence FrameworkAug 16 2012
Getting to grips with self-publishing might be time consuming at first but Elizabeth Eva Leach shows that welcome engagement and expert editorial input can be gained from going it alone without publishers.
A tweet back in July from the @LSEimpactblog with a link to Aimee Morrison’s blog on guerrilla self-publishing asked if it was time for more academics to consider it. I’d started tentatively nearly a year ago–August 2011– with a short article on a newly discovered concordance for a medieval motet, and was asked to write this post about the experience. My three most recent ‘articles’ (see my publications page) are currently blog-only publications, although the most recent wasn’t designed that way. I’ll refer to them as X, Y, and Z (links for those that are interested are given in the discussion below).
In what follows I conclude that senior academics need to lead the way on getting online self-publication accepted. The advantages (immediacy of publication and feedback, accessibility, use of links, revisability of text) seem to vastly outweigh the disadvantages (which I think are largely imaginary; see my responses to common questions below).
Continue reading →Posted by: Posted on August 16, 2012 by Blog Admin Tagged with: academic publishing, digital era, impactAug 15 2012
I wasn’t planning to write anything on Stephen Curry’s latest piece on the negotiated, irreproducible and mathematically unsound Impact Factor sold by Thomson Reuters to gullible university administrators. I agree with most of what he writes there and, as he correctly cites a 20 year-old paper, all of it has been known for a decade or more. So why now pick it up anyway? First, apparently a lot of people are recommending the article, raising the suspicion that there may be some last refuges of scientists out there who are isolated from common knowledge. Second, he mentions a smear campaign against the IF, or rather shaming the use of IF. Of course, everybody who is using the IF immediately disqualifies themselves and by now everybody knows that. In fact, every scientist who is not aware of the unscientific nature of the IF should ask themselves if they are in the right profession. Taking the IF seriously is similar to taking creationism, homeopathy, or divining seriously. Stephen writes:
Posted by: Posted on August 15, 2012 by Blog Admin Tagged with: academic publishing, impact, impact factor, journalsAug 14 2012
Catherine Durose argues that we must find alternative ways of working with communities that allow them to set terms of engagement. She advocates co-production, a research method premised on the shift in the power dynamics between researchers and ‘the researched’.
The public engagement role of academics is an important subject for debate, but we would question if the parameters of this debate are currently set wide enough. Whilst Matt Flinders’ suggestion of ‘triple writing’ is a welcome and useful means of widening dissemination, it does not question current research practice which has been widely criticised for failing to meaningfully involve those being researched in its design, undertaking and use. As academics, we cannot be complacent about the significant changes required to both research practice and governance in addressing this criticism.
Continue reading →Posted by: Posted on August 14, 2012 by Blog Admin Tagged with: Academic communication, government, impact, Knowledge transfer, public engagementAug 13 2012
Google Scholar had shown great promise as a digital tool for academics. Jonathan Eisen discovers its new ‘updates’ service has potential to open the door to a lot of new, valuable and open access research.
I logged on to Google Scholar last week and discovered something very new. This “updates” thing was not there earlier in the day. So I clicked on the link and got to this page: Scholar Updates: Making New Connections – Google Scholar Blog where James Connor from Google reports:
“Since Google Scholar launched nearly eight years ago, we’ve been helping people find the research they’re looking for. But often the spark for discovery comes from making a new connection or looking in a direction that you hadn’t yet considered and that — before your aha! moment — you wouldn’t have known to look for. Today we hope to start fostering these new connections with Scholar Updates.
Continue reading →Posted by: Posted on August 13, 2012 by Blog Admin Tagged with: citations, digital era, google scholar, impactAug 12 2012
Sumantra Bose is Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the LSE with a specialty in ethnic and national conflicts. Here he discusses the book that inspired his early interest in politics and also about the contemporary works of fiction and non-fiction he most admires for capturing humanity amidst war.
This article first appeared on the LSE’s Review of Books blog.
It was Autumn 1988 and I had just arrived in a pretty university town in New England, 90 miles west of Boston. I had come from my home city Calcutta (Kolkata) in India, where for twelve years I attended a Jesuit school. I enrolled as a freshman at Amherst College. Thousand-page reading assignments were frequent, and students were expected to participate actively in seminars. I felt like a novice swimmer thrown off the deep end of a pool. But soon the excitement of learning – not just learning new things but more important, a new way of learning – gripped me totally.
Continue reading →Posted by: Posted on August 12, 2012 by Danielle MoranAug 10 2012
Salma Patel has been on a whistle-stop tour of academic social media channels. Here she shares her simple, practical tips for academics who want to start engaging with the wider world through social media.
Question:
I’m an academic and desperately need an online presence because I want to start engaging with the public and disseminate my research online - where do I start?Answer:
1. LinkedIn: Create a LinkedIn profile. This is really easy to do and doesn’t require you to talk to anyone.
- Register an account and fill in your details.
- LinkedIn allows you to search through your mail to find any if your contacts on LinkedIn. Connect to all those that come up.
Continue reading →Posted by: Posted on August 10, 2012 by Blog Admin Tagged with: Academic communication, Blogging, digital era, impact, public engagement, social media, twitterAug 9 2012
Here’s an interesting test for those on Twitter. You see a tweet giving a link to an interesting topic. You click on the link and see it’s a YouTube piece. Do you (a) feel pleased that it’s something you can watch or (b) immediately lose interest? The answer is likely to depend on content, but also on how long it is. Typically, if I see a video is longer than 3 minutes, I’ll give up unless it looks super-interesting.
Test #2 is for those of you who are scientists. You have to give a presentation about a recent piece of work to a non-specialist audience. How long do you think you will need? (a) one hour; (b) 20 minutes; (c) 10 minutes; (d) 3 minutes.
Continue reading →Posted by: Posted on August 9, 2012 by Blog Admin Tagged with: Academic communication, digital era, impact, public engagementAug 8 2012
Academic blogs are transient, ephemeral and present a problem for citation, but their faults are not necessarily because of a distinct lack of mechanisms for preservation of digital material. Martin Eve writes that until we can be confident following a ‘paper’ trail of knowledge, blogs will not be merited with being cited as full-blown academic research.
At the risk of more meta, I wanted to jot down a few thoughts on blogs in scholarly research.
Sarah Quinnell recently wrote a post on the LSE impact blog, following up on her Guardian post that “blogs are increasingly recognised as a legitimate academic output”. I want to consider some of the problems here, but not from the perspective of content. As people who’ve read any of my work on scholarly communication will know, I don’t think there is necessarily a qualitative difference between the output mediums. So, let’s assume that, editorially, I think it is *possible* for blogs to have the same standard of output as a journal (even if, in the majority of cases, they don’t). However, blogs are transient, ephemeral, unarchived and present a problem for citation not, as Sarah makes out, because they would be placed at the lowest end of an impact hierarchy, but rather because of the mechanisms through which knowledge is constructed.
Continue reading →Posted by: Posted on August 8, 2012 by Blog Admin Tagged with: Academic communication, academic publishing, Blogging, digital era, impact, journalsAug 7 2012
Publishing can sometimes be seen as acting as the fuel behind the academic world. Yet, across social sciences, woman are not publishing their share of research papers. Karen Schucan-Bird fears that if they are not publishing at a level comparable to their male counterparts, woman are left standing at a career disadvantage.
We all know how important it is to publish our research. Recognition and reward is granted to the productive scholar and their university. But, is there equal opportunity for all to succeed in this pursuit? With growing evidence from the material and life sciences that women publish less than men, it may be that myself and other female social scientists are publishing less than we would expect. I sought to investigate.
Continue reading →Posted by: Posted on August 7, 2012 by Blog Admin Tagged with: academic publishing, impact, Research Excellence Framework
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