The Florida State College of Law Research Center Blog

Legal Education Commons

CALI has created a Commons for sharing legal education materials.  Here's an excerpt from their web page:

The Legal Education Commons (LEC) is the place to find and share legal education materials including syllabi, podcasts, presentations, and more. Faculty and librarians from CALI member schools can upload materials under a Creative Commons license that allows colleagues and students to find and use the materials.

The LEC also offers access to over 700,000 federal court opinions from the public.resource.org collection. As with other resources in the eLangdell system, these cases can be re-edited and incorporated into course materials.

Faculty, librarians, and staff of CALI member schools are free to contribute, via upload, MS Word, Powerpoint, Wordperfect, PDF, RTF, or text files as well as MP3 audio files.  The maximum size for any file is 50 megabytes.

See the CALI Legal Education Commons website here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

What's a Legal Simulation

Law School Innovation has an interesting post titled What's a legal simulation?  Here's an excerpt:

If Paul Maharg has his way, American law professors may soon have as much in common with the game referees in World of Warcraft than Prof. Kingsfield from The Paper Chase. Maharg, author of Transforming Legal Education, is working with CALI to distribute and support software that enables legal educators to run legal practice simulations. SIMPLE (SIMulated Professional Legal Education) provides a framework for students to engage in transactions typical of real-life legal practice, providing the kind of contextualized knowledge and skill that the Carnegie Study and others have demanded.

Read the whole post here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Law Schools Customize Degrees to Students' Taste

An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education discusses how law Schools are customizing law degrees.  Here's an excerpt:

The curriculum at law schools has undergone a major transformation in recent years, as many have set up niche programs to attract students. A few critics, however, are beginning to speak out against the trend, arguing that it is driven largely by marketing considerations and hurts legal education.

Read the whole article here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Survey Gets Law-School Students' Thoughts on Laptops

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article titled: Survey Gets Law-School Students' Thoughts on Laptops, Writing, and Ethics. The article discusses the role of laptops in law schools as well as writing and ethics and was based on a report titled: The 2008 Law School Survey of Student Engagement. Here's an excerpt:

Students who used laptops for class-related activities, like reading case briefs or taking notes, were more likely than students using laptops during class for other purposes to be engaged in classroom discussions, synthesize concepts from different courses, and work hard to meet faculty expectations, the survey found.

The trick for professors, of course, is to ensure that students are actually using computers to study law.

The survey, now in its fifth year, is administered by the Center for Postsecondary Research at Indiana University at Bloomington and measures various aspects of the law-school experience, including how students spend their time and how well they have learned. Participating schools use the information to assess their performance and develop practices to better teach law.

Read the Chronicle article here.

There's more information on the report here.

The survey results are here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

FERPA

The Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development, Department of Education has released the final FERPA regulation, effective as of January 8, 2009.  Here's an excerpt:

SUMMARY: The Secretary amends our regulations implementing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which is section 444 of the General Education Provisions Act. These amendments are needed to implement a provision of the USA Patriot Act and the Campus Sex Crimes Prevention Act, which added new exceptions permitting the disclosure of personally identifiable information from education records without consent. The amendments also implement two U.S. Supreme Court decisions interpreting FERPA, and make necessary changes identified as a result of the Department’s experience administering FERPA and the current regulations.

These changes clarify permissible disclosures to parents of eligible students and conditions that apply to disclosures in health and safety emergencies; clarify permissible disclosures of student identifiers as directory information; allow disclosures to contractors and other outside parties in connection with the outsourcing of institutional services and functions; revise the definitions of attendance, disclosure, education records, personally identifiable information, and other key terms; clarify permissible redisclosures by State and Federal officials; and update investigation and enforcement provisions. DATES: These regulations are effective January 8, 2009.

Read the whole regulation here. 

Posted by Jon Lutz

Closed Minds?

The problem with American higher education may not be too much politics but too little, at least that seems to be the conclusion of a recent book: Closed Minds? Political Ideology in American Universities.  The Chronicle of Higher Education recently discussed the book.  Here's a brief excerpt:

Closed Minds? was written by A. Lee Fritschler, director of executive education at George Mason's School of Public Policy; Jeremy D. Mayer, an associate professor at the school; and Bruce L.R. Smith, a visiting professor at the school. In their introduction, the authors say one of them considers himself a Republican, another a moderate Democrat, and the third a more-liberal Democrat—although they do not say who is who.

The authors lament what they see as a generations-long shift away from political debate on college campuses, which they contend is crucial to students' education. "Universities should be the home of lively and civilized political debate, and all too often, for a host of reasons, professors ignore political debate," they write.

Read the Chronicle article here.

Go to the Amazon site to see the book here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Professors' and Students' Political Opinions

The Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia (USG) has published a the results of a student survey exploring students' experiences with the expression of political opinions on campus by students and by faculty.  The press release is here and it includes a link to the full copy of the report.  In light of the recent concern among legislators that professors may be unfairly forcing their views on students, it's interesting to note that students reported that professors were more respectful of differing opinions than their fellow students were.

Robin Gault

Big Screen Kindle

Law Librarian Blog has in interesting post about the big screen Kindle.  Here's an excerpt:

Sometime ago I wrote, "while the Kindle buzz has stimulated interest in the legal academy, the development model will not follow along the lines of Kindle" because the digital text-study aid functionality law schools students want is not gizmo-dependent and products are or can be expected to integrate their computer-based apps with online research services. The AspenStudyDesk is leading the way and, in Professional Reading: Is Open-Source the Future of eBook Legal Publishing?, I predicted that  "Lexis and Thomson-West [will] join this market and dominate it eventually by allowing their eBooks to be customized and updated via their online research services. Hopefully, both will offer two options for their eBooks: (1) an word processing application that can be downloaded and (2) a web-based service that allows students to work collaboratively."

Read the whole post here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

Best Practices for Legal Education

Best Practices for Legal Education by Roy Stuckey and Others has been posted to the Web. 

Read the report here.

Posted by Jon Lutz

International Conference on the Future of Legal Education

From February 20-23 at Georgia State University College of Law.   For its point of departure the Conference with examine the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching Educating Lawyers report.  See this post for more information on this report.

Click here for more Conference information.

Posted by Jon Lutz