The Social Media Best Practices Workshop builds on the work of Laura Bergus (Iowa College of Law), who felt that her own school was accentuating the negative and ignoring the positive value of online social media. Ms. Bergus, a guest blogger on Social Media Law Student, began a campaign to reform her school’s policies and won the buy-in of her administration. This triggered the thought that other schools might also be seeking better policies and guidelines for their students.

Our goal for the Workshop is to generate best practice suggestions for law schools. We also hope to start a nationwide discussion among law schools on how to approach social media and its potential interaction with students’ current performance and future career prospects.

Professor John Palfrey (Harvard’s Vice Dean of Library and Information Resources), who is a keynote speaker at the conference, will be contributing to this workshop. Prof. Palfrey is co-author of Born Digital and known for his expertise on both the perils and promise of social media for young people.

Steve Langerud, Assistant Dean for Career Services for Iowa College of Law, will also be joining the workshop. Dean Langerud has been working closely with Ms. Bergus on developing new media guidelines for their school.

Sign up now for the 2009 CALI Conference for Law School Computing®.

[Correction: Laura Bergus is not "Social Media Law Student;" that's Rex Gradeless at SLU Law -- Laura is a guest blogger on that site. Thanks to Jim Milles for pointing this out.]

Prof. Bodie (St. Louis University School of Law) is on the advisory board of eLangdell and helping to turn his idea into a reality.

Last semester, Seattle U. Professor of Law Elizabeth Townsend-Gard taught a 1L property class that included a Second Life component, in which students explored virtual property as a way to gain insight into real property. I find this pedagogical tool of using virtual worlds as a cognitive foil for the real one a fascinating way to make use of virtual worlds, and hope to make use of that approach in my soon-to-be-announced class this fall.

Innovator Profile: Prof. Elizabeth Townsend-Gard and Rachel Goda (Law School Innovation blog).

If CALI has anything to say about it, the time has finally come for e-casebooks.

At the 17th annual convent for law school computing, CALI hosted a discussion about what’s needed in an e-casebook, looking at it not just from a technological but from a professors’ and students’ point of view. One interesting set of data presented showed that students (or at least, respondents to an email survey at the University of Nebraska College of Law) could very well have as many reservataions about ebooks as their professors — not surprisingly, around usability.

I’m fairly confident that technology will eventually bring e-text up to the level of usability as paper. The question is whether the network behind e-texts will adequately harness the power of community that becomes possible when casebooks go digital. Can these casebooks enhance the way classes and study groups learn? What can Web 2.0 concepts do for student learning?

Perhaps the most exciting possibility enabled by e-casebooks is the creation of a legal commons where professors can share teaching resources with each other in a low-cost, copyright-resolved manner. E-casebooks should be a benefit to professors at least as much as they would be for students.

Dred Scott’s Second Life

Bernhard Drax did a tremendous job filming, scoring, and editing together this clip. AudioCaseFiles supplied outstanding voice talent.

Charlie’s vision for this project was to do for legal text what graphic novels did for literature: open up new possibilities for drama, engagement, learning, and understanding. I hope this segment will prove a first proof-of-concept for that vision.

• PowerPoint presentation
• Event video
• Chat log

The challenge of a presentation like this — and indeed, the study itself — is that my topic is broad and the research shallow. Thus, the questions that people raised at the beginning and end spanned quite a few disparate and unconnected points, with quite a few scattered around uses of specific technologies. The format of a crowded lunch talk didn’t quite lend itself to a participatory conversation as I would have liked — there was so much knowledge and wisdom in the room that I felt it a shame to have answered so many of the questions myself (inadequately, I felt).

We did emerge with one possible next step: establishing a commons of resources (probably multimedia) that professors and instructors can use to animate (perhaps literally) their teaching. It’s the kind of project I could imagine CALI taking on.

Speaking of which, I will be presenting a more focused version of this same talk at the 2007 CALI Conference for Law School Computing.

Nesson believes that most mock trials are limited in value because their pace does not allow novices to think through arguments carefully. The result is unclear presentation and excess verbiage. Here is where Second Life’s text chat comes in handy. While for regular communication chat can sometimes be frustratingly slow, by artificially throttling communication speed, it also forces the mock attorneys to be far more judicious with their words and sharper with their argumentation. Conveniently, text chat also generates its own easy-to-review transcript.

The concluding exercise of this project can be found in this mock trial post-mortem. Here is an example of the self-generated transcript:

[13:22] Ulysses Korobase: What in particular where you interested in learning from Wolf’s unedited video?

[13:22] Witness: we believe that the unedited video may contain images of the assault described in the police statements

[13:22] Lilia Lamatia: objection

[13:22] Lilia Lamatia: speculation

[13:23] Witness: but there is no way to know for sure without seeing the cut content

[13:23] Eon Berkman: overruled, state of mind

One major distinction between this project and CyberOne is that the participants in this class were Harvard Law students, and the class was explicitly about law and entirely substantive. Another is that the class met physically, primarily, and Second Life was used for specific purposes.

Also see Charlie Nesson’s 2007 winter term Evidence course for earlier forays into trial advocacy in Second Life.