Buffalo Wings and Toasted Ravioli

From Rick Perlstein, via Hullabaloo:

Stop it, stop it right now. Stop pretending Islamicists - or environmentalists or animal rights activists which are, ridiculously, federal law enforcement and non-governmental terrorism-watchers next most obsessive concern - are the only imminent terrorist threats to our nation. We now know that students at Liberty University were ready to napalm protesters at Jerry Falwells funeral. One of the suspects is a soldier at Fort Benning. [UPDATE: Falwell gave the kid a scholarship.]

If the media does not start connecting some dots, they will have abdicated their citizenzship duties. How many times has the nation potentially come within a hairs breadth of suffering a right-wing terrorist attack this spring? As of today, three, or possibly six times - at least that we know about.

Read the rest to get the full rundown.

A symposium sponsored by

Chicago-Kent College of Law

Chicago, Illinois

May 18, 2007

• Goals
  • Gain familiarity with adult learning theory as applicable to legal research instruction
  • Give students experience and confidence in face-to-face and classroom teaching
  • Teach students to use technological tools for asynchronous instruction
• Assignments
  • Weekly presentations on readings
  • Pair presentations on legal research topics
  • Podcast introductions to legal research topics
  • Formal instruction: legal research clinics
• Tools used
  • Powerpoint (disfavored)
  • Blogs and wikis (not emphasized)
  • Skype
  • Bubbl.us
  • Podcasting
• Conclusions and lessons learned
  • Live instruction is hard to schedule
  • Podcasting can be surprisingly effective
  • Asynchronous instruction can meet students’ needs better than face-to-face instruction

Word processing file conversions shouldn’t be a big deal anymore, except in one instance: trying to open a WordPerfect file on a Mac.  There has not been a Mac version of WordPerfect for years–no doubt because outside of the technologically conservative legal market, nobody used WordPerfect any more.

Here’s the solution I’ve found: a free website called Media Convert.  It can convert any of hundreds of formats–text, audio, video, graphics–to a wide range of formats.  I just uploaded a short WPD file, let it chug away for a minute or so, and downloaded a fresh, shiny PDF version of the article.  Highly recommended!

I was interviewed a couple of weeks ago for an article on podcasting in New York Law Journal; the interview has just been posted on law.com.  Check out the remarkable artist’s rendering of Jim Milles as Podcaster.

An educational film from 1947, courtesy of YouTube:

Prepared for Monroe County Bar Association CLE program, May 8, 2007

Revised for UB Law School faculty workshop, May 9, 2007

What Is a Blog?

According to Wikipedia:

A blog (short for web log) is a website where entries are made and displayed in a reverse chronological order.

Blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of most early blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual although some focus on photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), or audio (podcasting), and are part of a wider network of social media.

How Do I Find Law-Related Blogs?

• Justia Blawg Search
• Blawg.com
• Law Professor Blogger Census
• Law Professor Blog Network

How Do I Subscribe to Blogs?

Blog postings are distributed, and subscribed to, through an RSS feed.

RSS - or ‘Really Simple Syndication’ - is an alternative means of accessing the vast amount of information that now exists on the world wide web.

Instead of the user browsing websites for information of interest, the information is sent directly to the user.

There are two halves to the RSS system that allows this to happen.

The first is that the user needs to have an ‘RSS reader’ (sometimes called an aggregator). This is a program which collects the raw XML news feeds from websites that are RSS-compatible and turns them into text and links that a user can browse at his or her leisure.

The beauty of this is that a user can take feeds only from websites that are of interest to them, and that it allows you to scan the latest information from a range of sources without having to visit half a dozen different websites.

The second half of the RSS system is that a website must have a feed specially set up to work with the news reader. Most big news websites now have such systems - and the links are highlighted with the orange ‘RSS’ boxes as seen below.

These feeds list the latest news stories in a programming language known as XML. The user sets the URLs for these feeds into the news reader, and hey presto - the website comes to the user, rather than the user coming to the site.

How Do I Read Blogs?

Using a feed reader, or RSS aggregator:

• Google Reader
• Google Reader Mobile (for Blackberry or wireless PDA)

Is RSS Just for Blogs?

• New York Times RSS feeds
• Wall Street Journal RSS feeds
• Rochester Democrat & Chronicle RSS feeds
• Justia Regulation Tracker

How Do I Write a Blog?

• WordPress
• Blogger
• CALI Classcaster
• LexBlog
• Justia

Here’s my latest find: Tumblr.com.  It lets you aggregate a number of RSS feeds into one.  I’m using it to aggregate all of my various web presences–my blogs, my podcasts, my Flickr, my Twitter tweets–into a single site with a single feed.  Are you unendingly fascinated by every word I say?  Now you can follow it all in one place.  Just go to jmilles.tumblr.com

Wayne MacPhail clued me into an amazing Mac program called DoubleTake.  Just drop your digital photos into the DoubleTake window and it automagically stitches them together into a panoramic shot.  See an example from Wayne and from me.

From the wee librarian:

This was announced a little while ago but I’ve only decided to blog about it now. I know there has been a lot of interest in this topic. We’ve hired our Immersive Learning Librarian, who will be looking into virtual worlds, gaming, and other immersive environments. Congrats to Shawn McCann! I hope to be working with him on our Second Life presence and I’m sure he’ll have some great ideas to help our presence grow there.

Congrats to the other librarians we have also recently hired:

• Communications, Marketing and Outreach Librarian - Catherine Baird
• Digital Strategies Librarian - Nicholas Ruest
• Digital Technologies Development Librarian - John Fink