Great conference. I learned a lot and am jazzed about the web 2.0 applications and libguides.

Here

Read this now! The Re-thugs exist because they have to compare apples to oranges, or else we’ll all see how screwed we really are!

Simmons

Originally uploaded by jnann58

Simmons Reception, fun!

Ok, it’s my birthday tomorrow.  It’s a big one and I’m feeling ambivelent about it.  Usually, I say that I don’t want a fuss, but I do.  This time, I don’t know.  My dad says that I’m having a mid-life crisis.  I just see my life on the downslope and am having existential questions.

On another matter, the speech in DC went well.  Pictures are at Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/86458666@N00/).  Pretty intimidating space.

The conference was good, but I’m feeling a little down about librarians.  In many ways, they are so conservative and controlling (the need to describe everything anally).  There may be some value in that, but it also not likely to keep us relevant in a very fast moving environment.  I think that we need to focus on what is most important (authentication and reliability of online legal information).

On to the third draft and am I nervous!!!!!  I’ll post the outline later, I hope today.

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Maharg - Transforming Legal Eduction - Glasgow Graduate School of Law -> Transactional learning.  Simulation, transactional learning.  Change the paradigm from boredom and terror.  Educational theory Thorndike v Dewey -> Thorndike won.  Thorndike emphasized teaching strategies, while Dewey looked at the learning ecology (context).  Dewey taught by doing (see the UofC Lab School in the early twentieth century).  Four themes to Maharg’s transforming legal education: experience, collaboration, ethics, and technology.

And then, transactional learning.  A trading zone is where different people with different backgrounds and needs get together to work together to make something.  A specific type of problem-based learning: active learning (performance, reflection, collaboration, process, professional assessment, ethics).  See, Sullivan, et al, Educating Lawyers.  Shulman says that each discipline has its own signature pedagogy.  Surface structure, tacit structure, deep structure, shadow structure (the absent pedagogy).

He uses simulationsL practice, facilitates different assessments, encourages collaborative learning.  He has an open source online simularion environment.  SIMPLE.

Hard to argue with the pedegogical points.  Don’t know about his software, though.  But, collaborative, active learning is a laudable goal.  Challenge the signature pedagogy.  He wants to prove that his vision works, he is seeking measured results.

Plenary session.

Well, first last night.  Went to the ball game, great hit Millar (bad dye job, though).  I got to talking to an IT guy at a law school that will remain nameless and he asked about legal research instruction.  Well, it seems as though his school’s librarians are still “teaching the books first”!  My reaction, what frigging century are they in?  Wasn’t this done with years ago?

Just in case you don’t recall, my take is that we should be responsible enough to make recommendations asn teach what people will use, will have available, and what we think are the best tools.  I’ll teach books if they offer what online doesn’t or if the books are “better” or “easier”, but not just to teach them!

Ok, were starting — John Mayer and his Alice Cooper thang — “I’m 18″

So, I was listening to NPR on the way to work (really, I usually don’t but I just finished listening to a book and the other stations had ads — ugh) and I heard Frank Deford talk about the amount of water that golf courses use.  His commentary was not very interesting, but it is here if you want to hear it.  What did perk up my ears was when Frank (OK, Mr. Deford) said that 40% of golfers believe that global warming is a myth.  After sputtering about those “rich white male morons”, something occurred to me, something that I’ve seen in other contexts and something that we are not working on enough, I don’t think.  What is it?

It is how hard it is to learn or accept something if it is in your interest not to.  Now, I see it teaching legal research and acquiring the skills that I teach are certainly in the interest of the students, but the subject is dry and the work is hard.  The more difficult but not creative the work that I have to teach, the more the students resist learning.

Just imagine if your exalted place in the world and your whole psychology, indeed your whole experience centers around your place as a rich white man.  Anything that negatively affects the narrative will be dismissed.  We see it all the time when white people protest that they have not benefitted from being white; when in reality the benefits are so all encompassing that we (white people) are usually blind to them.

Well, global warming is the same thing.  It is scary, it means major change that might put someone else on top and at the end might even change the golf course.

What we have to do when we work to educate anyone about anything is to see when and where it is in their interest not to learn it and attack at that point.  If we accomplish student self-teaching at that point of attack, learning is most likely to occur.

OK, a couple of end points: 1. I know that not all golfers are rich white men, but it is the stereotype and I bet that it’s not too far off.  2. Of course not everyone will learn and, indeed, ignorance is not the reason that all deniers, racists, etc are the way they are.  It’s that the ignorant can possibly be taught and change their minds scum will always be scum.