Click on the title to this post to read a wonderful essay from today’s Boston Globe Ideas section, written by Drake Bennett.
Animallaw.com a site that collects litigation and legislation info from the International Institute for Animal Law, an arm of the National Anti-vivisection Society in Chicago. Looks like a very helpful site.
The title to this post will take you to an article in the ABA Journal online about LawLink, a new social networking site for attorneys. The background offers musings about how lawyers might use the site professionally, by comparing with existing networking sites for doctors. Visit www.lawlink.com and see the site for yourself. It's very new, so there's not a lot happening yet. It offers classified ads, self-promotion brochures you can create for youreself (of course! It's for lawyers), networking and a discussion forum. Very slick presentation. We'll see what happens.
Click on the title to read a brief report in the ABA Journal online about Brian Leiter's new rankings. More interesting than the article are the comments following.
Click on the title to this post to read a good, in-depth article by Charlie Savage in today’s Boston Globe. U.S. District Court Judge Victor Marrero finds the PATRIOT ACT unconstitutional. The National Security Letter provisions, in particular, with their gag order and lack of judicial oversight, violate the First Amendment and the
separation of powers.
Click here
for the ACLU announcement
which has this tidy history of the case:
The case, Doe v. Gonzales, was originally filed in April 2004 on behalf of an anonymous Internet access company that had received anNSL. Although the FBI has since dropped its NSL demand, the John Doe has remained under a gag order. In September 2004, Judge Marrero initially struck down the Patriot Act NSL provision as unconstitutional, writing that "democracy abhors undue secrecy." The landmark ruling held that permanent gag orders imposed under theNSL law violated free speech rights protected by the First Amendment.Click here for the text of the latest decision and another link to get the rest of the materials, courtesy of the ACLU.
The government appealed Judge Marrero's first ruling, but Congress amended the NSL provision before the court issued a decision. In May 2006 the appeals court asked the district court to consider the constitutionality of the amended law. In a concurring opinion, Judge RichardCardamone strongly criticized the government for continuing to argue that a permanent ban on speech would be permissible under the First Amendment. (Snip)
While reports previously indicated a hundred-fold increase to 30,000 NSLs issued annually, an extraordinary March 2007 report from the Justice Department's own Inspector General puts the actual number at over 143,000NSLs issued between 2003 and 2005. The same investigation also found serious FBI abuses of the NSL power and numerous potential violations of the law.
In a related case, the ACLU represented four librarians who are on the board of Library Connection, a library consortium in Connecticut. The consortium was served with anNSL and challenged both the letter and the accompanying gag. After many months of litigation in which a district court found the gag on Library Connection was unconstitutional, the government withdrew its demand for information and abandoned the gag order.
Here are some notes and links I am putting together to try to sell my university on providing or helping to subsidize child care for employees (and maybe even students! talk about a recruitment and retention tool!).
Child Care as an Employment Benefit
I. Benefits to Employer
A. Less absenteeism: Employees who have problems with daycare arrangement often have difficuties with attendance. If a child is sick and cannot attend their regular day care, one of the parents must stay home. Now day care providers often offer an option for sick child care for mildly sick children, in addition to regular day care on-site or near-site. A statewide household survey in Minnesota found that 20 percent of parents reported child care problems that interfered with getting or keeping a job within the prior year and 37 percent reported having lost time or income due to a child care problem other than a sick child (Minnesota Department of Human Services. Child Care Use in Minnesota: 2004 Statewide Household Child Care Survey. 2005.)
B. Better employee focus: When employees are not worried about the care their child is receiving, and can visit over a work-day, they have better focus on their work.
C. Employee loyalty and lower employee turnover: Studies have also shown a remarkable reduction in employee turnover at employers who offer on-site or near-site day care, or even care subsidies as a benefit. In a study of employees with children in company-sponsored child care programs, 93% of respondents said that the work-site child care was an important factor in considering a job change. 19% of respondents had actually turned down another job, rather than lose their work-site child care, and 25% of those who turned down other job opportunities were managers. (Benefits of Work-Site Child Care, Simmons College Graduate School of Management, 1997).
D. Employees often cannot afford good, reliable daycare: The younger a child, the more expensive, because it takes many more care-giver hours for a baby than for a toddler or a school age child. In Boston, where daycare providers are licensed, the price to care for a baby is exhorbitant. It costs between $350-$450 a WEEK for licensed daycare (or $17,500 for a 50 week year) for newborns to 18 months. What percent of an employees' gross income is fair to expect for them to spend for child care? Are they making a choice between doctor care and day care? Or are they placing their children into unlicensed daycare? That's not fair!
E. Some Universities and other employers do offer a variety of child care benefits. Most now offer a savings account through which an employee can designate pre-tax dollars to pay for child care, as well as medical care and medicine, parking and transit costs. But some also offer subsidies on a sliding fee arrangement, based on family income. A few have gone further and offer on-site or near-site day care with some level of subsidy. This would be the most expensive arrangement, but what a powerful recruitment and retention tool.
In summary, employers benefit from providing on- or near-site child care facilities, or at least financial assistance on a sliding scale based on family income:
* Recruitment and Retention
* Turnover
* Absenteeism/Employee Productivity
* Employee Job Satisfaction and Performance
Link to CNN Money - child care benefits at 100 Best Employers
Link Bright Horizons Child Care -- a turnkey operation providing child care as a benefit to corporations and organizations.
Link Children’s Creative Learning Centers, which offers near-site child care in California.
Link, report by Center for Law and Social Policy report on child care assistance, focusing on employment of low income parents, in April, 2006.
Link to an article in today's Boston Globe about the vote in Frankfurt, Germany of the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO). This was a preliminary vote, but Microsoft had hoped the ISO would approve their Office Open XML document format as an international standard. This would have helped them sell their product to government and quasi-government organizations.
Click on the title to this post to read an AP article in the Boston Globe today about the guy who invented the computer virus, in 9th grade.
In an article in Legal Times, dated 9/4/07, "Skilled E-Scholars Click Their Way Up," Prof. Diana R. Donahoe (Legal Research & Writing at Georgetown Law Center) writes, largely advertising her new interactive electronic casebook, "Teaching Law," link, from Aspen. But she has interesting things to say about the changes we have all noted in student behavior and concentration styles. She notes that students in the digital age think and learn in different ways than previous generations. Prof. Donahoe compares the older "linear" forms of thinking and learning with the multi-level, "three dimensional" learning styles of students who flip between screens and programs constantly. She asserts that such students are bored by lecture and socratic method teaching. Prof. Donahoe goes ot to say that the newer generation of students also expects frequent feedback and interactive programming. They thrive, she says, on what seems distracting and chaotic to old coots like me.
Of course, a great deal of her article is taken up with the ways in which her new e-book meets the different demands of modern law students. But she has interesting things to say, though not completely unprecedented. Some parts of what Prof. Dohahoe is saying mesh with what I observe and have read about student learning. Students do learn and retain better with frequent quizzes and feedback. On the other hand, one stunning piece of the Thomson-West presentation on the future of print at AALL was that students feel they retain better when they read in print. It was a widespread response from the students they interviewed.
I also have doubts about how deeply engaged students really are when they are "multi-tasking." My colleague who shared the article with us, Prof. Beckerman-Rodau, is a notable technology user himself, but also doubts the "depth of learning" students can achieve while multi-tasking. This is often the upshot of conversations my faculty have about laptops in the classroom. Even the most techno-philes feel that they want the students to engage with them, not hide behind laptop lids. On the other hand, Prof. Donohoe is teaching research and writing, and comments on her teaching methods. She "facilitates" the students discussions in collaborative small groups, uses multi-media, and multiple screens through which she flips on a display screen.
A good deal of what Prof. Donohoe is using in class can be added with the classroom technology we have in our classrooms now. We actually use video clips, powerpoints, online screenshots and live explorations of web resources now in advance legal research class here -- I'll bet many of you do, too. We also use (as we have for decades), overhead projectors or their newer incarnations, document cameras, to project print materials. As I said in my recent post about my class, the students are learning from each other. The class session is spent discussing their adventures exploring various resources, and comparing their experiences, discussing why they prefer or detest certain tools.
I agree that students learn better, especially in skills classes, from actually doing and practicing with feedback. I am not sure these changes will benefit equally students in substantive law classes. Electronic casebooks were tried out a decade ago, with many of the same interesting features. The e-casebooks then allowed notes in the margins and highlighting of the text. And still, they were not successful. It was the STUDENTS who voted with their dollars for print versions of the casebooks. It will be interesting to see if a new generation of law students will be more enthusiastic about e-books.
I was dismayed a bit at what amounts to a lengthy advertisement for a product. But I do find it interesting both to hear what other legal educators see in new generations of "digital students." It is worth considering whether her comments apply equally to all types of law classes, and whether studies of adult learners bear out all of Prof. Donahoe's claims.
I had a conversation the other day with one of the faculty of our academic support program. She said that many of the students she saw in academic difficulty were taking my advanced legal research class, and were loving it. That’s always good to hear. She went on to say that the class, being focused on skill and practice gave students who had not been doing well in substantative law classes a chance to do well, feel competent. And that one class like that could feed into growing confidence in other classes. This was not something I had ever considered. It was a different way to look at what I do.
My class, like most research, writing or advocacy classes, lets students DO things and does not require the same set of skills as a final exam in a substantive course. I give the students worksheets, which sometime are rather time-consuming to complete. They are supposed to finish the worksheets before class and bring them in. We check them as complete and give them back to the students. Then, the class session is mostly taken up with the students reporting what they found, and the adventures they had in the finding.
My inspiration for the worksheets were the “bibliography” classes I had in library school, which required us to “learn” various types of resources. The difference is that I am teaching law students, not library students who expect to be required to learn how to use many sets to the point of being able to teach others about them. So, I lure the law students into exploring and testing resources with open-ended questions that send them to a choice of sources. My sheets are not set up so that there is any one single answer, and I don’t care so much what the students find. The questions are designed, instead, to encourage the students to explore and test the various resources – print or electronic. They discuss HOW they found things – did they use an index or table of contents? Did they use a menu or a search box? And how did it work? Were they satisfied or if not, what complaints? Why did one person get it to work and another did not? It’s the process, not the product we focus on. Could they find the answer in another resource and how did it compare?
I had followed the education arguments about different “intelligences,” and designing class so that it appealed to people who learn in different ways. What I had not considered was that success in one class affects success in other classes. I felt so pleased to hear the course was assisting students in such an unexpected way. I have students from the various journals, but was not aware that the course was drawing a different group. I am sure the same purpose can be served by clinic courses and oral advocacy classes, various practicum courses like client counseling or alternative dispute resolution. I do fear that some profs in the substantive law courses tend to see these alternate, process-oriented classes as being “soft.” I really like the trend that some professors of traditional courses are co-teaching with practice-profs, so you have classes that included drafting and contracts law or the tax practice and research class I co-taught with my colleague here for some years. I hope this grows! The more I read about adult learning, the more it seems to require a variety of teaching methods and skills.
If you, like me, love to look at images of galaxies, you might enjoy sigining on to this project to sort galaxies by type. Click on the title to this post to read an article from the Boston Globe. Galaxy Zoo is a project where amateurs are welcome -- no training or telescope needed. You sign in and scroll through a selection of images, pressing a button to note the shape of the galaxy. If galaxyzoo.org you are not sure, don't worry. There is a "don't know" button, too! And your decision is added into a list of others, so the entire decision does not rest on your shoulders. Just add your little bit whenever you have time. Visit galaxyzoo.org to see what it's all about. In case your cataloging instincts aren't getting enough expression at work!
