The Association of American Law Schools’ annual conference is happening now in New Orleans. I’m in Iowa, and it’s cold. While I had no idea where my legal education would take me when I entered law school in 2008, my mind was filled inspiring opportunities after seeing what was happening on the tech side of legal education at the 2009 CALI conference. I met a lot of great people last summer, and have stayed in touch with many online. Most of them, and many more progressive and aggressive educators, librarians and technicians are in Louisiana this week. Wish I were there. I’ll be following #aals and #aals2010 on Twitter. Any attendees are invited to send some warm weather, great music, fabulous food, and/or job opportunities my way! :)
Anyone who knows me (and apparently career services-types who read their email newsletters) knows that I got my 1L job through Twitter and this here blog. There a lot of reasons why social media, and Twitter in particular, is good for finding a job. Just last week, I got a DM from one of my online heroes asking if I was looking for a job this summer. That’s a nice surprise when you’ve been kicking yourself, even just a little bit, for saving yourself some grief by deciding not to participate in OCI.
Here are two recent Twitter experiences that made my life easier and, most importantly, made me realize that there are people out there, and they are listening:
- Bluebooking nightmare. After complaining about some inexcusably lame Bluebooking problem I was having, a few lawbrarians (@richards1000, @stephdavidson, @hmorrell) immediately jumped to my rescue on Twitter. That led to a conversation about my love for law librarians (more on that in the recent Legal Geekery podcast, episode 2), and accolades for one of my school’s key librarians, who I then emailed and encouraged to join Twitter. If you want to follow what more law librarians are doing, find links here.
- Babysitting assistance. Last night my niece and nephew spent the night, visiting my daughter. After putting the little ones to bed, I was up with the 11 year-old and a promise that she could use my computer for some online flash games. Problem with that was that I never play online games (although that may change now…). I quickly Googled “circle the cat,” a game my husband is fond of. That entertained for a few minutes, but then I tweeted for help. In just a few minutes, shortened links were pouring in. Here are a few we enjoyed:
I appreciate what Twitter does for me, and I know I’m not alone.
In preparation for CALICON09 (and an awesome session with John Palfrey), I’m creating a website to share the Social Media Best Practices document I’ve been working on between classes and finals over the past few months. The document will include recommendations for students, law school staff/administrators and employers on using social media (with advice for staff and employers primarily focused on relating to students and graduates by using social media). To mix it up a bit, I’ve included short video clips for each of the sections. A special sneak preview of the students section is here for your enjoyment/ridicule. I’m really interested to hear responses to my advocacy of social media for positive use by students. Note I don’t say anything about the risks. What do you think?
CALICON09 is happening June 18-20 at Colorado’s law school in Boulder. CALI, known to every law school in the country (save a few, like mine), is a place where law students learn and professors share, using modern internet technologies. One of the sessions at the conference this year will be presented by Harvard’s Berkman Center’s Co-director John Palfrey, author of the recent book about “digital natives,” Born Digital. (Palfrey will is also the conference’s keynote speaker.) The session will focus on how law schools can get smart about social media, from giving advice to students to addressing serious privacy concerns. My law school’s assistant dean, Steve Langerud, and I were invited to join in the conversation and share our experience at the University of Iowa College of Law in creating a social media best practices plan. (See Berkman fellow Gene Koo’s blog post about the workshop.)
The hope is to leave the conference with a working model for a social media plan that can be implemented for incoming students this fall. The best case will be schools setting up students, instructors and employers with meaningful advice and tutorials for productive social media use. The worst case, short of outright rejection by nostalgic administrators, will hopefully be careful and introspective critiques of the pros and cons of social media use by students, administrators and employers.
Thanks to Austin Groothuis at CALI for noticing Iowa Law’s project and to Gene Koo for connecting us with Berkman in this process.
If you’re going to CALI, I would love to see you there! Check out the CALICON whiteboard for details about a tweetup on the Friday evening of the conference.
In case you missed my earlier posts on Social Media Law Student about this project, please check out Part 1 and Part 2 there.
The gap in knowing the answer to “Why Facebook?” between those who use social networking and those who don’t is painfully illustrated in the chambers discussion between the juror who tweeted and updated his status on Facebook during the Fumo corruption trial. Juror Eric Wuest, put on the spot by the judge and defense attorneys, said Facebook (endearingly called “Facepage” by the judge for the first several minutes) was a journal for his thoughts, having no target audience and seeking no direct replies. Those of us who have used social networking know that he’s right: very often we will share our state of mind, an experience of the day or our feelings for others without regard for who will or might read them. Occasionally such posts are a call for action, response or even for help, but these are the exception rather than the norm. Hearing a defense attorney suggest that the Facebook update “Eric Wuest is thinking ‘what if?’” was somehow intended for the audience of the 600,000+ members of Philly’s FB network and that it was somehow identifiably connected to the Fumo trial is laughable.
It’s clear from what Wuest says that he’s not a blogger (although he did have an out-of-date anonymous blog (for which his profile has been hidden since I first looked on 3/17 and where he identified himself as pscyho, all in good fun)) and doesn’t use social media very often. In fact, he sounds like an average, relatively passive user, citing only a handful of Twitter followers and noting that the “game” of Facebook is to friend anyone who you might recognize, just to see who can get the most. He also said the blogs he reads are “joke blogs,” with animals doing funny things or people in strange situations. My heart broke a little for him a little knowing that saying “Oh, nothing related to the case, it’s just FAILblog and I can has Cheezburger!” would get him nowhere with the crowd in the judge’s chambers.
In the end, luckily, justice prevailed. Wuest was escorted out of the room after defending his innocuous posts and the judge and attorneys debated Wuest’s credibility as well as the probability of mistrail-level risks involved with such internet use by a deliberating juror. For the record, the state’s attorney advised, “[Using Facebook like this is] a new thing for us older people, but it’s what everyone is doing.” In response the judge said, “And they’re doing it to a ridiculous extreme…No doubt this is a very important issue.” Speaking to the nature of Wuest’s answers during the discussion, the judge said Wuest was “Just like any other witness. Some of the answers might not be totally accurate…[But to warrant a mistrial] there has to be a prejudicial aspect to this.” He continued to say that Wuest was just the kind of juror you want: one conscientious guy, “more aware of [his duties] than I would ever imagine a juror being” and trying to do the right thing. The judge denied the defense’s motion to remove Wuest from the jury and Wuest continued in the deliberations.
