Laura Bergus

For all of my drum-beating about the glories of online social networking, the CALI annual conference last week was a welcome reminder of how nice it is to actually *meet* people. It was great to match real faces to Twitter avatars, and I made a point of getting to know several folks I’d never met in cyberspace. Face-to-face human interaction is good stuff.

I had the opportunity of moderating part of a group discussion of social media best practices for law schools. More than 50 law librarians, administrators and techies attended this session on behalf of their school, and not a single one of them reported having policy in place to guide them in using social media. Co-moderators John Palfrey, Sarah Glassmeyer, Denise Grey, Susanna Leers, Meg Kribble and Gene Koo collected input on how institutions are using and would like to use social media for everything from recruiting new students to publishing scholarly works.

We collected contact information from nearly 40 people who said they would like to work together in collecting data and crafting guidelines for law schools’ social media use. Preliminary suggestions for students, staff and employers of law students/grads are collected at http://smbp.laurabergus.com. Next steps include building an online community where the best-practices discussion can play out and coordinating schools’ leadership in drafting working documents. Stay tuned!

While at the conference, I also had the chance to go to two of Boulder’s fine restaurants, Cork (where we had a most entertaining French waiter who gave us no crap for ordering Australian wine) and Flagstaff House (where we sat on a covered and heated porch and marveled at a thunderstorm sweeping through the valley). We also wandered around Pearl Street (very reminiscient of Iowa City’s own pedestrian mall) and drove out into the Flatiron mountains. Beautiful part of the country.

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.