Is your school planning anything for orientation this year about building or hiding an online identity? Are you advising professors on whether or not to friend students on Facebook? Do you know if your dean has guidelines for herself or her staff on using social media?
Over 65 people from law schools around the world (mostly US but a few Canadians and at least one Brit) have joined the new network at socialmediabestpractices.org to discuss questions like these. If you are a law student, librarian, professor, counselor, administrator or anyone affiliated with a law school or legal education in general, you’re invited to sign up.
If you haven’t already, review the information for law school students, staff/administrators and employers (of law students and law grads, that is) at smbp.laurabergus.com.
You’re also invited to take this 5-minute survey about social media at your law school, offered by CALI.
I want this project to be useful, so please tell me what you think!
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.
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.
