Using philanthropic funding, Baraniuk and the team behind OpenStax contracted professional content developers to write the books, and each book went through the industry-standard review cycle, including peer review and classroom testing. The books are scope- and sequence-compatible with traditional textbooks, and they contain all of the ancillary materials such as PowerPoint slides, test banks, and homework solutions.

So there is professional level seeding of content while also allowing for wiki-like contribution:

Each book has its own dashboard, called StaxDash. Along with displaying institutions that have adopted the book, StaxDash is also a real-time erratum tracker: Faculty who are using the books are encouraged to submit errors or problems they’ve found in the text. “There’s also the issue of pointing out aspects of the text that need to be updated,” notes Baraniuk, “for example, keeping the Sociology book up-to-date as the Arab Spring continues to evolve. People can post these issues, and our pledge is that we are going to fix any issues as close to ‘in real time’ as possible. These books will be up-to-date in a matter of hours or days instead of years.” When accessing a book through its URL on Connexions, students and faculty will always get the most up-to-date version of the book. Faculty can, however, use the “version control” feature on Connexions to lock in a particular version of the book for use throughout a semester.

If you thought that keeping up with authoritative versions of an ebook and citing it (trust me it is odd to cite to a location in a Kindle book) was messy, this new model will throw you. Then again, that is a small issue.

Group contributions for the latest on an issue and the ability to choose versions is a great idea. Law texts that could update the latest cases or a change in legislation as they happen and then be refined overtime would be wonderful. Of course teachers use other ways to reach these goals. But if crowds/commons style approaches to texts work, we may see better and less expensive versions of textbooks. How the system will mangage disputes about content and education boards’ issues with approval remains to be seen. Still, the promise of this approach should make the miasmic aspects of education boards look silly and create a press for improved ways to have quality content available for educators and most important, for students.

A former student writes:

Yesterday, I received some good news: I have been offered — and will be accepting — a job as a trademark examiner at the PTO starting in May. It took a little longer than expected, but I finally found a way to couple my interest in trademark law with my equally compelling, Maslovian interest in keeping a roof over my head.

Quite frankly, I would not have been able to secure this job without the foundation of knowledge I obtained in your classroom. I came to Pitt in 2004 with an interest in law but without a specific sense of direction. Your introduction to trademark law class changed all of that. So for being the key in the ignition that led to me finally getting a job that I am well-suited for (and interested in!), I thank you.

I can’t wait to proudly display my unopened Canfield’s Diet Chocolate Fudge soda on my desk at the PTO.

Thanks again, for everything.

Feedback from former students is rare; feedback like this is rarer still.  Thank you!

(URL: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2017372375_tweetingteens30.html in case the hyperlink above isn’t working).

Case Western Reserve’s Journal of Law, Technology & the Internet is searching for a final article to publish in its spring edition. Any scholarly work related to cyber law, intellectual property law or the intersection of technology and the law will be considered. This is a great opportunity to see your research in print and online by the end of the spring semester. The Journal of Law, Technology & the Internet is a recognized student journal at Case Western Reserve University School of Law located in Cleveland, Ohio. Please forward all submissions, along with a CV or cover letter, to the attention of:

dtc22@case.edu | (734) 812-7373

The court held that this is a legally cognizable injury, and that a jury has to decide whether she wouldn’t have been hired anyway.

For those of you on the market this year (or thinking about it), the case is also an insightful view into the black box of academic hiring. It shows how mixed signals can occur, and how uniformly positive feedback can still not lead to getting hired for all sorts of reasons outside of the candidates’ control. I won’t comment on the reasoning or facts in this case, because I just don’t know them. That is, as they say, up to the jury now.

One final point – there is a key faculty governance nugget buried in this case. One factual question was whether the dean always followed faculty recommendations, and/or whether the dean must. While most deans follow almost all faculty hiring recommendations, they usually (technically) don’t have to. One issue in this case is that no such policy was in writing. After this case, deans might want to put such a policy in writing, but maybe the deans (or university provosts and presidents) won’t want discretion so limited.

H/T How Appealing

Nearly two years ago, I received an email from the Director of Fordham’s Center for Law and Information Policy, stating that the name of our center infringed the rights of Fordham.  I responded that our center, like many others at law schools across the nation*, uses “center” and “law” in its descriptive title, and then refers to the subject matter of the center—in our case, “intellectual property” (in their case, “information policy”).  I assured him that we always use our school’s name in any materials referencing the center.  The trademark professor in me wanted to write a long missive about both trademark law and policy.  The human being in me wanted to make a goofy yet heartfelt reference and say, “Can’t we all just get along?”  Instead, I closed by saying, essentially, that I think what they are doing is great, and I think what we are doing is great, and what law schools across the country are doing by creating enhanced learning opportunities for students in centers of research and dialogue and policy is great.  I also extended an invitation for him to come visit sometime and see the kinds of things we do at Texas Wesleyan.

(I also told him that we do have a logo, which uses the acronym of the center with the words “Center for Law and Intellectual Property” and our Texas Wesleyan house mark, and I assured him that we always use the name of the school in every piece of material we send about the center, as we have a strong interest in identifying ourselves as a Texas Wesleyan initiative.)

I did not hear from him again.  However, after our email exchange, Fordham revamped the webpage for its center and applied for federal registration of their acronym CLIP for a long list of goods and services (and using the phrase “intellectual property” four times).  That registration issued at the end of October, and the President of Texas Wesleyan has now received a cease and desist letter stating that not only any use of the acronym CLIP but the very name of our center infringes the registered and common law rights of Fordham.

The trademark professor in me wants to write a treatise about trademark law and policy.  The human in me wants to make a goofy yet heartfelt reference and say, “Really?!?”

In this current climate, when budgets are tight and the structure and content of legal education is something we are all debating passionately, when we are all working as hard as we can to provide innovative and dynamic educational opportunities for our students, I can’t help but wonder whether our collective time and resources could be better spent on other things.  On the other hand, in a lemonade-from-lemons sense, my trademark practice students are getting to see the real-world dynamics of practice.  The fact is:  As a university, we are not about to spend our students’ tuition money in this climate defending ourselves in an out-of-state trademark lawsuit, even if we think we are right, even if we think we would win, even if I suspect the best answer on the exam would be “no likelihood of confusion.”

In the end, if we can’t call our center by its descriptive function, perhaps we will go the trademark route.  I always tell my students that FLURM would be an excellent mark, because it is a coined and unattractive word.  Perhaps we’ll change our name from the Center for Law and Intellectual Property to FLURM.  Come to Texas Wesleyan School of Law, and be a part of THE CENTER OF FLURM!  At least then, no one will be confused.

* center such as, eg, the Center for Intellectual Property Law (John Marshall Law School), the Intellectual Property Law Center (Drake Law School), the Center for Intellectual Property Law and Markets (University of San Diego), the Center for Intellectual Property (University of Maryland), the Intellectual Property Center (University of Akron), or the Center for Law and Intellectual Property (Thomas Jefferson School of Law), the Center for Intellectual Property Research (Indiana University Maurer School of Law), to name a few.

Some links and comments, below the fold.

As I often am when I read pieces like this, I was struck by its juxtaposition with other pieces in the same paper. In this case, take a look at the Corner Office column, which interviewed Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone. The Corner Office is often one of my favorite parts of the Sunday Times. From a micro perspective, Geoffrey Canada hits the nail on the head when it comes to why organizational change is so difficult.

Of course, organizations and institutions that don’t change voluntarily may have change thrust upon them. When it comes to law schools and professional education, we’ve talked here at madisonian.net about both voluntary and involuntary change to legal education. Readers may want to look at, or just recall, these posts:

Deven Desai organized this extensive mobblog on legal education, way back in 2008. Many of the themes that Segal sounds in the Times today were sounded back then, by one or more of the great roster of mobblog participants.

I have from time to time characterized the challenges facing legal education as innovation challenges, explicitly evoking the complacency of a somewhat similarly dominant incumbent American institution: the steel industry. See the posts here, and again here. The American steel industry, premised on integrated mills, was in slow decline for decades — and both internal and external scholars of industrial history knew that, for many years — yet up through the late 1970s and early 1980s management and labor unions collaborated on a series of collective bargaining agreements that perpetuated some of the highest wages in American industry. The workers, their families, and their communities enjoyed extraordinarily high standards of living up through the early 1980s. Then the industry went over a cliff. The bulk of global steel production exited the United States. American steel-making communities have just started to come back, 30 years later (in Pittsburgh’s case), or, in many cases, are permanently scarred.  But the human cost — hundreds of thousands of lost jobs, family dislocation, community collapse — has been staggering.

Clay Christensen used that history as one of the central illustrations of his original, Schumpeterian Innovator’s Dilemma. Christensen directed attention to the challenges of disruptive technology and to the claim that managers in successful industries needed to find structural ways to accommodate disruption, lest disruption wreak catastrophe on their businesses.   In the case of steel, that disruption was the mini-mill.   For law schools, the accreditation structures that Segal describes in his piece have largely suppressed the emergence of the kind of disruptive technology that would feed an innovator’s dilemma for law schools.  But as Segal observes, the cliff may be approaching nonetheless: demand for legal education, at the high cost levels now seen across most of the business, may not be sustainable.  A similar history can be pulled out of the steel analogy.  Economic historians argue that in some respects, at least, Christensen is wrong; demand for the high-priced products of integrated mills had been falling steadily since the beginning of the 20th century.  Steel’s collapse could have been avoided had management and labor collaborated well before the emergence of mini-mills in building a more flexible industrial structure that supported cheaper cost structures.  Is similar flexibility available to legal educators?  Is it desirable?

Quite a while back, I wrote a post noting with interest the development of a new MBA curriculum at Yale.  Business schools aren’t constrained by accreditation requirements akin to those that dictate much of law and medical education, so Yale was free to choose a non-Harvard, non-Stanford path, which it has done. ( I have the general sense that the faculty and students at Yale are happy with the change, and that the model has been adopted at some other schools.)  What impressed me in part was the sense of curricular integration, and relationship to real-world behavior by managers, that informs the Yale model.   Yale did not simply make itself “glitzier” or “pricier” or “cheaper” or “faster.”  (Of course, I may be taken by Yale’s marketing of the thing.  Folks in business education might tell me that Yale’s approach is more rather than less similar to peer programs.)  What impressed me more than anything else was the speed with which the faculty adopted the new program, a speed that was informed by the school’s sense of competitive need.  Yale isn’t a top-tier business school and very badly wants to be.  To attract the best students and the best faculty, Yale decided that a strategy of product differentiation was in order.  And lo, though not without controversy – the dean who led the process left shortly afterward, and now runs some provocative management training at Apple – the school pivoted, and it pivoted remarkably quickly.

David Segal’s piece highlights pivots being undertaken by at least one new law school, pivots, like Yale’s prompted by a sense of competitive need.  But the pivot in question and elsewhere seems largely to consist of  “make legal education the same, but much cheaper.” It’s the Harvard curricular model — appellate cases, casebooks, classes organized by Langdellian disciplines — on a  shoestring budget.  Perhaps in his next piece, Segal will look at that curricular model itself, not in order to critique the Socratic method straw man, but to explore how the conceptual structure of legal education, inherited from Harvard more than a century ago, not only remains essentially unchanged (despite supplementing it with law clinics and “skills” instruction) but contributes to — even justifies — the cost structure that places like the Duncan School of Law perpetuate, even while they resist it.  And then Segal can borrow some of those Corner Office lessons, to illustrate why and how law faculties rarely, if ever, feel the need for competitive speed.

With apologies (for that last line) to fans and critics of Top Gun.

First: What can be done, consistent with military security, and with the prior approval of the military authorities, to make known to the world as soon as possible the contributions which have been made during our war effort to scientific knowledge?

The diffusion of such knowledge should help us stimulate new enterprises, provide jobs for our returning servicemen and other workers, and make possible great strides for the improvement of the national well-being.

Second: With particular reference to the war of science against disease, what can be done now to organize a program for continuing in the future the work which has been done in medicine and related sciences?

The fact that the annual deaths in this country from one or two diseases alone are far in excess of the total number of lives lost by us in battle during this war should make us conscious of the duty we owe future generations.

Third: What can the Government do now and in the future to aid research activities by public and private organizations?

The proper roles of public and of private research, and their interrelation, should be carefully considered.

Fourth: Can an effective program be proposed for discovering and developing scientific talent in American youth so that the continuing future of scientific research in this country may be assured on a level comparable to what has been done during the war?

New frontiers of the mind are before us, and if they are pioneered with the same vision, boldness, and drive with which we have waged this war we can create a fuller and more fruitful employment and a fuller and more fruitful life.

War should be understood as the military actions in Asia and the war on terror.

By now you all may have wondered, “What the heck is Deven doing talking about war (good God, y’all, what is it good for)?” Or something like that. And some of you may have figured out that all of the above except “War should be understood as the military actions in Asia and the war on terror”, which I threw in to try and seem like the ideas are from today, is from President Roosevelt’s letter to Vannevar Bush.

Funny how little changes overtime. Jobs, medical progress, public/private collaboration, the future of science education are all on our minds today. They have been a core issue since at least 1944. The full history of Science the Endless Frontier is hosted by the NSF. It is a fun read. Well, if you are absurdly nerdy, it is a fun read.

There are many things to enjoy in the report. One part that jumped out at me is his idea about employment and science. I may write more as I digest the report in general. For now take a read:

Scientific Progress is Essential … For the Public Welfare: (closest link to the passage)

One of our hopes is that after the war there will be full employment. To reach that goal the full creative and productive energies of the American people must be released. To create more jobs we must make new and better and cheaper products. We want plenty of new, vigorous enterprises. But new products and processes are not born full-grown. They are founded on new principles and new conceptions which in turn result from basic scientific research. Basic scientific research is scientific capital. Moreover, we cannot any longer depend upon Europe as a major source of this scientific capital. Clearly, more and better scientific research is one essential to the achievement of our goal of full employment.

How do we increase this scientific capital? First, we must have plenty of men and women trained in science, for upon them depends both the creation of new knowledge and its application to practical purposes. Second, we must strengthen the centers of basic research which are principally the colleges, universities, and research institutes. These institutions provide the environment which is most conducive to the creation of new scientific knowledge and least under pressure for immediate, tangible results. With some notable exceptions, most research in industry and Government involves application of existing scientific knowledge to practical problems. It is only the colleges, universities, and a few research institutes that devote most of their research efforts to expanding the frontiers of knowledge.

Today we may swap the rest of the world for Europe, but otherwise I think the point holds up rather well.

First, there is this claim “It’s time that we as a nation accepted a basic — and seldom-mentioned — fact. You don’t need a degree (and certainly not an M.B.A.) to start a business and create jobs, nor is it even that helpful, compared with cheaper, faster alternatives.”

Although many may say college was not necessary for them, I wonder how often an investor would take interest in a large range of folks without the same pedigree that these few have. Just look at where the folks who drop out went to school even briefly, their home lives, and socio-economic backgrounds. These dropouts had some serious foundations and support for success before college. I don’t disagree that learning about sales, networking, and how to take failure are important. I just wonder whether stating that school is not the place to go if you want to start a business is so smart for everyone. I have tried and failed at several things since law school. I have had the advantage of family support, growing up around two doctors, attending rather good schools from k-12, socialization regarding how to talk to the well-educated power brokers, and great undergraduate and graduate degrees to kick open doors for those initial meetings. Oh and if anyone thinks elite schools are not about networking, think again. Facebook: starts at Harvard, expands to elites, adds more, is all about social networking; sounds like a networking thing to me. In short, droves of people avoiding college to start a business should assess whether they will be able to start one, or whether they will be apprentices who are underpaid, overworked but in fact learning on the job. There is nothing wrong with that approach; but as far as I know, most places that offer such apprentice work expect a college degree as a baseline.

Second, schools should change, but they are not silver bullets. As for teaching failure, I always tell my students that the classroom is where you must try and fail, try and fail, try and fail, because it is better to do that in class rather than on a test or outside the campus. So yes, schools that over focus on passing tests rather than developing critical thinking and social skills are probably missing a large piece of the education puzzle. Maybe the answer is less technology as another Times article that looks at a private school group that cuts off technology for the students until around eighth grade suggests. YEAH! I happen to believe in the idea of simple, reading, writing, and arithmetic. Why? It served me well. I was ready to take college level political philosophy during high school. College professors were amazed at what I had read and discussed in grade school. Of course my way is the best. No, wait. Is that really the basis for a solution? No.

Technology is what we make of it. I believe we, as a society, can and will develop less expensive ways to share knowledge and put the power it into everyone’s hands. The materials on Khan Academy are but one example. Despite the fits and starts of Kindles, iPads, computer, netbooks, tablets, etc. as reading devices, I’d say that the group failures in the space point to a way forward. The challenges of IP laws, state regulations, and federal regulations await resolution. Tackling those problems will take, wait for it, a good education.