So long, my Facebook friend . . .

The New York Times reports on the phenomenon of being "unfriended" on Facebook. Urban Dictionary (which is mostly really, really offensive, so don't click that link unless you're shock-proof) gives these as two definitions for "unfriend":

The oposite of befriending someone. When you unfriend someone you don't necessarily become their enemy per say, but you are just no longer their friend, sorta like just distancing yourself from them until you befriend them again.

The act of removing a friend from your facebook account. Compulsive people prune their friend list periodically, removing people that they no longer have contact with. More often though, unfriending is only done when a particular friend's updates and self-promotions become so annoying that you can no longer stand hearing about them. Or you might unfriend someone when they piss you off, however, this is not very effective since the person who is unfriended is not notified that you unfriended them and you'd be better off to keep them as a friend and plot your revenge.

I was delighted to discover from a friend (real and Facebook) that you could unfriend someone without a notification. First, if a Facebook friend wants to unfriend me, I don't need to know. Please just go gently into that good night. Second, I don't need real life drama when I unfriend someone who was better left in my past. The fact is that we friend a lot of people so as not to offend them. But then they're "all up in our business" (as we liked to say in Texas). So it's nice to be able to make a graceful, non-confrontational coward's exit.

This reminds me of when we all got caller ID 15 or so years ago. You would dial a wrong number, and then the person would call you back to ask you why you had hung up without saying anything? And suddenly you're in a relationship with someone who should have been a total stranger and you're explaining why your relationship just isn't working out for you. So they hang up on you. Now you're mad. So you call back to tell them how rude that was. And why not? You have each other's phone numbers. I was relieved when people began using caller ID as God intended: as a way to *ignore* people, not *engage* them.

Modern life is tricky.

How Long 'til the Kids Flee Facebook

I suggested a year ago that, with the addition of older Xers like me to Facebook, it certainly couldn't be considered cool anymore. Need further evidence that Facebook isn't cool? My mother tried to "friend" me. While I generally agree that parents ought to keep tabs on how their children use the Internet, I'm drawing the line at your 40 year-old daughter. Sorry Mom. Not gonna happen.

Obama is Our President; Joe Biden is Our Story

This picture was taken last summer of (from left to right) my BFF and colleague Kathleen Bergin, a Turkish student at Bahcesehir University, and me. I love Kathy. I love Turkey. I love Bahcesehir University. I love Obama. So this picture makes me really happy. If this picture also included my family and a big block of cheese, it would pretty much be perfect.

I can't sleep tonight. The whole world changes in 8 1/2 hours. Tomorrow is going to be that scene in the Wizard of Oz when we switch from Kansas to Oz and everything goes from black-and-white to technicolor. Tomorrow is technicolor.

I watched the concert at the Lincoln Memorial on HBO yesterday. I watched Oprah from the Kennedy Center today. I'll watch the Inauguration from school tomorrow. I'll sing and jump up and down and wave at everyone on TV just like I did when I watched HBO and Oprah. And then I'll order the soundtrack. No foolin', this Inauguration comes with a soundtrack. Again, add a block of cheese, and I'd marry this Inauguration.

It's a big day for a lot of people tomorrow. Americans, sure. But it's more than that to a lot of people. African-Americans, obviously, but I can't even imagine what that's like. But I do know what it's like for a generation that's been uninspired by anything. Until now, no one's even tried to inspire us. I wondered what it would be like when one of our own was in the White House. Frankly, I thought it would be bad (and it may still . . . there are a lot of elections between now and the time Xers fade into the background). This Obama character, though, knows what he's doing. Scoop up all the people who were considered uninterested in the national conversation and tell us that it's our turn, and you can ride that horse for a long, long time. Count me in. I am jaded, jaded, jaded, and he's convinced me.

I thought America was over. Seriously. I thought the good part was long, long gone. I listened to my parents talk ad nauseum about how sad it was when John F. Kennedy was shot. Everybody remembered where they were. Great. The only reason that anyone in my generation remembers where they were when anything happened is because we're trying to manufacture some equivalent "where were you when . . .?" moment to the one Boomers have with JFK. (And 9/11 was the Millennial moment, not ours. We had the shuttle crash, but really? It was sad . . . sure. But it was no presidential assassination or mass terrorist attack on U.S. soil.) It's not that we wanted a tragic moment. We wanted to care about something uniquely American so much that it would break our hearts if it was taken away. "Better to have loved and lost" etc., etc., etc.

I remember the precise moment when I believed that America was over. It was the admonition that terrorists hate shopping more than anything in the world. If you want to really piss off a terrorist, go shopping! That was the day I logged onto the State Department site to find out how to get my Canadian work visa.

Then, of course, there was Katrina. I already knew America was over, but I was in a ridiculous amount of denial about what a shabby state we were in when the progress stopped. I saw a lot of disgusting apathy in the weeks after Katrina. But the thing that changed me -- I mean, *really* changed -- was when I realized that all the critical race theorists are right: It's interest convergence that changes people's behavior. Not the desire to do good. Not an innate sense of what's right and what's wrong. I haven't talked about that moment since it happened, but I think about it a lot. And it still makes me nauseous. Bergin and I told Houston police at the Astrodome that there was a set of unlocked doors leading down a series of unmonitored rooms and hallways. We went in one night to see what was in there. It had old office furniture in it and had probably once been an office suite, adjacent to a maze of hallways. People had clearly already been there since the Astrodome was opened as a shelter. Someone had urinated on the floor. Someone had shit in a trash can. There were soiled clothes tossed in different places. Bergin and I thought, "Wow! What a spectacularly good place to rape someone!" We told the police that part, too. The first night, the cop we told shrugged. The next night, the cop we told shrugged. So we went in the third night with a camera and took pictures. We posted them on our blog and reported that we'd told the police that bad things were going to happen in there, but they seemed pretty cool about the whole thing. We started referring to it as The Rape & Torture Suite. The next day, they were tied shut. "Now?!" I screamed, when I saw it. "You won't lock the doors to keep someone vulnerable from being secreted away and brutalized, but you'll lock them to keep your department from being embarrassed?" Why not? Brownie was doing a heckofajob and all was right with the world. I tried to sell my husband on the idea of moving to Turkey. We compromised and came to New York instead.

And you know what this makes me think of? Jill Biden.

Everytime I see Joe Biden, I can't help thinking of what it must have been like to lose a wife and child as a young man. He must have thought nothing was ever going to feel right again. Surely, he thought the good part was behind him. There must have been days when he thought *he* was over. And then came Jill. I bet he dared not hope that she might usher in a season of new happiness. But eventually, he clearly did believe that. And suddenly, his best days were ahead, not behind.

That's us now. Suddenly, our best days are ahead.

"Sweet land of liberty/Of thee I sing." 7 hours and 45 minutes. :)

Super Sticky Plagiarism Situation

Here's a seriously twisted plagiarism case. It's unusual to see administrators take this kind of action -- demoting a professor -- for willful ignorance of academic dishonesty by students. But it does seem to send the right message to everyone involved: Honesty matters.

Plagiarizing Professor Punished

For reasons, I don't fully understand, law students every year seem aghast when I explain what can happen to them if they are caught plagiarizing in law school. I talk to them about law students who have been expelled, law students who have been denied admission to the bar, law students who have lost jobs. And this is just the stuff that I can find in reported judicial opinions. Certainly, the general rule of thumb in litigation is true of law student plagiarism cases: what we see in court reporters is a fraction of a fraction of the disputes that actually get litigated, and those disputes are a fraction of the disputes that are handled without court intervention.

But what's even more appalling is when a professor is busted for plagiarism. I mean, really? It can't be that he didn't know what plagiarism was. He's an English professor, for crying out loud. I bet he's counseled hundreds of students over the years about the dangers of plagiarism. I bet he's referred students to some sort of disciplinary body. He was ultimately suspended without pay for 5 years, a punishment that prompted him to retire. I thought the punishment was awfully light for someone not experiencing multiple personality disorder or something similar.

I also thought the treatment in Inside Higher Ed was pretty generous. For example, look at this excerpt:

One of the authors from whom Twitchell borrowed was Roy Rivenburg, a former Los Angeles Times reporter and freelance writer. In his book Shopping for God, Twitchell lifted a passage from a 1995 piece Rivenburg had written on the marketing of Christian-related products. Rivenburg’s passage noted:

“Indeed, with the exception of furniture and major appliances, it is possible to outfit an entire home in Christian products — bird feeders to body lotions, luggage to lamps.

Twitchell’s passage was very similar:

“Indeed, with the exception of furniture and major appliances, it is possible to outfit your entire self and home in Christian products — bird feeders to body lotions, luggage to lamps.”

No! No, it was not "very similar"! It was virtually identical. He contributed three words and no original ideas to the original quote.

Being an Xer, I don't really have a deep sense that many things are absolutely moral or immoral. A friend once described my sense of moral relativism as "stunning." But plagiarism is stealing. And fraud. To paraphrase the old Certs commercial, "It's two, two, two [crimes] in one." And see how easy that was? Some quotation marks, a web link, a pair of brackets, and no one gets hurt.

But Are They Willing to Pay for It?

Students are unhappy with the amount of practice-based legal writing they're able to do in law school according to the latest LSSSE results:

Despite near universal agreement on the value of these skills and competencies, legal writing, for example, is typically featured primarily in the first year, and viewed by students as a sidebar in their doctrinal classes,” writes George D. Kuh, LSSSE director and professor at the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research, in his introduction to the 2008 results. “The low value placed on writing is symbolized by the facts that relatively few legal writing faculty are tenured or in a tenure-eligible role and are often paid less than other faculty members. Nevertheless, good lawyers must be good legal writers; it is a skill that will serve students well as they transition to the practice of law.”

Although law students report that they have plenty of opportunities to hone their legal writing skills in school, more than a third of them “wished there were more opportunities to do practice-based legal writing during their studies.” Furthermore, only 36 percent of students agree that their legal writing coursework helped them “learn substantive law by providing an opportunity to work through concepts and ideas.”

Have you said to your students or to your faculty who teach legal writing that it's "the most important class in the curriculum?" I know some of you have said it, because I've heard it plenty. And yet . . . there are only a handful of schools that have put their money where their proverbial mouths are. This you can take to the bank: If your law school doesn't offer salary parity, recognition of legal writing scholarship, and tenure to the faculty who teach legal writing, you can't head-fake the students or the legal writing professors into thinking you value legal skills training by just calling legal writing "the most important class in the curriculum." Oh sure, we nod and smile and say, "oh, thank you Mighty Tenured One." But seriously?

Some of us were born at night, but it wasn't last night.

And here's my message to students: If you really value legal skills training, then when you donate money to your school, earmark the money for legal skills training. Or better yet, don't donate until the law school begins making a significant resource allocation for legal skills training. If every alum who got called in the annual donation drives said, "I'm sorry; I can't support a law school that doesn't invest in legal skills," then you can bet that your law school would transform in a heartbeat into a legal research, writing, and drafting mecca.

Technology for Meetings

Sometimes it seems like technology has made our lives more complex, so it's nice when you run across something that actually makes your life easier. The tools listed here are ones that I use for meetings of various groups I'm a part of. They work equally well for faculty committees, board meetings, and meetings with students. I also recommend them to students who want to collaborate with each other on a project but don't live near each other.


Free Conference Call
Use: conference call service
URL: www.freeconferencecall.com
Registration: one member of the group registers and receives a phone number along with conference call instructions to share with the rest of the group
Ease of use: SUPER easy
Cost: the conference call service is free; each caller pays for her own long distance charges

Skype
Use: conference call service
URL: www.skype.com
Registration: all members must download the Skype software to their computers; Skype has a conference call feature
Ease of use: FAIRLY easy (the download is SUPER easy; using the software requires a little computer savvy but not much more than e-mail)
Cost: free (but users will need to make sure they have built-in computer speaker and microphone or an external speaker and microphone -- most computers have built-in speakers; fewer have built-in microphones)

Agree-a-Date
Use: meeting scheduler
URL: www.agreeadate.com
Registration: one member of the group registers to send out meeting invitations and notices to other members; the registrant chooses a span of dates/times, and other members select their availability; the registrant can then easily tell which date/time has the best availability
Ease of use: FAIRLY easy (but much easier than scheduling a meeting through a series of emails)
Cost: free

In addition, groups that need to share documents or collaborate on documents to accomplish their work might consider online collaboration applications like Google Docs or Adobe Buzzword. For those applications, each member must have her own account. Another option is to set up a TWEN site (or Blackboard or other course management site) to "park" documents that the group needs.

Research Supports Collaborative Learning for Millennials

Today's edition of Inside Higher Education reports on a study of peer instruction and concludes that students learn more when they have an opportunity to discuss concepts with their classmates. The study was able to differentiate between just mimicking answers from smarter classmates and actually learning information that could be applied to different questions and hypotheticals, and researchers found that actual learning increased when students talked about new material together. While the study dealt exclusively with in-class learning, there's nothing to suggest that the same wouldn't be true of out-of-class collaboration like study groups.

Preliminary results of a follow-up study suggests that the best formula for learning is a combination of instructor-led and peer-led discussions.

So the collaboration that Millennials prefer is also good for them! (Interesting idea for follow-up study: is collaborative learning as effective across generations?)

Cross-Generational Influence in Legal Writing: Getting Started

I teach legal writing primarily and have for the past 11 1/2 years. However, my primary research interest is cross-generational influence and cross-generational competence (the nice thing about being one of the first to write about something in legal education is that you get to make up what it's called). So the filter I tend to see most things through is a generational one.

Recently, I've been thinking about the generations in legal writing. What's interesting to me is seeing the generational influence in a relatively new field of law teaching. In the next few weeks, I'll explore here the influences primarily of Boomers and Xers in legal writing.

My basic premise is this, though: while the field of legal writing tends to be cohesive, the rifts that do occur seem to head down several fairly predictable fault lines (a couple of which even I won't touch publicly). One of those is a generational fault line. And it's not just any fault line; it's one that tends to be pretty volatile. The gap between Boomers and Xers is not only large because of the characteristics of those particular generations; it's also large because it also straddles the pre- and post-technology revolution line. In a field as new as legal writing, it's expected that progress will be marked in some respects by how well this very young field is able to navigate the political landscape of a very old profession. So those who strategize for this new field's success necessarily do so within their own framework of how youth (the new) deals with authority (the established). Ideas of what makes someone authoritative and how much deference one should give to authority vary widely between the Boomers and the Xers.

Next up: some foundational information about Boomers