Finals are coming fast, but still make sure to take care of yourself. This cat does.
Final exams and cat naps
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Tag Archives: Law School
Sites and course pages
For new STU students, welcome to law school!
My home page is at http://nathenson.org.
This site, digital garbage, is my academic blog on law and technology.
I also run a personal blog at http://nathenson.org/blog.
Course pages are available to STU students through Blackboard at http://webcourses.lexisnexis.com. You’ll need to get your Lexis ID from the law library.
UPDATE: Lexis is in the process of updating its main law school homepage. The update has led to problems for users of Internet Explorer 7. If you have difficulty logging into Blackboard, try using Mozilla Firefox.
Tiger Woods, distractions, and laptops in the classroom
I was awe-struck during the recent U.S. Open Championship, where Tiger Woods won a nerve-wracking 19-hole playoff on the fifth day. The whole time, Woods suffered from a torn ACL and a double-stress fracture in his leg. Not only was he often in visible pain when taking a shot: he also had to walk a 7000+ yard course five times. Yet he remained focused, tuning out everything, including his own considerable pain.
Around the same time, I read Maggie Jackson’s post at Nanci Alboher’s blog about Jackson’s new book, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age. Citing an expert in the field of “interruption science,” Jackson states that knowledge workers switch tasks on average every three minutes. Once distracted, they take a half-hour to return to their original task. Jackson notes that “[in] meetings where everyone is checking e-mail, opportunities for collective creative energy and critical thinking are lost.”
Substitute “meetings” with “law school” and one sees a pretty accurate image of what can happen in classrooms with laptops. I would imagine that Jackson would agree that banning laptops would enhance the classroom experience. As she states in her posting (albeit not on the topic of laptops):
We are born interrupt-driven -– that’s how humans stay tuned to their environment. But if we jump on every e-mail or ping, we’ll have trouble pursuing our long-term goals. To make inroads on the deep, messy work of life, we need to stay focused, bringing the spotlight of our attention back again and again to the work at hand.
Advice for new law students, part III: avoiding your own Universal Studios fire
In an op-ed in the New York Times, UCLA film professor Jonathan Kuntz writes about the recent fire at Universal Studios. After describing the destruction of the courthouse square from To Kill a Mockingbird and Back to the Future, Kuntz notes:
More serious may be the loss of the circulating 35-millimeter theatrical prints. While not original masters, these are the copies made for screenings at repertory theaters, art museum retrospectives and in college classes. . . .
. . . .
This latest fire, I hope, will prompt Universal and its fellow majors to better preserve not just key titles like “Duck Soup,” “Dracula” or “Vertigo” — which will surely be reprinted and return to circulation — but also the other 90 percent of their inventories, the less famous and therefore more vulnerable titles that the studio may not feel justify spending thousands to save. These are exquisite samples of 20th-century American culture and deserve to always be seen in their extravagant, sensual, big-screen glory.
It sounds like after the fire, some of Universals’ assets no longer exist beyond a single remaining master copy. That’s troubling for several reasons. First, should the masters be destroyed, the best (and in some cases, only) copies will be lost. Second, for cultural use to be made of the materials, new copies must be made.
What does this have to do with law students? The same thing: the importance of archiving and the dangers of failing to do so. Every term, students suffer data catastrophes — hard drive crashes, stolen laptops, etc. — leading to lost class notes, outlines, paper drafts, etc. Law school is stressful enough without the added strain of losing a 100-page outline two days before the final exam. But sadly, it seems to happen every term.
Back up your essential files, do so regularly, and keep them in secure and geographically distinct places, such as multiple computers, external hard drives kept elsewhere, network storage, and/or online storage. Or do simple and quick backups: periodically email your essential files to yourself.
Advice part I (life and stress) here.
Advice part II (studying and attitudes) here.
Advice part III (back up your data) here.
Advice part IV (essay exams) here.
Advice part V (conclusory argumentation) here.
Advice part VI (incomplete argumentation) here.