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Introduction
Welcome to the University of Miami School of Law Faculty Development Wiki, originated and curated by UM Law's Director of Faculty Development.
The "Director of Faculty Development" (DoFD) is charged with helping faculty with their research. That is at once a daunting and somewhat formless charge. In the hopes of giving that mission some form and content, this page and the set of pages that it links to are an experiment in cooperative organization and information-sharing. NOTE: Given the nature of a wiki, not all pages are linked from this one, so please click around.
These pages are designed to be a collaborative exercise: Wiki pages can be edited by anyone with the access to read them. That means that you are invited to help define the Director's Mission Statement and even add things to his To-Do List by going to those pages and clicking on the edit tab at the top of the page. You also can create as many new pages as you wish, although if you want anyone to read them you'll need to make sure that at least one other accessible page links to each of them.
See the Wiki Editing Instructions for links to editing help. If you would more information about who can read these pages see the Security page.
Internal Faculty Talks
The Internal Faculty Talks page lists
- Planned internal faculty talks, and paper titles when available
- Dates available if you would like to give a talk. Feel free to edit the Internal Faculty Talks page directly to claim a spot, or email the DoFD
- Copies of the paper for past and forthcoming talks
SSRN
Whether or not it was wise to commit the law school to the SSRN machine (and pay them for the privilege), the fact is we did it. Having done so, it's important to do it well.
Currently we are not doing it well at all. Changing this requires effort from everyone on the faculty. We should make it a collective goal to have 100% participation in SSRN -- everyone should have posted at least one item (dated 2006 or 2007 or 2008), whether final or draft, by the end of this academic year. People now look at SSRN uploads as measuring productivity and SSRN downloads as somehow measuring a faculty's scholarly impact. This may be -- is -- ridiculous, but having decided to the play this game, we should at least make an effort to play it well.
Here's a link to U. Miami SSRN page. It's a start -- thank you to those who have been contributing their articles -- but does this look like a sufficiently impressive law school?
Here's the DoFD SSRN Nag List -- people who have confessed to having recent scholarship which they have not yet uploaded to SSRN. If your name is on the list, please follow the instructions in How to Upload to SSRN; please do not remove your name until ALL of your recent scholarship is online.
If the nag list proves insufficient, we may have an SSRN Hall of Fame (for the people with the most stuff uploaded) and an SSRN Hall of Shame (for those who post nothing on SSRN). Since downloads are outside of our control, it does not seem right to focus on these at present.
Research Assistants
Many faculty have mentioned that they want a research assistant, or would like to have better trained RA's. The Research Assistants page has
- Names and contact info for students seeking a job
- Information about (forthcoming) Research Assistant training sessions to be organized by the library
Law Review Submission Tools
The Law Review Submission Tools page offers various tools including:
- Links to ExpressO
- Information about law review submission policies
List of Recent Faculty Scholarship
The list of recent Faculty Scholarship is still vestigial.
Please add information about your latest scholarship.
Cool Tools which use a computer
Desktop Software
- Mind mappers
- Clipmate - better document editing - Read Why You Need Clipmate for more info.
- Copernic - better searching of your hard drive for that missing piece of text is Copernic desktop search. Unlike Google, it doesn't phone home and tell on you.
- Word Processing
- Law Office Software
- Courtroom Software
- Presentation Software
- Utilities
Web Reading Tools
Web Writing Tools
- Calendars
- Making Your Own Web Page
- Blogs. If you follow the instructions at umlaw.net I'm happy to install a blog for you. Or you can get one hosted free from Wordpress.
- Wikis: If you follow the instructions at umlaw.net I'm happy to install a wiki for you.
Other
Some thoughts on client-server
Note: For more up-to-date info, keep an eye on the UM Faculty Software Wiki
PDF Editing Tip
Wordperfect X13 (with the latest patch) imports most PDF files and converts them into text files. This can be very useful sometimes....
PDFCreator is an open-source, freely available software to create PDF files in the same manner as Adobe's Acrobat.
Writing Tools
(to come)
It All Comes Together: Microsoft Office Tips Roundup
PR
- Promoting Articles
- Faculty PR more generally
See also liaison with other departments (to come)
Interdisciplinarity
- survey of what we do (to come)
- resources (to come)
- centers on campus and in other units
- issues relating to cross-listing courses?
Other Professional Development
- Teaching Skills (to come)
- Workshop anyone?
- Personal Web Pages
- Blogging
- Other Local Wikis
- Copyright Experiences Wiki, a project on what rights law journals allow authors to keep
- First Step Wiki, which is a place to sketch ideas for a proposed one or two day introductory program for incoming UM law students.
Miscellaneous
The Relevant Academic Writing page collects links to articles about faculty development, and invites commentary on them.