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The Chronicle of Higher Education chronicles how the use of badges can be used as a virtual diploma of sorts:

Educational upstarts across the Web are adopting systems of “badges” to certify skills and abilities. If scouting focuses on outdoorsy skills like tying knots, these badges denote areas employers might look for, like mentorship or digital video editing. Many of the new digital badges are easy to attain—intentionally so—to keep students motivated, while others signal mastery of fine-grained skills that are not formally recognized in a traditional classroom.

At the free online-education provider Khan Academy, for instance, students get a “Great Listener” badge for watching 30 minutes of videos from its collection of thousands of short educational clips. With enough of those badges, paired with badges earned for passing standardized tests administered on the site, users can earn the distinction of “Master of Algebra” or other “Challenge Patches.”

Traditional colleges and universities are considering badges and other alternative credentials as well. In December the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that it will create MITx, a self-service learning system in which students can take online tests and earn certificates after watching the free lecture materials the university has long posted as part of its OpenCourseWare project.

MIT also has an arrangement with a company called OpenStudy, which runs online study groups, to give online badges to students who give consistently useful answers in discussion forums set up around the university’s free course materials.

I know of one great organization that uses badges!

So California wants to clamp down on people selling trinkets (so-called utilitarian objects) at places like Venice Beach, but not people selling art.

And for almost as long, artists have set up tables to sell their wares. But last year, after a federal court dismissed a city ordinance as unconstitutional, the number of vendors hawking mass-produced items like T-shirts and costume jewelry grew rapidly. Soon, local people said, it was impossible to see the ocean from what is officially called Ocean Front Walk.

A new ordinance that goes into effect on Jan. 20 is intended to forbid only those who are selling items that could be considered to have utilitarian value — that means art is allowed but T-shirts are not. Mr. Rosendahl said that several city and First Amendment lawyers have assured him that the law will stand up in court.

“Who gets to decide what art is?” asked Emry Daley, who has sold Rastafarian gear from his native Jamaica for nearly five years. He pointed to the wooden pipes and leather bracelets that he said he had made. “Nobody can get this anywhere but here. This is something special. We sell things that inspire people.”

First Amendment? Really?

Oh boy Liptak writes close to home sometimes.

I heavily sanitized my resume–omitted any affiliations with the Federalist Society or my talks at Second Amendment conferences sponsored by the NRA. Fortunately, I have never worked for any ideologically-oriented groups. I’ve worked for 2 federal judges, the Department of Defense, and a law firm. I never summered at IJ, Koch, FedSoc, IHS, or anywhere else. So my resume, unless you squinted hard, didn’t scream libertarian. Teresa Wagner, not so much.

“My client is an ideologue,” Mr. Fieweger said. “She does believe in conservative values.” Ms. Wagner has worked for the National Right to Life Committee, which opposes abortion and euthanasia, and the Family Research Council, which takes conservative positions on social issues.

John Mcginnis (who advised me on my AALS foray) said things are getting better:

John O. McGinnis, a law professor at Northwestern University and an author of the Georgetown study, said last week that “it is still the case the legal academy is quite ideologically monochromatic.” But he added that things seem to be changing.

“My perception, for what it is worth, is that the younger generation in academics is largely quite open to those of all political views,” he said. “They did not experience the polarizing effects of the 1960s and the Vietnam War.”

Wally Olson sums up my thinking well:

“I have serious misgivings about asking the courts to fix this through lawsuits,” Mr. Olson said. “It threatens to intrude on collegiality, empower some with sharp elbows to sue their way into faculty jobs, invite judges into making subjective calls of their own which may reflect their assumptions and biases, all while costing a lot of money and grief.”

“At the same time,” he added, “there’s a karma factor here. Law faculties at Iowa and elsewhere have been enthusiastic advocates of wider liability for other employers that get sued. They’re not really going to ask for an exemption for themselves, are they?”

Update: More from Elie Mystal (whom I finally met last week at AALS!)

Conservatives writ large aren’t a protected class, but the conservative law professor is damn near an endangered species. They need help, not because they are genetically predisposed to be crappy law professors, but because years of discrimination against them tell conservative legal minds to find something else to do besides become a law professor. There are lots of places where conservative principles are welcome, but legal academia isn’t one of them. . . .

Whether or not they grovel for it, something needs to be done to help the American conservative law professor. Because the way things are going, I’m taking screen caps of the Volokh Conspiracy and sending them to be archived in the Museum of Natural History.

The Court summarily affirmed Bluman v. FEC (a case filed by my good friend Yaakov Roth). Elie Mystal sums up the logical inconsistency of the Court’s opinion:

Corporations are people when it comes to influencing our political process with money. But people are not people if they are foreign born. Clearly, foreign nationals living in the United States should just incorporate themselves in Delaware if they want to regain their personhood.

The Law School Survey of Student Engagement has released its 2011 Annual Survey Results:

The selected results reported in this section are based on responses from more than 33,000 law students at 95 law schools in the U.S. and Canada who completed LSSSE in spring 2011. We also draw upon responses to a set of experimental questions appended to the survey and given to a subset of the 2011 respondents.

The results presented in this report represent just a small sampling of the information LSSSE collects each year. In addition to the three themes featured on the following pages, LSSSE data let us learn more about how certain law school programs, practices, and curricular efforts relate to student success and student engagement; changes in the law school experience from year to year; how various types of students experience law school; and much more. These findings can yield important lessons about the law school experience writ large, and, at the school-level, about the experiences of students in the classroom and the wider school environment. Below, we highlight just a few results to provide a better idea of the breadth of issues that LSSSE data can inform.

A few highlights (lowlights?).

Students are not prepared to work in groups:

On the question of learning to work in teams and with non-lawyers, fewer than one-third (28%) of students surveyed reported frequently working with other students on projects during class, much less working with non-lawyers or support personnel, and 24% reported never working together on projects during class. This is not surprising; law schools have tended to stress working alone so as to grade students on their own work. Ultimately, however, preparation of future lawyers is likely to diminish the role of grading convenience and accentuate the role
of helpful experience.

H/T TaxProf