Herding Cats: Improving Law School Teaching

What makes a good law teacher? Is excellence in teaching largely a matter of intellectual brilliance, of superior organization and delivery of material, of friendliness and fairness to one\u27s students? Or does it have more to do with style, with stage presence, with the ability to engage an audience in the act of reflective and spontaneous thinking? While the question of how to define and evaluate teaching necessarily bedevils deans and tenure committees who must make personnel decisions, the focus on defining the competent teacher has obscured from faculty attention the more fundamental question: how can we implement a system to improve faculty performance across the board? It is this question that law schools around the country have not adequately addressed. Three years ago, the faculty of Franklin Pierce Law Center adopted a program to improve our classroom teaching. This article describes and evaluates that program, in which all three authors played a role

Herding cats: observing live coding in the wild

After a momentous decade of live coding activities, this paper seeks to explore the practice with the aim of situating it in the history of contemporary arts and music. The article introduces several key points of investigation in live coding research and discusses some examples of how live coding practitioners engage with these points in their system design and performances. In the light of the extremely diverse manifestations of live coding activities, the problem of defining the practice is discussed, and the question raised whether live coding will actually be necessary as an independent category

The Visual Effects Research Lab : Herding Cats to Infinity

In the paper I outline the current findings of the research undertaken at the VERL. The three-year project links the worlds of film, art, technology and computer science. In sharing methodologies and promoting cross, trans and inter disciplinary understanding the project challenges established notions of visual thought and creates new synergies between scientists, artists, and film-makers. In 1985 painter David Hockney was invited by Quantel to experience its TV computer graphics system Paintbox. Hockney worked for 8 hours nonstop creating artworks with the ‘tablet’ and ‘pen’ set up. He described the system as like ‘painting with light’. In the spirit of Quantel’s project VERL and Creative Scotland invited artists to propose fantastical moving image projects un-realizable with incumbent technology. VERL worked with the four selected artists to shoot high resolution (up to 4K) and post-produce in Nuke and Maya a series of innovative film projects for cinematic exhibition. The projects pushed the lab’s facilities and team to its limits creating impossible ornithological stunts, buildings rising from burning embers, real and imagined robots and visceral fantasy worlds. This project has had a great deal of publicity in the National and International media, and has been widely acknowledged to be of great significance to the European research community in film media. The UK Film Council, Broadcast Magazine, OFCOM Scotland, The European Union RDF, Nordmedia Germany and Film Fyn Denmark have all quoted findings from the project. It was awarded “Best Practice in Media / Science” at the Creative City Challenge Awards 2011 in Bremen Germany.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

The Increasingly Complicated World of International Mediation

Book review of "Herding Cats: Multiparty Mediation in a Complex World" (Chester A. Crocker et al. eds.). Washington D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1999.Published in cooperation with the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolutio

Dialogical Interspecies Ethics: Ataraxia, Desire and Hope in the Post-Human World of Anne Carson\u27s Pastoral

This review essay implicitly revisits human and non-human power relations within a critical animal studies context that understands the affective conjunction between the manipulation of our worlds (action, partly through knowledge) and degrees of involvement with these others that live in our worlds (comportment via emotions). I take Louise Westling’s new study as the platform for an analysis of two book-length poems, The Autobiography of Red (1998) and red doc\u3e (2013), which centre on the life of a shepherd, Geryon. Rather than revisit classical pastoral, these texts extract power-relations that classical myth and pastoral spatialise. In so doing, I argue, they reclaim a site of the emotions within the scene of herding—itself a metaphor for containing animals, for channelling and managing resources, wildness. Carson’s treatment of emotions positions the reader to evaluate the border between human and non-human animals; to unpack and complicate the terms by which we might wish to make or unmake that very demarcation

Herding Cats? Management and University Performance

Using a tried and tested measure of management practices that has been shown to predict firm performance, we survey nearly 250 departments across 100+ UK universities. We find large differences in management scores across universities and that departments in older, research-intensive universities score higher than departments in newer, more teaching-oriented universities. We also find that management matters in universities. The scores, particularly with respect to provision of incentives for staff recruitment, retention and promotion are correlated with both teaching and research performance conditional on resources and past performance. Moreover, this relationship holds for all universities, not just research-intensive ones

Herding Cats: Improving Law School Teaching

What makes a good law teacher? Is excellence in teaching largely a matter of intellectual brilliance, of superior organization and delivery of material, of friendliness and fairness to one\u27s students? Or does it have more to do with style, with stage presence, with the ability to engage an audience in the act of reflective and spontaneous thinking? We conducted a survey, described below, of programs to improve teaching in law schools. We found that the efforts law schools make to improve teaching are generally focused on newer faculty and take place in the emotionally charged context of tenure decisions. Few if any schools have a systematic program to encourage tenured and experienced teachers to improve their use of class time

Herding Cats: Student Engagement and Classroom Management

How many times have you wondered how to better organize your classroom to optimize management and lesson engagement? This presentation will leave you with ideas to help turn students\u27 brains on to learning and increased engagement in the classroom while minimizing classroom management issues