Here at the University of Victoria Faculty of Law, we recently compilted the results of th IT/Computer portion of the annual 1st year student survey. Here is a link to the three page survey.

Here are some highlights from the Survey:

• 94% of incoming students own laptops, and 98% of those laptops are wireless.
• 87% have high speed internet at home, and only 1% do not have any form of internet access from home.
• The average purchase price for laptops dropped again to $1358 (down from over $2000 in 2004).
• See the last page of the report for student comments (page 3).

I guess it's not surprising that wireless capabilities on student laptops is approaching 100% given that you cannot buy a laptop now without a wireless card built in. Anecdotally, I've noticed large numbers of students using skype for their long distance calls, rather than land lines, cell phones, and/or calling cards. I wonder if that will change now that the "Skype-out" to regular phones is not free.

It is interesting that laptop prices continue to fall at a fairly steady rate, which in part is helping increase the number of students who can afford to arrive at school with a laptop. The only question is what are they doing with their laptops in class ;-)

I just finished writing a paper for the Computer Aided Legal Instruction Conference (CALI) in June, called "Research in a Digital World -or- Personal Knowledge Management for Legal Researchers". From the executive summary:

The increasing volume of digital information with which researchers work is making the task of finding, capturing, organizing and eventually collaborating with digital data more difficult. Electronic information in multiple formats sitting in multiple silos of data present a challenge to researchers who have difficulty finding a specific piece of information in a timely fashion.

The two major benefits that come from effective knowledge management and knowledge sharing are an increase in the speed and quality of the research being performed. Less time is spent looking for information that has already been identified or created, so that more time can be spent in analyzing and associating disparate pieces of information. Modern electronic tools make possible collaboration between colleagues that in the past would have been difficult, expensive, or impossible. Voice and video conferencing over high speed research networks can facilitate real time collaboration at a fraction of the cost in time and money of flying members of a research team to a central location. On line collaboration tools can greatly facilitate group document creation and editing, and when it comes time to polish the final product, real time document editing makes it possible for groups scattered around the world to review a document together and make edits together.

Once researchers have the appropriate software to manage their data and help them collaborate, they need to make sure that they also have the appropriate hardware and infrastructure to take full advantage of the benefits the new software will give them. Access to high speed research networks is a must for video and voice conferencing, as well as real time document editing. An average desktop computer with two monitors, instead of the traditional single monitor, will give researchers a 10% + boost in productivity. Finally a web camera and good quality head phone/microphone rounds out a well equipped research workstation.

Whether they realize it or not, most researchers are struggling with the mountains of digital data that they have accumulated during their careers. If shown the tools available to them to find, capture and collaborate, many, if not most, will start to use some of these knowledge management tools to increase their productivity and effectively manage and collaborate with their data.

Every year at the UVic Faculty of Law we have our 1st year students fill out a survey, which among other things, asks them about the technology that they are bringing with them into law schools. It is interesting to see the trends over the three years that we have been administering the survery (see the PDF for the charts that tell the story). Some of the highlights are:

• 2 students out of the 104 surveyed do not have access to either a laptop or a computer at home.
• 86% of students own laptops, and 86% of those laptops are wireless.
• The average price of laptops purchased dropped from $2070 to $1677 over the past year.
• 5 students asked for some sort of a group purchase plan (in the comments section of the survey).
• 88% of students with computers or laptops have access to high speed internet at home.

http://www.law.uvic.ca/rmccue/docs/Computer_Survey_Incoming_2005.pdf

I can remember a story that my brother told me from when he started working for Lawson & Lundell in Vancouver in the early 1980's. Soon after starting work there he went to the managing partner and asked if he could have a desktop comptuer to help him with his work. The managing partner replyed to him that he could see no reason for him to have a computer since they were already providing him with a secretary to do his typing! Within four or five years almost all the partners had computers on their desks.

In July I spent two weeks in Serbia visiting 5 law libraries and 3 court house libraries, evaluating their IT infrastructure for USAID. As part of their Serbian Rule of Law Project, I was preparing a report to help USAID make an effective donation computers, servers and database licences to the libraries. The goal of the donation is to give the law shcools and courts access to a wide variety of European Union legal resources, so that they can be better positioned for entry into the EU somewhere down the road. You can see the blog entries from my trip here, or a PDF of the same here. As an example of what the law schools are facing, the Nis Law Faculty (in southern Serbia) has 4100 students (compared to 350 at UVic), and has 21 public access computers, only two of which are available to their 4000 undergraduates.

I've been back from Serbia for just over a month now, and I in talking to people about my experiences there, I find myself repeating a few things over and over to people. It seems ironic that there is a perception in the media (true or not) that the US and Europe aren't getting along well very, but the US currently spending large amounts of money to help Serbia integrate with the EU. The US has gotten into a mess in Iraq, but continues to do good in other parts of the world, for which they don't get a lot of credit.

Another interesting thing I was told by one of my drivers, who also happens to be a bee keeper, is that right after the US bombing took place, the quality and quantity of the honey production by his bees increased dramatically. Now why would that happen? It may have something to do with the fact the the US destroyed most of Serbia's heavy industry in the bombing, and in the process eliminated the source of most of the pollution in Serbia. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective) many of the plants have now been repaired and the pollution if flowing freely again. It's not surprising that Mirko (the bee keeper) now reports that honey production is down to where it was before the bombing again.