This is the first year I'm on my school's appointments committee. Wading through the AALS FAR forms is great fun for everyone involved.
But it's also quite a tax on the environment. By the end of all of the distributions, there will probably be close to 900 or 1000 candidates (a guess, but probably not far off). If every school has 3 people on their appointments committees, and most of them print out the forms so they can easily look through them, that's at least 270,000 pieces of paper used (assuming double-sided printing). It can easily go up by the hundreds-of-thousands with more people on the committees, like the 6 we have here at Drexel.
That's quite a waste.
It seems to me, though, we now have technology to take a bite out of this waste. The iPad seems perfectly designed for wading through FAR forms. It's screen size would easily display one form. I can imagine an app that would make wading through these single-screen forms a cinch. A flick of a finger should go from one form to another. A drop-down menu could let you search candidates by field. A box somewhere on the page should let you make notes, whether it's a score for the candidate or something you want to remember about that person. You could also easily underline or highlight parts of a page. And following a link to the person's resume would be useful too.
I'm sure there are other neat ways that an iPad could help this process, but this minimal app would be a great way to go through FAR forms quickly, easily, and with little waste.
Anyone know iPad programming language? I'll take 10% of the profits, you get the rest.
David, you can search the FAR forms online using a variety of AALS-prescribed parameters (e.g., subject matter). Might that suffice?
As for saving paper, perhaps the committee's administrative assistant can create two-sided, rather than single-sided, photocopies of the master set.
On a somewhat related matter, if a school had only one doctrinal slot open and had five or more committee members, might it be cheaper to avoid attending the conference and just pay for campus visits?
Posted by: Tim Zinnecker | August 23, 2010 at 03:48 PM