Spotlight Blog

We have this summer's CALI Conference theme: "UNBOUND." Why did we choose UNBOUND? Read more to find out.

A new chapter is available in eLangdell, our open casebook initiative: The Ethics of Tax Lawyering by Michael Hatfield. Faculty can adopt it, and students can use it, for free in a bunch of different formats: on iPads, Kindles, and even as a PDF for easy printing. There is a faculty version with notes available.

The Law School Tech Talk podcast will be talking with John Mayer, our Executive Director, live on Monday, 1/31 at Noon EST/11 CDT. He'll be talking about eLangdell - our electronic casebook initiative - and this summer's CALI conference, among other CALI projects. Attending the live broadcast is free.

We've finally dived head first into 2006 and made all CALI video and past CALI webinars available on the most popular video site on the planet. YouTube granted us a nonprofit account, which means no time limits (time limits were why we chose blip.tv as our original video host). So you can subscribe and peruse the archives on CALI's YouTube channel.

We're about to publish casebooks that are free for law students and law professors to use on multiple formats (iPad, Kindle, PDF, etc.). AALS meeting attendees got a preview of some casebook chapters, and now you can, too, at elangdell.cali.org.

Your reaction to eLangdell has been overwhelmingly positive. Read some early write-ups and mentions here, here, and here. We especially like this part from The Librarian at Law. Read it below...

If you're in San Francisco for the 2010 AALS Annual Meeting this year, you should stop by and say hi to the staff at CALI's exhibitor booth. We'll all be there! Ask us about our electronic casebook initiative, eLangdell, if you're interested in adopting open casebooks that are freely available to your students. We'll also be demoing a new version of CALI lessons (hint: this version is compatible with iPads and smartphones).

So you're new to CALI.org? Welcome to our site. But what do you do next? How do you access all of this great content? Well, like most websites, you create an account. But to access the lessons there's one tiny registration step that's a little different than most websites: the CALI Authorization Code. Sound confusing? It's not. Watch this 2 minute video to learn how to create an authorized account at cali.org.

With turkey day over, law school exam season is in full swing. Most students have hours and hours of outlining, reading, and supplemental material reviewing ahead of them. You know what your students would appreciate? A study tool that's just as (or more) effective and free to them, but that's also a break from the same old study routine. Suggest CALI Lessons. Read more...

Our website has a handy bookmarking feature. You click the "Bookmark this" button and that lesson magically appears in your "My Bookmarks" page linked from your right hand menu. Your bookmarks are stored there, safe and sound until you delete them, for you to run the lessons at a later time. For you Internet Explorer users experiencing bookmark problems and error messages, there are workarounds. Read the FAQ on bookmarks.

CALI lessons are easy to assign to students. Just copy the URL that leads directly to a lesson; paste it wherever you want, see: /lesson/815. This works for referring to CALI through email, a website, or any Course Management System. But there is a right and wrong way to post links to CALI in a CMS. Make sure you set all CALI links from within your CMS to open in a new window. Read more.

We have a bunch of FAQs to help you along at cali.org; they can help you do things like register, save your score, or track student lesson usage (only if you're a prof on that last one, of course). Now the FAQs are even easier to find and navigate. Just click the Help tab in the upper right, and choose the appropriate topic to see a list of FAQs in that topic.

Law profs: want to learn how to use blogging and podcasting to engage your students? CALI is hosting live webinars on how to create and maintain a class blog using our free blogging network, Classcaster. Part one on Wed., Nov. 17 will show you how to create a class blog and introduce basic features. Part two on Wed., Dec. 1 will teach you how to integrate audio and create an iTunes podcast. Sign up to join us live.

Some of us CALI staff got a peek at a working build of eLangdell this week, and we're very excited by what we saw. eLangdell, of course, will be our online tool that allows educators to publish, edit, and remix casebooks and coursepacks for free (students: how do free casebooks sound?). In the meantime, we're on track to release a few original casebooks authored by great law faculty we've chosen through the eLangdell stimulus project. We'll then publish their work using eLangdell. Read more...

If you’re planning to be in San Francisco for the AALS conference, join us on Saturday morning for a delicious breakfast and conversations with colleagues about legal education. There will be a brief presentation about CALI’s work in electronic casebooks and open educational materials and updated information on the continuing development of new interactive web-based lessons. Read on for more information.