Spotlight Blog

Join us at the CALI® Annual Breakfast and Membership Meeting. This is an invite-only membership meeting where John Mayer (Executive Director – CALI) will give a brief overview of the trends in legal education technology and CALI’s initiatives for 2016. You’ll also have a great networking opportunity with fellow members.

Space is limited! Send your RSVP to LaVonne Molde (Membership Services Director – CALI) at lvmolde@cali.org. by Sunday, December 27, 2015.

The word or phrase “law library” used to mean “the place to get the law”. Before online databases, there wasn’t any other place to get the law – it was too big to put in your pocket or sit in your office. Even law firms with a few shelves of books called it their “law library”.

“Law librarians” were the people who knew where to find the law and how it interrelated. Law is certainly not self-organizing, nor is it immediately obvious what the best path is to finding the law and its meaning. You need help, guidance and tutoring, That was the law librarian.

Most of the good stuff on www.cali.org requires you to have a CALI account. Accounts are available for everyone at CALI member schools, all you need to do is register. Registration is very easy and should take about 2 minutes. Before you get started you need two things: (1) Your school’s authorization code and (2) a valid email address.  Yep, that’s it!

The 25th annual CALI Conference for Law School Computing, June 18 – 20, 2015 at University of Denver Sturm College of Law is right around the corner. We’ve put together an interesting and diverse schedule that will show off some of the best work being done in the law school information and educational tech spaces. With over 70 presenters giving over 50 sessions and nearly 300 attendees  representing over 90 law schools CALIcon is the best place to learn what’s going on with technology in legal education today.

Not all CALI lessons are linear. To the student they may appear linear and some are in fact linear. But the option to create complex branching questions that allows the student to “choose his own adventure” through responses is available to the lesson’s author.

I recently learned a new phrase “noisy learners”* to describe successful online learners. The same day, I noticed that the lettering for the “L” key on my laptop was wearing away. On the surface these appear to be unrelated events; yet I’d like to explore them both in this post, as there may be a tangential connection.

We don’t talk enough about our accomplishments here at CALI. I believe it is because we are too busy working on the “next thing” and barely pause long enough to get the word out about how other things are going. Technology in legal education is constantly changing, though it does often cycle back around to ideas we’ve had in the past (*cough*, ebooks, distance learning, *cough*).

We’re going to try to change this.