Spotlight Blog

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.

The leader of the Law.Gov movement to make US law more accessible, Carl Malamud, issued a challenge: submit a written or video essay about what Law.Gov means for a chance to win $5,000. As Law.Gov becomes a reality, it's going to affect most lawyers. And what law student couldn't use $5,000 these days? We hope some of you poor law students consider making a submission. Profs, tell your students about it (class project?).  Read it.

Deadline Monday, November 15, 2010

The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) is seeking nominations of qualified and enthusiastic individuals to fill vacant positions on its Board of Directors. If you know of someone who would like to contribute to the research and development, strategic planning and governance of CALI, then consider nominating them for the CALI Board of Directors. It would be a good idea to clear it with the person first to make sure they want to be nominated. Self-nominations are acceptable.

Law profs: have you ever thought about recording your in-class lectures, or even creating your own lecture recaps, then making the recordings available online for your students? We at CALI might give you a free digital recording device if you're willing to try it out with us next semester. And with Classcaster, our free blogging platform for legal educators, it's simple to set up a class blog to deliver your recordings to students...and even send your recordings to iTunes as a podcast.  Read on for more...

CALI's free blogging system just keeps getting better. We recently added a feature that makes it really easy to map a custom domain to your Classcaster blog. It's a nice feature if you own your own domain and don't want to use the default classcaster.net domain. Example, you just created a Classcaster blog at ilovecali.classcaster.net, but you want caliisawesome.com, which you own, to be the domain.  Here's an FAQ explaining how to do it.

Whether you're tracking your progress for your own benefit, or whether your professor has assigned a CALI Lesson (especially with LessonLink), the only way to keep a reviewable, detailed record of your CALI Lesson usage is by using CALI Lesson's built in ScoreSave before you exit the lesson. This ScoreSave FAQ explains the process. Once you've saved your score, check out "My Lesson Runs." You'll see lots of details, like how you answered each question in the lesson.

Alexis Madrigal of the Atlantic posted a story called "Reimagining the Stodgy Law School Casebook for the Digital Age" that discusses the Berkman Center's H20 project and links to a very early, alpha version of eLangdell (a version that may not much look like future working versions of eLangdell). Be on the lookout in all the usual places for more on eLangdell. There may be substantial news in the coming weeks.

You know we like you. Why else would we keep giving you all of these great CALI Lessons? So you should like us on Facebook. You'll get the latest CALI news and announcements. And you might even have a chance to win cool stuff (hint: pay special attention on Wednesdays).

A few weeks back we teamed up with Valparaiso Law Librarian Sarah Glassmeyer, the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School, and Justia to create the Law Student Guide to Free Legal Research on the Internet.

We're calling it Wordle Wednesday. Every Wednesday we'll create a word puzzle - with the great site Wordle - using one of our lessons. Then we'll post it to CALI's Facebook Page. The first law student Facebook Fan to correctly post the title and link of the lesson we used for that puzzle, wins a prize. Here's the CALI Wordle Wednesday for 9/8/2010.

Law students, have you ever been lost after having just read something in your casebook? Wish you had an easy way to find the CALI Lesson that covers what you just read? Well, stop wishing; that's actually a thing. For some casebooks, we can tell you which lessons match up with specific sections of the casebook.

Our free blog publishing platform for educators, Classcaster, has a handy - or handsfree, depending on how you roll with your phone - new feature. You can simply call a number and speak into your phone to create an audio file and post it directly your Classcaster blog.

We officially have a host school (with a fancy new building) for the 2011 CALI Conference for Law School Computing. More details from our fearless leader:

With law school orientation just around the corner, the 2010-11 CALI Lesson DVDs and a new batch of updated authorization code cards should be arriving soon at all CALI member law schools, if they have not already. Member schools should hand DVDs out to all of their students, but especially 1Ls.

You can find CALI at AALL's conference next week. Booth 709 of the exhibit hall, to be exact. If you're a fan of Law Librarian Conversations podcasts hosted by University of Nebraska Law Library's Richard Leiter and Marcia Dority-Baker, you will be able to meet them and many of their regular panelists in person at CALI's booth.

The LawLibCon crew is scheduled to be in the CALI booth Sunday from 2 to 3 PM, for more of a meet and greet, then on Tuesday from around 12 noon to 3 PM. Though they may be a bit preoccupied recording a show on Tuesday, you're still welcome to stop by; and they may even pull you in for your take on the meeting for the podcast.

Connie Crosby, one of the regular LawLibCon panelists has a nice roundup on Slaw blog with a link to the most recent LawLibCon podcast previewing the AALL meeting.