Spotlight Blog

Fall semester is almost upon us, which means it’s time to review some information to make working with CALI easier for you and your students.

DVDs and Authorization Cards

Congratulations to CALI’s own Director of Internet Development Elmer Masters for being named one of the Fastcase 50!  Created in 2011, the Fastcase 50 is an annual list of the Top 50 of “law’s smartest most courageous innovators, techies, visio

This collection of 50+ chapters showcases a sampling of academic technology projects underway across the University of Minnesota, projects that we hope inspire other faculty and staff to consider, utilize, or perhaps even develop new solutions that have the potential to make their efforts more responsive, nimble, efficient, effective, and far-reaching. Our hope is to stimulate discussion about what’s possible as well as generate new vision and academic technology direction. The work underway is most certainly innovative, imaginative, creative, collaborative, and dynamic.

First of all, it’s pronounced “GREAT-house”, not “grue-THEW-ee-us”.

There are over 140,000* law students in the 201 ABA accredited law schools in the US. According to the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), higher education students spend an average of $1100 per year on books.

The 2011-2012 school year was a landmark year at CALI. I am, of course, thinking of the fact that we were founded 30 years ago, but 2012 is significant in more ways than an anniversary that happens to end with a zero. This year CALI:

We just published our 900th CALI Lesson on cali.org! The 900th lesson was Professor Steve Bradford’s “Inventory and the Cost of Goods Sold.” This is a true milestone for CALI. Congratulations to Professor Bradford on another great lesson, and to each of our lesson authors.

It’s getting easier to publish ebooks using freely available tools like Sigil and Calibre. What’s this have to do with your law school? Think open, ebook versions of your law reviews, journals, or custom course materials. All published in-house and at little cost. Review workshop requirements and reserve your spot.

We at CALI are very excited Chicago-Kent’s Cyber Clinics pilot project.

We’re asking legal educators to consider adopting free, open eLangdell books and supplements for their Summer or Fall classes.

Consider the advantages of free, open education materials:

In February I wrote that every book is a website and we need to embrace the webiness of books. This led to some good discussion about the nature of books generally and casebooks in particular and about the nature of websites. The discussion helped clarify a couple of things in my mind.

So tell the truth.

Some of you looked briefly at eLangdell and dismissed it as an e-book project...

The CALI Conference for Law School Computing’s agenda is starting to round out nicely. You can now review some of our accepted sessions, and today we’re very excited to announce our keynote speakers:

Recently there has been an explosion of advances in the ebook arena. New tools, new standards and formats, and new platforms seem to be coming out every day. The rush to get books into an “e” format is on, but does it make a real difference?

There’s still time to join our free online course, Topics in Digital Law Practice.

If you haven’t yet, register for the course and catch up by watching video of last week’s class (below).

Then join us live Friday at 2pm Eastern for special guest Marc Lauritsen‘s class on Document Automation.