CALI Spotlight

U of Minnesota Releases “Cultivating Change in the Academy”, Highlights Future of the Book

Posted on July 31, 2012 by Elmer Masters

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. This collection of innovative stories is a reminder that we are a collection of living people whose Land Grant values and ideas shape who we serve, what we do, and how we do it. Many of these projects engage others in discourse with the academy: obtaining opinion or feedback, taking the community pulse, allowing for an extended discourse, and engaging citizens in important issues. What better time to share 50+ stories about cultivating change than in 2012 – the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Land Grant Mission!

via University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy: Cultivating Change in the Academy: 50+ Stories from the Digital Frontlines at the University of Minnesota in 2012.

Produced in just 10 weeks, this book is a snapshot of academic technology projects and research underway at the University of Minnesota. Of more interest to me than the speed with which it was produced or the subject matter are the formats in which the book was released. First, it is a blog and a website. Each chapter is a post with the text of the chapter embedded as a PDF file. The blog has commenting enabled, RSS feeds and its own Twitter hashtag, #CC50, so that readers may engage the authors in ongoing discussion. Second, the work is available in EPUB, .mobi, and PDF formats so you can read it on the platform of your choice. The work carries a Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial- ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License making it possible to redistribute and reuse easily.

As I’ve stated in a prior post I think the future of books, especially textbooks and other educational materials lies on the web, not locked into some closed or crippled format. This book serves as an excellent example of the future of the book.

Posted in CALI Spotlight | Tagged casebooks, eBooks, elmer, epub, Open Access | Comments Off

Farewell to Austin Groothuis

Posted on July 19, 2012 by John Mayer

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

I learned that the first day I met Austin quite a few years ago when CALI hired him as a student intern. Later, we hired Austin into the newly created position of Communications Coordinator aka “Marketing Dude” because getting the word out about CALI ‘s many projects using blogs, podcasts, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and many other social media outlets was getting so intricate that we could not continue to do it in staff found time.

Over the past several years, Austin has splendidly increased awareness about CALI. He was becoming the voice of CALI – always calm, always polite, always ready to engage the comment hordes with a frank and honest reply. Austin made himself tremendously useful in so many other ways as well at the AALS booths, paralegal conferences, CALI Conference, etc. We got used to seeing his mug around and are diminished by his departure.

Austin is leaving CALI to join the ABA Antitrust Section. I know that he will be successful and I know that I will look forward to watching his successes in the future. Please join me in wishing Austin a farewell.

Sarah Glassmeyer, CALI’s Director of Content Development will be taking over many of Austin’s social media and community development functions. Emails to agroothuis@cali.org will be directed to her immediately.

Posted in CALI Announcements, CALI Spotlight | 1 Comment

How Law Schools Could Save Students $150 Million (updated)

Posted on July 18, 2012 by John Mayer

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. Do the math and this comes out to 140,000 x $1100 = $154,000,000.

What if most of the books that students need for law school were free? Well, obviously, this would save students the cost of purchasing $154,000,000 worth of books each and every year.

How can this be done?

What if every law school in the country – all 201 of the ABA accredited law schools – nominated just one faculty at that law school to write a casebook and donated that book, in electronic format, to the commons under a Creative Commons license. The cost to law schools would not be zero, but collectively, the value to law students would be enormous.

The basic plan would be thus… Continue reading →

Posted in CALI Announcements, CALI Spotlight, eLangdell | Tagged $150 million challenge, creative commons, eBooks, law school, law students, pbooks | Comments Off

#CALIcon12 Wrap-Up

Posted on June 26, 2012 by Austin Groothuis

John welcomed attendees as a Lego minifig. He’s promised to outdo this stunt in 2013.

We’d like to thank Thomas Jefferson School of Law, sponsors, speakers, and especially attendees for making the 2012 CALI Conference for Law School Computing such a success!

As we’ve done with all previous years’ video, we’ll post this year’s recorded conference sessions on the CALI YouTube page (there’s a 2012 CALI Conference playlist if you scroll down) as soon as they are available.

There are some pictures from the conference on the CALI Facebook page. Feel free to tag anyone we missed, or even send us your own pictures from the conference.

See you in 2013, back where it all began: Chicago-Kent College of Law.

Make sure you’re registered for the CALI Conference mailing list to be the first to hear updates and news about the 2013 conference.

Posted in CALI Announcements, CALI Spotlight, CALIcon | Tagged calicon12 | Comments Off

CALI Annual Report & Infographic (A Message from John)

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Austin Groothuis

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:

hired a new staffer, law librarian Sarah Glassmeyer, to help with eLangdell and produce legal research lessons;
can now, officially, call ourselves book publishers (in the nontraditional sense of open source casebooks and supplemental materials for legal education);
published our 900th CALI Lessons;
hosted a free, 9-week massive open online course (MOOC), Topics in Digital Law Practice, with over 900 registered students and faculty;
reinvented lessons with smartphone and tablet compatibility and a host of cool new features.

You can find more details in the CALI Annual Report (PDF).

The work we do is possible because of the dues law schools pay. We increased dues recently in two steps – first to $6250 in 2011 and then to $7500 in 2012 – in order to hire new staff, buy new lessons, commission new ebooks, and more.

We understand many budgets are tight and times are chaotic, which is why we thank each of you for the overwhelming support. We believe that your continued support of CALI is part of the solution. Legal education and law practice are changing in no small part due to the technologies that CALI researches. The recent CALI MOOC on “Topics in Digital Law Practice” was aimed at increasing awareness about just how significantly technology is affecting law practice in the 21st century.

To visually communicate some of the ways that your CALI membership brings value to your institution, we’ve created an infographic. Please share it with anyone in your organization.

If you have any questions, ideas, complaints, suggestions or comments, do not hesitate to contact me. 2012 is also my anniversary in that I have been working in legal education for 25 years this coming July. I feel a great responsibility in serving you as the Executive Director of CALI since 1994 and I look forward to working with you into the future.

With Regards,
John Mayer
jmayer@cali.org
@johnpmayer
312-906-5307

Source: Uploaded by user via CALI on Pinterest

Posted in CALI Announcements, CALI Spotlight, CALIcon, eLangdell, Lessons | Tagged a2j, infographic, membership dues, MOOC, TDLP | Comments Off

900 CALI Lessons and Counting

Posted on June 4, 2012 by Austin Groothuis

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. We couldn’t do it without you!

Posted in CALI Announcements, Lessons | Comments Off

Learn to Make Ebooks at CALIcon12

Posted on June 1, 2012 by Austin Groothuis

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.

We’d like to invite you to a day-long, DIY ebook workshop at the 2012 CALI Conference for Law School Computing. This is a technical, hands-on workshop limited to 20 participants.

Review workshop requirements and reserve your spot.

Posted in CALI Announcements, CALI Spotlight, CALIcon, eLangdell | Comments Off

CALI partnering with Chicago-Kent for pilot law school clinics program

Posted on May 14, 2012 by Austin Groothuis

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

“The goal of the project is to help establish cyber clinics as a permanent part of U.S. law school education,” Professor Staudt said. “Cyber clinics are law school courses offering credit to law students who work on A2J Guided Interviews® and other content for statewide legal aid websites, lowering barriers to justice for low-income, pro se litigants.”

What’s CALI’s role in this? We’ve been partners with Kent’s A2J project for years, helping create the A2J authoring software. And now we’ll be publishing the Cyber Clinic’s course materials as an eLangdell book.

You can read the full press release from Chicago-Kent here.

Posted in CALI Announcements, CALI Spotlight, eLangdell | Comments Off

Adopt free, open legal ed materials.

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Austin Groothuis

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:

Free for students or faculty to download, and cheap to print.
Multiple formats available (yes, including basic PDF and links to print for our original casebook materials).
Open licensing and lack of DRM so faculty have permission and ability to edit, customize, and re-distribute.

And it doesn’t matter if you’ve already chosen materials for your course, adopting only parts of an eLangdell book to supplement your course costs your students nothing.

Please help us spread the word about the advantages of free, open materials for legal education by passing the information found in this recent email along to your faculty. And be on the lookout for announcements of upcoming titles by subscribing to the eLangdell mailing list. Continue reading →

Posted in CALI Announcements, CALI Spotlight, eLangdell | Comments Off

A Book Is A Book And Other Thoughts On Our Webby Future

Posted on April 16, 2012 by Elmer Masters

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.

First, though every book is a website not every website is a book. As I mentioned in the previous article, once a book is in an electronic form such as EPUB the process to make the book into a website is straight forward. That is not to say that it is easy, but that the path from EPUB to website is clearly marked. The reverse is not true. Moving a website to a book format such as EPUB is not straight forward and may even be impossible.

A website is often a complex and carefully organized store of information. It may be fairly static, with a single information store arranged and hyperlinked for readers to discover. It may be Continue reading →

Posted in CALI Spotlight, eLangdell | Tagged books, eBooks, elmer, epub, links, web, websites | Comments Off