CALI Spotlight

CALI Lesson Teaching Guides

Posted on July 28, 2014 by Sarah Glassmeyer

Faculty members logging into CALI this week will see a new box on the upper left hand side of each lesson page. (It’s also visible here, on the upper left hand side of this blog post.) As you can see, it’s titled “Teaching Guide.” This box, viewable only to faculty, contains links to all the tools we have to enhance the CALI Lesson experience for faculty and (hopefully) make it easier to assign CALI lessons.

Here’s a brief rundown of what each link does:

Faculty View – This puts the entire CALI lesson (including answers) on one HTML page. This makes it easier to review the lesson and provides the ability to print it out, if you would like to review it that way.
Lesson Mapper – the CALI Author software that powers CALI lessons allows for very sophisticated branching and logic. Remember “Choose Your Own Adventure” books? It’s like that. The Lesson Mapper is a visual guide to how the pages of the lesson interact with each other and the flow and branches of the lesson.
Download – Did you know that faculty can edit and privately republish CALI lessons? Well, you can! This link will download a zip file of the lesson and it’s images. You’ll need to download CALI Author in order to edit the lesson, but then you are free to change it to suit your needs. This FAQ on AutoPublish has more information.
LessonLink – LessonLink turns CALI Lessons from a student study aid into a faculty assessment tool. It gives CALI lessons a special URL that will allow the faculty member that created the LessonLink the ability to view each student’s score down to a question by question basis. And it can be done with a simple push of a button!

We are always trying to make CALI more user friendly. If you have any questions or enhancements that you’d like to see, please contact us at feedback@CALI.org

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Where are the ALWD Lessons?

Posted on July 10, 2014 by Sarah Glassmeyer

A very popular resource on the CALI.org website has been the four lessons that decipher and explain the Association of Legal Writing Directors (ALWD) Guide to Legal Citation. They were assigned by all sorts of courses, from basic legal research to advanced seminars.

So why did we remove them?

Well, quite simply, they were out of date. CALI lessons are not just written and reviewed by law professors, but also revised by them to remain current. Our lessons were for the 4th edition of the ALWD Guide. The new 5th edition has just been released and not only does it contain significant changes, but it also comes with an online companion that effectively eliminates the need for CALI lessons. Thus, a decision has been made to remove the lessons permanently instead of revising them.

If you would like more assistance with legal citation, please check out Prof. Peter Martin’s free Introduction to Basic Legal Citation available in the eLangdell Press bookstore.

Posted in CALI Announcements, Lessons | Comments Off

CALIcon14 is a Wrap!

Posted on June 23, 2014 by Sarah Glassmeyer

Yes, another CALIcon has come and gone. Thank you so much for attending! I kept hearing the phrase “my people” in sessions and hallways of CALIcon and that’s ultimately what CALI and CALIcon is about – Community. And we couldn’t have one without you.

Personally, I thought it was a great one, but who really cares what I think? Not many people, I tell you what. What do you think??? TELL US. That’s the only way we can make future CALIcons better. There is a survey at http://surveys.cali.org/public/survey.php?name=CALICon14 for you to take and let us know what you would like to see at future CALIcons. If you think of something else later on, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line and tell us later (http://www.cali.org/content/contact-cali-staff) . CALI is a consortium and we’re here to serve you.

Huge, huge, HUGE thank yous to the following people:

1) The librarians, faculty and staff of our hosts Harvard Law School and Harvard Law School Library. A special shout out to Gail Harris, who was our point person at HLS. She was amazing and we could have not done it without her.

2) Our sponsors – Hein, BloombergBNA, ThomsonReuters, Interpid, Extegrity, ExamSoft, CLIO, Appointlink/MyLaw2.0, Electronic BlueBook, Quimbee, and the Free Law Coalition – Justia, LII, Oyez and Public.Resource.org.

3) Our fabulous keynote speakers Jason Scott and Dorothea Salo. And all session speakers as well. If it weren’t for you, CALIcon would just be three days of Mayer dancing around in costumes. Could you do us a favor? Will all speakers please upload their slides/materials to the pages of their sessions? We will also be posting the video recordings of the sessions on these pages soon. There is a 1-5 flame voting system in place on these pages as well if you would like to rate them.

And finally, thank you to all my coworkers, with special mentions to CALI staff members LaVonne Molde and Elmer Masters. They handle the bulk of CALIcon planning, with LaVonne overseeing logistics and Elmer the content.

You may have won a raffle prize – I will be contacting the winners of those who had to leave early and sending those prizes on. And finally, if you missed the online action, Rob Richards has graciously collected the #CALIcon14 tweets and storified them for us (http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2014/06/23/calicon-2014-conference-for-law-school-computing-storify-tweets-and-resources/) .

See you next year in Denver, CO!!! The University of Denver Sturm Law School will be our hosts.

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CALIcon 14 Updates – Reception, Agenda and more!

Posted on May 12, 2014 by Sarah Glassmeyer

Just 36 days until legal education and technology’s premiere educational and networking event…CALIcon14! And with that date drawing closer, I have some updates for you.

There will be a reception for all attendees on Thursday night at the Harvard Faculty Club. (Pictured here – pretty swank, eh?) It will run from 5:00pm to 7:30 and will feature an open bar and hors d’oeuvres. It’s absolutely free for registered attendees of CALIcon, but you must RSVP in advance. Guests are permitted, but they must purchase tickets. The costs are $30 for adults, $15 for children 5-12 years of age and children under 5 are free. Visit http://conference.cali.org/2014/reception to RSVP and purchase guest tickets.

We had an outstanding response to our Call for Presentations – over 90 proposals for just about 55 available slots. This week Elmer will be finalizing details with accepted speakers and the final program list will be available this Friday. And don’t forget…in addition to our educational program, we’ll have two fun and exciting keynote speakers – Jason Scott, rogue archivist with the Internet Archive and Dorothea Salo, former repository librarian and current professor of library science.

Of course, there’s still time register! You may note that there’s a new pricing structure this year. Yes, that’s right, we LOWERED the cost of registration for attendees.

Hope to see you in June! If you have any questions about CALIcon, please contact Elmer Masters.

Photo Credit: Kelly DeLay via Compfight cc

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It’s 2am..Do You Know Where Your CALI Authorization Code Is?

Posted on April 24, 2014 by Sarah Glassmeyer

It’s the moooooooost wonderful tiiiiiiiiiiiime of the yeeeeeeeeear!

Yes, law school finals time! Well, it’s wonderful for us at CALI®, maybe not so much for law students taking the exams and the law professors that will have to grade them or the IT departments dealing with grading software installations or librarians having to staff libraries for extended hours. But other than that…

CALI Lessons are a great tool to use throughout the semester, but we do realize that finals time is when students really flock to the site and start running lessons. We also know that law students like to run lessons in the afternoons and evenings, long after most law school faculty and staff have gone home.

As you (hopefully) know, CALI Lessons are absolutely free for all students, faculty and staff of CALI member schools. We know someone is a student, faculty or staff member at a member school because in order to use CALI Lessons you need to register on the site, and in order to register on the site, you need a CALI Authorization Code. CALI Authorization Codes are distributed by the Authorization Code Contact of each school.

You see why the late evening study habits of law students and the diurnal working hours of most law school faculty and staff can be an issue now, right?

If you are a student, please do not wait until the last minute to register on the site. Go get your CALI Authorization Code now and register. No, right now. Go. GO.

If you are a staff or faculty member, there are a few ways you can avoid late night panicked emails and messages from students. We have a boilerplate email you can send to students explaining what CALI lessons are and what your school authorization code is. You can also post the CALI code behind password protected websites or intranets. And you are more than welcome to put the CALI Authorization Code cards you’ve been sent in the library at the reference or circulation desks. Don’t have any more cards? We can send you some or if you would like to make your own, a MS Word Template is available.

Photo Credit: FJTUrban (sommelier d mojitos) via Compfight cc

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Vote for the CALIcon14 Sessions You’d Like to See!

Posted on April 11, 2014 by Elmer Masters

With over 90 sessions proposed and only 55 slots over 3 conference days a lot of tough decisions need to be made in assembling the agenda for CALIcon14. You can help by voting for the sessions you would like to see included in the agenda. Your votes are one factor we consider when deciding which sessions to accept for the CALIcon. Given the number of proposed sessions this year voting will be a major factor in selecting sessions.

Voting is easy. Start with the Proposed Sessions list and click on the title of the session you would like to see on the CALIcon agenda. At the bottom of the session description click on the “Vote for this session” link to cast your vote. That’s it, your vote is recorded. You do not need to be logged in to vote, you may vote for as many sessions as you like, and we track IP addresses of votes so if you’re going to stuff the ballot box you’ll need to get creative.

Everyone should vote even if you are not planning on making the trip to Harvard because all sessions will be recorded and made available on the net. That means you should vote for sessions that interest you because if the session is accepted you’ll be able to watch the recording even if you miss it live. For folks attending CALIcon14, tools for creating custom schedules and rating sessions will be available later.

Voting will remain open through Friday April 18, 2014.

Posted in CALI Announcements, CALIcon | Tagged #calicon14, Conference | Comments Off

CALIcon14 Registration Now Open!

Posted on March 18, 2014 by Sarah Glassmeyer

The day you’ve been waiting for is here…CALIcon14 Registration is now open!

The Conference for Law School Computing® is three days of legal education and technology fun. We’re anticipating over 50 sessions in 5 tracks covering a wide range of topics related to theses areas. We will also have two exciting plenary speakers: Dorothea Salo of the University of Wisconsin and Jason Scott of the Internet Archive, Archive Team and Textfiles.com.

This year’s conference theme is “The Next Wave” and it will take place in Cambridge, Massachusetts at Harvard Law School on June 19-21, 2014.

To register for the conference, you will need to create a new username/password on the conference website even if you have an existing CALI.org username. We have three levels of conference registration:

If you are not sure where you belong, a full listing of CALI member schools and organizations appears on our website.

You may notice some price changes when you register. In recognition of the difficult economic times, we’ve lowered the price for most attendees by $100. Speakers will now pay a $95 registration fee. As always, 3 breakfasts, 3 lunches and an evening reception are included with registration. We accept payment via check or credit card (processed via paypal.)

While you are registering, don’t forget to reserve your hotel room! Hotels in Cambridge during the summer are a hot commodity and the hotels will only hold our block until May 19, 23 and 28 (depending on hotel.)

At this writing, we already have over 30 sessions proposed. There is also still time to propose a session! A wide range of topics are appropriate and valuable to our attendees – so don’t be shy! Let us know what you’ve been up to in legal and educational technology!

See you this June in Cambridge! If you have any questions, please contact LaVonne Molde at LVMolde AT CALI.org .

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Teaching Law Students to Program?

Posted on March 17, 2014 by Sarah Glassmeyer

One of the more controversial suggestions in legal education reform is the idea that law students should learn computer programming. Critics wonder what possible use this could have. Are future lawyers going to have to build their own tools? Is it only useful for students preparing for a career with a legal product developer?

Surprisingly, given my position at CALI® and our work with A2J Author® and law school clinics, I’ve been a bit skeptical of teaching law students to actually code. This is not to say that I think law students should stick to the basics of books and case law… I’ve long been a proponent of basic technological education for law students. To my mind, as a future consumer of legal technology – which all lawyers will be, regardless of area or size of the practice – it would be useful to have a basic understanding of the underlying components of the tools they use. An analogy I’m fond of is that while you don’t need to know how your car runs, it’s helpful to understand what it means when a red liquid is running out of the bottom so you don’t get taken by a mechanic.

My opinion and way of thinking about law students learning programming has been recently changed by Andew Baker of SeyfarthShaw, an AmLaw200 firm. He’s the Global Director of their Legal Technology Solutions Office and works with attorneys and clients to streamline the work SeyfarthShaw does in order to provide a better value to the client Not all of the work his office does is technological – much is just organization of process and knowledge. He said that he likes hires with experience in programming or using tools such as CALI’s A2J Author® because it teaches students to look at a problem broadly and systematically instead of the separation of issues that a traditional legal education provides.

That was a light bulb moment for me. I finally got it: Programming is not about learning a particular service or tool or language. It’s about teaching a student to alter the way they approach a problem and view it before solving it. Again, another skill that every attorney could use, regardless of how or what they practice.

As a reminder, CALI® is in the middle of a pilot project with law school clinics and courses using our A2J Author(R) tool. Course kits and instruction on how to adapt these courses for use in your school will soon be available for free. The A2J Author software is already available for download and is also free for educational and non-profit use.

Image from CALI’s Flickr Collection of CC licensed images, all free for you to use!

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Open Education Week 2014

Posted on March 11, 2014 by Sarah Glassmeyer

Happy Open Education Week!

What is Open Education?

Education, of course, is transferring knowledge and skills through formal and informal means.

Open, when used in the context of information or technology, means that something is monetarily free so there’s no cost to use it (although there are often costs to maintain). It also means that there are no legal impairments to use. That doesn’t mean that one must give up one’s copyright or ownership of material or a tool, just that there is a license (such as Creative Commons or GPL) that allows for others to use it. There are different levels of these licenses so, for example, you can make sure you are credited as original author, prevent people from altering or modifying your work, and keep people from making a profit off of your material.

Technologically, most people stop at the definition of Open with the ability to download the material. However, as anyone who has tried to copy material out of a PDF knows, sometimes the ability to download something doesn’t really help you use it. In a perfect world, Open material would also be in a format that allows for easy editing and reproducing, such as HTML, Excel, Word or Google Docs (to name just a few.)

Putting it all together…Open Education is transferring knowledge or skills via free and accessible material and tools (known as Open Educational Resources, or OER). Although MOOCs and Free Casebooks* monetarily benefiting students have gotten most of the press around Open Education, another beneficiary of Open Education is….educators. That’s right, professors and librarians!

When educators share their materials such as syllabi, exercises/homework or even casebooks or textbooks, that gives everyone a head-start on the basic legwork of creating a course. I am a former legal research professor, a subject that is pretty standard across the country. I never could figure out why all 500+ legal research professors all had to recreate the same wheel.

With the preliminary work out of the way, educators can spend their time and energy on adapting existing materials or creating innovative uses for them. When they re-share these materials, others can use them as is or adapt and find other innovations. All of these advances in education ultimately benefit students. They may not be as aware of it as a free casebook, but they are benefiting.

CALI has tools and materials available for you to create and use Open Educational Resources. Our eLangdell® Press casebooks and casebook chapters are all licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-SA license, which means you can use and edit them however you wish, free of charge for both you and your students. We provide a variety of formats, including Word, so that you can easily edit them even if you’re not a “techie.” The only hitch is that you need to provide credit as to where you found the material and license your creations the same way.

Another option is Classcaster, our blogging, podcasting and website creation tool. Classcaster gives you an easy way to create and distribute OER in a variety of formats. And if you’re not quite ready to share with the world, it has privacy controls so that you can limit who views and uses it.

If you have any questions about Open Education – resources, practices or tools – please contact CALI. We’re here to help!

Posted in CALI Spotlight, Open | Tagged open education | Comments Off

For Your Consideration…

Posted on February 27, 2014 by Sarah Glassmeyer

It’s that time of year when up and comers and even older reliable stars have ads and phone calls placed on their behalf in the hopes that this will be the year that they are picked.

No, I’m not talking about Hollywood awards season, I’m talking about law school casebooks.

If you are a law school faculty member, I invite you to look at what we have to offer here at CALI’s eLangdell(R) Press. eLangdell Press(R) books chapters are very similar to traditional casebooks. We hire tenured and tenure track law professors to write casebooks, which are reviewed by a law faculty editorial board. However, we think we’ve made some great innovations in casebook publishing that make our books a great asset for your courses. These include:

Open licensing – our casebooks and be edited and remixed without worrying about copyright infringement
Multiple formats – There is no special software required to use our eBook versions of our casebooks and they are compatible with multiple devices. We also have PDF and print versions for the traditionalists among you.
No cost to your or your students. – The one exception is print books, but those are sold at cost with no profit to CALI at all.

As the books and chapters are free and open, you can even incorporate just a chapter or section into your existing course without any undue financial burden on your students. All of our casebooks and casebook chapters are available for ebook, word and PDF download on the eLangdell(R) Press website. If you’d like to preview a print copy, please don’t hesitate to contact me at Sarah AT cali.org.

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