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!
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.
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.
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:
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
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
So tell the truth. Some of you looked briefly at eLangdell and dismissed it as an e-book project.
“I don’t even have an e-reader?,” “Students can’t highlight/make notes in e-books,” “I just like print,” and “What will I do with all of that office shelf space without real books with which to fill it?”
Right?
That’s ok. The misconception is mostly our own doing. Even the “e + Product” naming formula may have led you to believe that only techies with an extra $500 to spend on a newfangled device every other fiscal quarter (see: not normal tuition-paying law students) can use eLangdell.
Just last week I added PDF, MS Word, and links to cheap print versions to complement the e-book versions of Christian Turner’s Land Use casebook, so I can authoritatively say:
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? The “e” versions of books offer little in the way of improvement over the print version of the same book. Sure, these new formats provide a certain increase in accessibility over print by running on devices that are lighter than print books and allow for things like increasing font size, but there is little else. It is, after all, just a matter of reading the same text on some sort of screen instead of paper.
Marketers will tell you that the Kindle, Nook, iPad, and various software readers are the future of the book, an evolutionary, if not revolutionary, step in reading and learning. But that does not ring true. Continue reading
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 course (below).
Then join us live Friday at 2pm Eastern for special guest Marc Lauritsen‘s class on Document Automation.
Want to know what we’re up to here at CALI? John Mayer, our Executive Director, gave his annual “State of CALI Address” during the 2012 CALI Member Meeting at the AALS Annual Conference in January. You can watch it here:
