OER: Where Law School Lags Behind K-12 and Undergrad

Posted on November 17, 2011 by Elmer Masters

Open Education Conference LogoI recently had the opportunity to attend the 8th annual Open Education Conference in Utah along with CALI’s Executive Director, John Mayer. The conference brought together educators, administrators, and technologists from the K-12 and post-secondary worlds to share information, show off projects, and discuss the current and future state of Open Educational Resources. Wikipedia defines Open Educational Resources (OER) as:

digital materials that can be re-used for teaching, learning, research and more, made available for free through open licenses, which allow uses of the materials that would not be easily permitted under copyright alone.[1] As a mode for content creation and sharing, OER alone cannot award degrees nor provide academic or administrative support to students.[2][3] However, OER materials are beginning to get integrated into open and distance education.[4] Some OER producers have involved themselves in social media to increase their content visibility and reputation.[5]

I attended sessions, participated in discussions, and met interesting people. From all of this I came away with a few things that I think are important to CALI and the future of OER in law schools. Continue reading →

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CALI at AAfPE

Posted on November 8, 2011 by Deb Quentel

Last week was all about education. True, every week in my job is about education. But last week it was about education on the road. My teachers were 8th graders, paralegal educators and The Big Bang Theory. Yes, I left the vacuum of my office and went to the 2011 Annual Meeting of AAfPE – The American Association for Paralegal Education in Baltimore.

Before I get to the AAfPE meeting, I have to start at the very beginning. Because as Julie Andrews has taught us, it’s “a very good place to start.” My immersion in education outside of my office started as I waited in line to pass through security at O’Hare. Ahead of me in line was a class of 8th graders going to Washington, D.C. (which is not in Washington state as one student corrected another). In addition to the geography refresher, I picked up some knowledge about 8th graders: they whisper, chat, text, mill about a lot considering they are within the narrow confines of a security line, hide inside their hoodies, and generally exhibit a lot Continue reading →

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CALI Lessons’ Self-Publish Option Gets an Upgrade

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Austin Groothuis

createOur authors create CALI Lessons using special software built by CALI: CALI Author. The software is free for staff and faculty at CALI member schools, and we just released CALI Author version 4.1.8 this month.

CALI Author is easier to use than you might think, and you don’t have to go through the normally rigorous editing and selection process our official CALI lesson authors go through to simply publish your own lessons just for your students. The AutoPublish feature in CALI Author lets you customize one of those already in the CALI library of lessons or even create your own lesson from scratch, self-publish your creation on our servers, share it with your students (or whoever you want), and even track student usage of your lesson.

And if you AutoPublish using the latest version of CALI Author, it publishes your creation into the new CALI Lesson user interface. In other words… Continue reading →

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Why We Fight

Posted on October 25, 2011 by Sarah Glassmeyer

It is a happy coincidence that Open Access Week coincides with my inaugural post on the new CALI Spotlight blog.  I am a HUGE fan of Open Access – and all of the Opens, really…Open Source, Open Education, Open Data, Open Law, etc.  So much so that CALI’s commitment to the Opens with its tools and products was a major reason that I leapt at the chance to work here.

What is Open Access (or OA)? To quote trusty old Wikipedia, it’s “unrestricted access via the Internet to articles published in scholarly journals, and also increasingly to book chapters or monographs.”  And I’m a librarian, so when I use the word “access,” I don’t just mean “free.”  I also mean that there’s enough metadata attached and it’s stored in such a way that people can find it and that people a hundred years from now will be able to use it too.

I feel like OA doesn’t get as much traction in law as it does with other academic disciplines, which is crazy because if there was ever a discipline more ripe for OA than law, I haven’t seen it. First, there’s the primary data set for it which is… Continue reading →

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Idea Management

Posted on October 21, 2011 by John Mayer
Idea Bulb

"Good ideas are common - what's uncommon are people who'll work hard enough to bring them about." - Ashleigh Brilliant ° "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." - Howard Aiken

At CALI, we work on a lot of different projects.

  • CALI lessons / computer-assisted instruction
  • Distance learning
  • Ebooks
  • Open Access to the Law
  • Access to Justice
  • Classroom Tech
  • Community engagement and building

We do a lot of research at the intersections of technology, law, education and access to justice, but we have been remiss in capturing wisdom from these half-baked ideas.

Our project management system has a permanent list we call the “Project Idea Bucket” that holds our not-ready-for-prime-time ideas, and, just as relevant, we have a “Dead Idea Bucket.” So many things we work on have long histories. For example, CALI published ebooks back in 1994 using the Folio Views software.

Over the coming months, CALI staff (including myself) will be using the CALI Spotlight blog to describe their thoughts on ideas that go into the design, development, strategy and implementation of projects relating to our research in technology, law, education, and access to justice. The articles will be short, but we hope the shared insights will be useful to you. Even if you do not find every article interesting, the exercise of writing them is very useful to us. It’s one thing to have an idea, another to articulate it for an audience, and quite another to execute. Feel free to choose judiciously from our idea buffet, and, as always, your feedback is welcome.

John Mayer
Executive Director, CALI
jmayer@cali.org

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