CALICon06

This is the official blog for the 2006 conference held Thursday-Saturday, June 15-17, 2006 at Nova Southeastern Shepard Broad Law Center, Fort Lauderdale, FL.

Each conference session has its own blog post, arranged by date. You can access them here:

• Thursday, June 15
• Friday, June 16
• Saturday, June 17

Pithiness and links to come later. The darn program ate my last post! You can find my comments from yesterday at all these locations: Keynote: Professor James Boyle, Center for Study of the Public Domain, Got Gamers? Law Students and Videogaming, VitalSource, Implementing tools for collaboration across boundaries, and WEX - An Online Legal Encyclopedia.

Dinner at Cafe Du Paris. The duck and shrimp were very good. The ginger ale was so-so.

Edited to fix the links.

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

Authoring a CALI lesson, whether as part of a CALI Fellowship or alone, requires faculty to approach, and to think about, the material that makes up their courses differently. The Family Law Fellowship started in January 2006, and the Fellows are still immersed in the lesson-writing process. To date, only four of each Fellow�s lessons have been written (and re-written). From this unique vantage point, four of the team's Fellows will share their observations and insights about the impact of authoring on both their teaching and their writing.

MP3: BiernatLLSat900.mp3

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Len Biernat
Professor of Law
Hamline University School of Law

Andrea Charlow
Professor of Law
Drake University Law School

Deb Quentel
Director of Curriculum Development & Gen. Counsel
CALI

Janet Richards
Cecil C. Humphreys Professor of Law
University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law

Cynthia Starnes
Professor
Michigan State University College of Law

Audience: Authors and Web Coordinators
Technical Level: Medium to ? (basic concepts will be of interest to all)

Web sites and collections of course materials present challenges in editing, updating and presenting information in the most highly usable forms. Information is most useful when it is categorized and indexed, but kept separate from the delivery mechanics.

This presentation will introduce the basic principles of content management and information presentation with immediately-usable examples of content placed on the web. Specific examples include the use of database-driven web pages, style sheets, XML systems (podcasts, newsfeeds, etc.) and content management systems.

MP3: DanielsLR5Sat1200.mp3

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Earl A. Daniels
College of Law Web Coordinator
Georgia State University College of Law

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Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

Not gettin� along�not listenin��wantin� to leave�thinkin� of someone else�

These phrases could have come from a George Strait or Brooks & Dunn song. Unfortunately, they also can describe the frustration of your customers about the service they�re getting. Technology professionals sometimes focus on the technical nature of customer problems, rather than on the human nature. As a result, though they may solve the technical problem, they leave the customer upset.

This presentation will discuss principles of communications and customer service, and help you reduce the chances that customers will view your customer service as a country music song.

MP3: SunLR4Sat1200.mp3

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Calvin Sun
NEED TITLE
Temple University School of Law

Audience: Everyone
Technical Level: Extreme Geek

Running Apache, MySQL, and PHP or PERL out of the box can be a very satisfying experience for most law school websites. Yet all of these applications can be easily re-configured to run more efficiently and faster, providing real snap to your website. If your website is humming along, this session will show you how to make it purr.

MP3: MastersLR3Sat1200.mp3

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Elmer Masters
Director of Internet Development
CALI

Intro Gnomes

Elmer's del.icio.us tags for Apache.

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

The best way to increase CALI usage in your law school is to roll out all those multi-disciplinary skills and start thinking outside of the box. In addition to Door-to-door vacuum cleaner sales, auto sales, shoe sales, and retail management experience Washburn University's Andrew Evans also discusses how his skills and experiences of owning his own business, being a union organizer and a former law student helped him to increase usage of CALI.

Since Andrew has taken over as Washburn Law's CALI representative, CALI usage has more than tripled. He knows exactly what to say to get a room full of 75 students to flip open notebooks and grab writing utensils in order to write down the CALI password. He also found creative ways for faculty to motivate students to do CALI lessons. Faculty members are so excited about CALI that they have even expressed interest in writing CALI lessons in their specialized fields. Andrew will show you how to get your people jonesing for CALI!

Did we also mention that Andrew will be discussing how his martial arts experience comes into the mix? That's right! You can't be a good pimp without a good pimp slap.

MP3: EvansLR1Sat1200.mp3

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Andrew Evans
Government Documents Librarian
Washburn University School of Law

Audience: All
Technical Level: Edgy

As technology permeates our lives, we find that students not only use it but expect its use in the classroom. In response to this expectation, more and more faculty members use technology, and primarily PowerPoint, in lectures. Unfortunately, their use is often ineffective to the point that the technology not only loses its benefit but detracts from the learning environment.

This presentation will focus on the effective use of technology with vibrant examples of audio, video, PowerPoint, wireless control technology, and responder units to enhance the learning experience.

What this presentation is: This presentation will demonstrate the power of technology with the tools that virtually all faculty have and will include a look at more advanced tools. Specifically, the use of Flash Animation created though Swish, the tool Snag-it to capture information from the Web, video editing tools to use clips within a PowerPoint presentation and others. As an added bonus, a teaching technique will be demonstrated with common objects (non-technological) that illustrate the power of the way information is presented and how the methods we employ affect the listener - our students with a twist - that is, illustrating how technology can enhance a non-technological teaching tool.

Additionally, this presentation will illustrate common mistakes most presenters make and offer simple solutions on how to avoid these mistakes.

What this presentation is not: This is not a �how-to� course. This will not teach the intricacies of how to create a PowerPoint presentation or how to use the various tools utilized in the presentation. In a short time, one can only wet his or her appetite to learn the skills needed to prepare powerful and effective presentations for the classroom.

This proposed topic illustrates audio stimulation, video stimulation and student participation of a kind that is rarely utilized in today�s teaching environment but is extremely effective.

MP3: BeckmanLLSat1200.mp3

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Sydney Beckman
Assistant Professor of Law
Charleston School of Law

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

All Law school admissions offices have been using ACES to communicate and exchange data with the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC) for the past 7 years and over 150 law schools have elected to use LSAC's Admit-M product as their primary admissions database. Beginning in the summer of 2006 LSAC is merging these two products into a single next generation admissions system called ACES2.

This session is an overview of the technical aspects of this next generation admission system and is an update to the ACES2 technical conferences LSAC held around the country in the fall of 2005. ACES2 will allow law schools to have a system which uses the latest technologies and advances, and which will serve as the launching pad for new services that can be provided by LSAC over the next 10+ years. The goals of the new system will be to merge ACES and Admit-M into one seamless application, to automate as much of the transfer of data as possible, and to provide easy access to data for admissions professionals in the office and on the road. Details will be given on ACES2's interaction with schools systems as well as the application's security, office software integration, reporting capabilities, maintenance and architecture.

MP3: LowryLR5Sat1030.mp3

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Troy Lowry
Director of System Software Development
LSAC

JoAnn Sabol
Senior Manager of Software Services
LSAC

Audience: Anyone
Technical Level: Medium

Hurrican Katrina, 9/11, floods, ice-storms, flu pandemics, electrical outages...the list of possible ways that your law school may be shut down is long. This doesn't mean you have to lose an entire semester or endure major disruptions to your faculty and students' lives. CALI is proposing the creation of a Law School Disaster Preparedness Plan where two web servers will be hot and ready to go with a variety of pre-installed software that law schools can use in case of small and large disasters. At the very least, this can be a single location to get information out to your constituency and at the most, it can be a place to deliver educational content in the form of web pages, blog posts, podcasts and video so that you don't have to cancel an entire semester just because your building is unavailable for a couple of weeks. Ben Chapman and John Mayer will lay out the basic plan and then use the majority of the session to discuss details like what other services should be offered, how can schools pre-prepare for disaster and what are law schools willing to do about disaster preparation.

MP3: ChapmanLR4Sat1030.mp3

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Ben Chapman
Assistant Dean for Information Technology
Emory University School of Law

John Mayer
Executive Director
CALI

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Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

Gordon Russell will present an overview of a model of outsourced Administrative package (Sonis), Email (using hosted solutions and beta GMAIL for the organization), Library ILS (using EOS web and IBM self checkout and referring URL technology), Jotspot to build a wiki internet service), Exam4 hosted solution for student exams. The presentation will exam what has worked and what has not, describe what has been hosted locally and how the school has made use of newer burstable T1 to interconnect the scattered building that the school is temporarily making use of while supporting a growing student body that will number 600 students by the fall of 2006 and a faculty and staff of over 60.

MP3: RussellLR3Sat1030.mp3

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Gordon R. Russell
Professor of Law
Charleston School of Law

Audience: Low
Technical Level: All

Recently the web has shifted closer to Tim Berners-Lees vision of a collaborative web developed through community. Myspace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, and Wikipedia are applications that gain value through community interaction. Yet, for the most part, web sites of higher education have remained fixed, static repositories without much community interaction.

The panel will argue that embracing the social web is important for institutions of higher learning that desire to enrich collaborative learning environments. Our panel will review what is known about the online habits of the next generation of law students; what characteristics of new social web applications are "hot"; and specific ways in which these characteristics can be integrated into legal education. We anticipate lots of time for discussion and examples from the audience.

Nicholas Drury
Web Services Manager
Duke University School of Law

Scott Lenger
Web Editor
Duke University School of Law

PDF's of our presentation slides will be available here early next week.

Audience:
Technical Level:

Washington College of Law has developed or implemented some cool tools to meet various needs of our users. Korin Munsterman and Greta Dawson will show the tools they use for: surveying users, off-loading website content updates to the administrative offices, offering a means for committees to share documents and information, providing users with tips and tools, how to guard against viruses and spam, updating faculty webpages, RSS feeds and blogs, creating custom podcasts, promoting the work of the SBA, providing outline databases for students and Westlaw webinars, and more.

We invite other schools to join us to show off the tools they use. People should contact Greta Dawson at greta@wcl.american.edu or Korin Munsterman at kmunster@wcl.american.edu if they would like to participate.

Greta A Dawson
Asst Director of Technology/Network Services Mgr
American University Washington College of Law

Korin Munsterman
Director, Clinical Technology and Information Syst
American University Washington College of Law

Audience: All
Technical Level: Samsonites

Using RSS feeds to distribute news, files, podcasts, and videocasts is one of the hottest new ways law school libraries can capitalize on the CALI Classcaster for promoting their resources and services.

Informing legal researchers/patrons in real-time about premium level content and indispensable legal information that can be found and is readily available in your library is quite easy once you start using one of the newest services provided by CALI to all its members: the ClassCaster server.

Faculty, librarians and staff at all CALI law school members can now open accounts on the CALI ClassCaster and create real-time distribution channels for 'piping hot content� from their units.

This session will present WSU Arthur Neef Law Library's approach to 'piping hot content' to its law faculty, law students, law library and law school staff via several ClassCaster blogs and �IntraBlogs� (ClassCaster blogs providing feeds to law library and law school Intranets)

This session will also present the collaboration between a law librarian and a law school faculty in producing weekly summary podcasts for the �Legal Education Podcasting Project (LEPP)�. A step-by-step overview of the hardware, software and ClassCaster account set-up will end the session.

MP3: SamsonLR5Sat900.mp3

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Michael Samson
Law Librarian
Wayne State University Law School

Audience: All
Technical Level: Medium

With the number of natural diasters that we have seen lately diaster recovery has become a very huge buzz word in the tech community. However many only think of the servers, many do not think of the workstation recovery.

In addition this session will introduce/refamiliarize the audience to various tools and software available for backing up workstatsions. It will include why one product may be better than another in ceratian environments.

At the Washington College of Law, Greta Dawson and Korin Munsterman inplemented backup solutions for workstations. Not all workstatsions are backed up with the same devices or software. Some of the solution is outsourced some in in house.

Solutions at WCL include 2nd copy and Connected by Iron Mountain.

More disk space please! Data must be preserved, it must be easily accessible, it must never be deleted. This presentation will explain how Duke Law School went from "out of disk space" headaches to SAN city.

The strategy of storage management is not just at a technical level, it is a conception in that the capacity and structure of data is a critical aspect for every network system. This is about the manageability of network files from MS Word, Powerpoint to databases, images and Email archiving.

Duke Law School went from ripping out several individual servers, to learning about SANs and mixing a closet full of CPU's into an organized mounted rack. Data in virtually every organization continues to grow and storage decisions have become a vital role in security, recovery, and resource management.

MP3: DawsonLR4Sat900.mp3

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Greta A Dawson
Asst Director of Technology/Network Services Mgr
American University Washington College of Law

Becky Mangum
Network/Systems Manager
Duke University School of Law

Korin Munsterman
Director, Clinical Technology and Information Syst
American University Washington College of Law

Audience: Tech Staff
Technical Level: Medium

Each year, during the start of the new academic year we will have a new incoming class of law students (150 – 250) zooming by with newer and more complex computer problems. They can come in the form of a virus, trojan, worm, or spyware. Have you ever received the ever popular blue screen of death with a message informing you that Windows registry hive is missing or corrupted?

Working with limited staff, time and resources, what is your best option for fixing student laptop issues, installing software and running computer maintenance. The answer is to streamline the process and to automate the procedure.

In this session, we will discuss how to create the ultimate rescue CD that allows you to streamline the computer repair, maintenance, setup, and application installation process. We will focus our discussion on the two wonderful technology innovations: BartPE and AutoIt.

BartPE, Bart’s Preinstalled Environment is a bootable live Windows CD/DVD. BartPE supports various types of hardware and can be configured to use a variety of plug-ins to add applications, drivers or tools. For example, you can add the Firefox plug-in to make the browser available on the CD. When we build our BartPE CD’s we add the Windows XPE plug-in allowing BartPE to emulate the Windows XP environment, making it BartXPE.

AutoIt is a freeware BASIC-like language for automating Windows GUI and general purpose scripting. The two applications working in tandem can automate most of your end-user support tasks. For example you can automate applications and utilities to run automatically while under the BartXPE environment. Allowing you to boot off the CD and just walk away while AutoIt runs the utilities you automated.

* Additional materials including those from CALI conference can be found at http://law.asu.edu/it/bartpe

MP3: ChuLR3Sat900.mp3

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Wayne Chu
Technology Support Analyst Associate
Arizona State University College of Law
Wayne dot Chu at asu dot edu

Edward Garcia
Technology Support Analyst Sr
Arizona State University College of Law
Edward dot Garcia at asu dot edu

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

In the Spring of 2004, Fordham Law School started conducting its student course evaluations online. This proposed session will outline the development of the online evaluations application which was created in-house, the requirements and how the online process has affected the course evaluations. The session will also present the advantages and disadvantages of online student course evaluations compared to hand-written ones. The sessions will also include unexpected effects, good and bad, as Fordham Law School continues to conduct its online course evaluations on its seventh semester.

Mohyeddin Abdulaziz
Director of Information Technology
University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law

Marianna Balquiedra
Web Administrator
Fordham University School of Law