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

For years, Software Secure has provided law schools our Securexam software to enable students to use their own computers to take tests without being able to cheat. While continuing to mature and evolve the core security software, Software Secure has recently turned to the task of making computer based exams easier to administer.

To date exam software has benefited students, but at times has added additional work for those responsible for administering exams or managing school IT. The work Software Secure has done in this area has manifested itself in �PlanetSSI� a web-based system that removes the friction of exam administration and more closely connects the students with faculty and administration. After all, computers should make things easier, not more complex.

Software Secure will also provide a peek of its newest product offering, Securexam Remote Proctor, which extends our Securexam testing technology in to the true distance learning market. Using video, audio and fingerprint authentication technology, Securexam Remote Proctor enables schools to offer testing anytime from anywhere with the same academic integrity of an on-campus, proctored exam room. Securexam Remote Proctor represents a tremendous boon for any program thinking to expand into the distance learning environment.

MP3: WinnegLR5Fr400.mp3

Play It Now!

Douglas Winneg
President
Software Secure, Inc,

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

Demonstrating a Cost Effective Global Service for delivering high quality distance learning that replicates all of the dynamics present in live face-to-face meeting or classroom over the public Internet. Law Schools can now provide fully interactive Classes, Seminars, CLE to students and Attorneys anywhere in the world.

The Vemics LiveAccess™ Solution combines the best features of videoconference and web collaboration services into a single, simple to use integrated product. Participants can connect with a PC or Laptop running Windows XP, from any high speed Internet service such as cable modem, DSL, WiFi, and Corporate Broadband.

An affordable archive and web retrieval service allows Law Schools to record sessions (classes, seminars, mock trial, virtual guest lecturers, more) and to provide a valuable service that can also generate incremental revenue. Access to this web service is password protected and can add value to the law school's content library.

The Cannon Financial Institute won the prestigious LOLA Award for best online synchronous video-based training course at Online Training 2005 using the Vemics LiveAccess™ Solution.

MP3: MillarLR3Fr400.mp3

Play It Now!

Robert Millar
Vice President, Business Development
Vemics

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

At the University of Arizona Rogers College of Law we still use Westlaw, Lexis, Raiser's Edge, Admit-M, examSoft and other major applications. But there are many other important needs and functions that are critical to the mission of our school that we simply cannot find anywhere to buy or, if available, they don't quite meet our needs, too expensive or suffer from any other deficiency. We will explain our design concepts and development strategies and tools that allowed us to build easy to use applications that all have the same 'look and feel' to meet our daily needs such as:

Catalog Request (for prospective students)

Alumni Forum (browser interface to Raiser�s Edge)

Forums (our main class communications platform for posting class materials, class communications, etc.)

Class/Room scheduling/events calendar

Facebook/seating charts

Career Services � Job Postings/OCI

Evaluations/Exam numbers/Ranks/exam, paper e-filing

Faculty Directory/Publications/Scholarship/myEDM (Internet network storage access)

College Publications

Student email/info

Search engine

Library functions and highly dynamic websites

MP3: AbdulazizLR4Fr400.mp3

Play It Now!

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

Erica DeFrain
Educational Technology Librarian
University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law

Paul G Kealey
Internet Developer
University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law

Garnette Knoll
Support Systems Analyst, Sr.
University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law

Lisa Wagenheim
Electronic Services Librarian
University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

WEX is an ambitious attempt to collaboratively develop an encyclopedia-like resource for law novices. This is not an easy course to steer -- collaboratively-developed open encyclopedias like Wikipedia have sparked a lot of controversy, and it is far from clear that they are an unalloyed good thing. This session will discuss WEX, and the idea of open legal encyclopedias in general, from a number of different viewpoints. First of all, do the potential benefits of such a resource outweigh the drawbacks? Second, what happens at the intersection of wiki-like software (such as MediaWiki, which WEX uses) and educational legal content? After all, WEX works as a species of content-management and authoring system that can aggregate little bits of new, used, and repurposed information in new and interesting ways.

This session will be of interest to wiki geeks, online-resource developers, and others interested in collaboratively developing legal-education materials (including library materials like pathfinders and research guides).

Here is the FreeMind map that goes with this presentation. You can get the appropriate software to read it at http://freemind.sourceforge.net/

The file is here: CALI Wex presentation.mm

Thomas Bruce
Director, Legal Information Institute
Cornell Law School

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

As an incoming 1L, Neil Wehneman had a simple (and some would say naive) goal: capture as much legal knowledge as he could, and make it freely available to as many people as possible, both as to cost and copyright. The Life of a Law Student podcast was born.

Life of a Law Student relies on Fair Use to assimilate into audio the public domain caselaw along with knowledge gained from textbooks, professors, hornbooks, and other sources. Since that first day of class, Life of a Law Student has been listened to by thousands of current and incoming law students across the country, run into friction from some existing law professors, and been featured in the New York Times. The podcast is currently focused on bringing on additional students in order to "franchise" the idea across law school campuses and across the world.

This session will focus on the policies and goals of Life of a Law Student, the Fair Use argument underlying the methodology, and how this type of podcast fits into a holistic legal education experience.

MP3: WehnemanLR2Fr400.mp3

Play It Now!

Neil Wehneman
Student
University of Cincinnati College of Law

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

Law schools serve both students and teachers. So, for law schools and for West, ripping, mixing, and learning necessarily expands to include teachers using digital forms to structure (to some extent) what and how they want their students to study and learn. This presentation mainly demonstrates a mix of digital forms available to teachers for teaching.

MP3: HummelLR5Fr230.mp3

Play It Now!

Justin Hummel
Manager - Business Development & Academic Technologies
Thomson West

Steve Nickles
C.C. Hope Chair in Law and Management
Wake Forest University School of Law

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

Scheduling your Law School's classes, events, exams, make-ups, meetings, etc. can be a daunting task. While there are many commercial solutions for handling room and building scheduling, they are expensive, and often times inflexible. Efficient building wide scheduling requires a multi-user, permissions based approach in which specific departments and users can be delegated the rights to schedule assigned rooms and calendar categories. It also requires a public web based interface where faculty, staff, and students can view the entire school schedule at a glance. An intuitive and responsive web based interface utilizing the latest web technologies, is just icing on the cake. The University of Pittsburgh School of Law has developed, in-house, a flexible scheduling solution which addresses these requirements. Come for a demonstration of the application and a discussion of the underlying implementation.

MP3: KurpiewskiLR4Fr230.mp3

Play It Now!

Matthew Kurpiewski
Assistant Manager of IT
University of Pittsburgh School of Law

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

In the last 12 months, the Marquette Law School Media and Technology group has adopted several software tools and several administrative practices to promote collaboration. Technologists provide the foundation and framework, librarians provide the subject expertise, and professors reap the benefits. We are using both commercial software products and free web services. We have combined social bookmarking & RSS to identify and distribute relevant content. We have also turned our blog into a collaboration point for technology staff with different responsibilities and reporting structure.

Products discussed: Microsoft Sharepoint, Microsoft Corporate Communicator, del.icio.us, furl.net, airset.com, Wordpress, RSS Bandit

Marquette tech blog - http://law.marquette.edu/blog/index.php

Marquette Tech del.icio.us - http://del.icio.us/mulaw_tech

Marquette Tech furl.net - http://furl.net/members/mulaw_tech

MU Law Librarians furl.net - http://furl.net/members/mulaw_library - faculty tags are "private" at this time.

MP3: NelsonLR3Fr230.mp3

Play It Now!

Steve Nelson
Technology Manager
Marquette University School of Law

Audience: Library folks
Technical Level: Low

Much is being written lately about both the long term risk to libraries in relying on vendor supplied online resources, and about the loss of valuable government information due to the GPO relying on online availability. In this session, a solution to both problems will be presented.

The presenter will show how the Rutgers-Camden Law Library is developing and maintaining an electronic collection of government document materials through the use of wget, and other simple tools that can automate process of collection development. Practical discussion will include: 1. selection of materials; 2. the use and features of wget; 3. techniques for automating the collection process.

MP3: JoergensenLR1Fr230.mp3

Play It Now!

John Joergensen
Librarian
Rutgers, The State University of NJ, Camden

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

Distance education comes in many different styles. In addition to synchronous and asynchronous methods, there is also the medium used for transmitting the class, such as video-conferencing, web-based, or a combination of both. Each of these present different advantages and disadvantages. This session will look at the considerations one should use in deciding what is the best distance learning method to use for a class. The focus will be on synchronous video-conferencing and asynchronous web-based courses.

MP3: PodgorLR2Fr230.mp3

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Ellen S. Podgor
Associate Dean of Faculty Development & Distance E
Stetson University College of Law

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

This session explores the issue of centralization (a.k.a. outsourcing) v. decentralization of IT and provides real life examples of what works and more importantly, when to proceed with caution. Are most IT services now a commodity that can be centralized with little impact to service levels or does in-house decentralized hardware, software, and people make for a unique synergy that simply works better every time. You don�t want to reinvent the wheel for services like email, file storage, network printing, web hosting, admin system, help desk, active directory, etc., if you can find lower cost, higher quality alternatives that work in a law school environment. Do not be caught off guard, join the discussion on this culturally unique decision that explores the advantages and disadvantages of several centralized options that you may soon be facing at your law school.

MP3: DurbinLR5Fr100.mp3

Play It Now!

Michael P Durbin
Director Information Technology
St. Louis University School of Law

Deb Ranard
Director, IT
Capital University School of Law

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

Digital content is in demand. Call them ebooks, digital books, or electronic files - as laptop use continues to increase at law schools - students have begun to search for digital content that is portable, searchable, and reasonably priced. VitalSource has been working with both Thomson West and Wolters Kluwer for over two years to develop these types of content solutions for law students. This lecture will explore feedback gathered from both students and faculty about digital content, the current challenges involved in delivering the content to students, and the features and benefits of the current version.

MP3: PooleLR4Fr100.mp3

Play It Now!

John Poole
Director Higher Ed Sales
VitalSource

Audience: All
Technical Level: Moderately Technical, but not past the ken of most

Search engines help you find stuff, and customized search engines configured with your collections in mind are great tools for helping your audience and directing its attention toward important things on your web site. This presentation will discuss the architecture of search engines, and various means of using and configuring them so as to enhance the usability of your site. The SWISH-E open-source search engine will be used as the main source of illustrations, though most if not all of the techniques that will be discussed can be carried out in most popular software, and the discussion of indexing capabilities and search techniques will be sufficiently generic as to apply to most who are running their own engines. Moderately technical, but not past the ken of most.

Here is the FreeMind map that goes with this presentation. You can get the appropriate software to read it at http://freemind.sourceforge.net/

The file is here: CALI search engine presentation.mm

MP3: BruceLR3Fr100.mp3

Play It Now!

Watch the presentation.

Thomas Bruce
Director, Legal Information Institute
Cornell Law School

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

Dozens of law schools are experimenting with podcasting as a delivery mechanism for distributing classroom lectures and special events--i.e., repackaging pre-existing content (not that there's anything wrong with that). Exploring the creative potential of podcasting as a medium of expression opens up opportunities to reach new publics in new ways. Find out how and why Jim tries to make law librarianship entertaining.

MP3: MillesLR1Fr100.mp3

Play It Now!

Watch the presentation.

James Milles
Director of the Law Library
State University of New York - Buffalo School of Law

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

Alumni wished they had it; recruiters demand it; students need it; faculty fight it. How can you successfully develop a practical course in Law Practice Management and meet the needs of all? Combining both practice management and business management into a single full semester course is one way. The University of Florida Levin College of Law has been teaching this course successfully for four years. It is always a full class.

MP3: AdkinsLR2Fr100.mp3

Play It Now!

Watch the presentation.

Andy Adkins
Associate Director, Technology Services
University of Florida College of Law

Audience: Anyone
Technical Level: Low

Apreso Classroom is an affordable automated lecture capture and Web publishing system that produces online versions of the classroom experience for on-demand student review. Permanently installed in the classroom, and operating without attendants, Apreso Classroom is the first lecture capture system affordable and practical enough to be deployed campus-wide. Educational institutions the world over are increasingly recognizing the value of making course lectures available to students for online review. They enable students to improve comprehension and retention, professors to improve the effectiveness of class and office hours, and universities to boost facility and technology usage. However, most solutions for getting lecture content online are prohibitively expensive, difficult to use, and lack the operational simplicity required for university-wide acceptance. Anystream's Apreso Classroom is an affordable automated lecture capture and Web publishing system that produces online versions of the classroom experience for on-demand student review. Apreso Classroom can be scheduled to start and stop automatically, removing the need for professors to learn to operate the system or change the way they teach. It automatically captures and synchronizes the professor's voice with visual aids being projected in the classroom, and posts an interactive, indexed Web-based version of the lecture to university websites or course management system. Designed specifically for higher education, Apreso Classroom's enterprise architecture integrates with campus-wide information systems. Permanently installed in the classroom, and operating without attendants, Apreso Classroom is the first lecture capture system affordable and practical enough to be deployed campus-wide.

MP3: JonesLR5Fr1030.mp3

Play It Now!

Watch the presentation.

Mark Jones
---
Anystream, Inc.

Tim MacEldowney
---
Anystream, Inc.

Audience: All
Technical Level: Suits not required

A good technology officer must make the institution more efficient and meet the expectations of community members and related parties through the adoption and intelligent use of technology. This session discusses what the technology officer must be, have, and do to succeed. It is geared to current and aspiring IT officers, library directors and deans supervising the technology function, and librarians, faculty, and staff members interacting with the technology officer. The speaker will draw from the experience of well-known technology officers and industry publications to paint an accurate portrait of a successful technology officer.

MP3: MolinaLR4Fr1030.mp3

Play It Now!

Watch the presentation.

Pablo G Molina
CIO
Georgetown University Law Center

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

Concord Law School is a business unit of Kaplan, Inc., which is one of the Washington Post Companies. Concord is a fully online law school that has been in existence for 8 years. Over that time, its Learning Management System (LMS) has evolved to encompass all aspects of the law school experience including synchronous and asynchronous learning, web based registration, exam and quiz taking, assignment submission, grading, community building, faculty/student communication, virtual library resources, and career services. Recently, the synchronous classroom piece of the LMS has been revamped using Macromedia Flash Technology. Craig Gold, Professor and Associate Dean for Technology and the chief architect of the LMS and Steve Burnett, Associate Dean for Business Development will do a live demonstration the Flash based synchronous classroom as well other aspects of the Concord experience. Attendees will be able to participate in the synchronous classroom using their own computers.

MP3: BurnettLR3Fr1030.mp3

Play It Now!

Watch the presentation.

Stephen Burnett
Associate Dean for Business Development
Concord University School of Law

Craig Gold
Associate Dean for Technology
Concord University School of Law

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

While post hoc collections of journals like Hein Online and ad hoc collections of working papers like SSRN continue to grow, legal journals are by and large still only print enterprises. A great opportunity to share information freely and provide better, more usable and future-protected information is being squandered. The panelists will address why digitally publishing journals is in everyone's interest, what technologies promise the most good for preserving born-digital information, and other considerations and caveats in digitally publishing journals, with reference to the real-life experiences at two law schools.

MP3: JoergensenLR1Fr1030.mp3

Play It Now!

Watch the presentation.

John Joergensen
Librarian
Rutgers, The State University of NJ, Camden

Wayne Miller
Director of Educational Technologies
Duke University School of Law

Gary Moore
Assistant Dean for Information Systems
Hofstra University School of Law

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

In the book, Got Game (Harvard Business School Press 2004), the authors concluded that extensive video-gaming experience has significantly affected the generation of young adults now entering the business world, i.e., they are better addapted to business than the earlier generation, but they present management problems to older managers who don't have similar video-gaming experience. Do law students have similar video-gaming experience? Could law students be afffected in the same way? Could such law students present a similar challenge to "older" faculty and staff members who lack similar video-gaming experience? Professors Ron Brown and Joe Grohman surveyed law students at Nova Southeastern University and on the CALI website searching for some of the answers. They will present and discuss their findings.

MP3: BrownLR2Fr1030.mp3

Play It Now!

Watch the presentation.

Ronald Benton Brown
Professor of Law
Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad Law Center

Joseph M. Grohman
Professor of Law
Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad Law Center

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

Learning By Design and other Fallacies: What Behavioral Economics, Serendipity and Procrastination Can Teach Us About Educational Technology

Behavioral economics has taught economists what non-economists had always claimed. People do not act as the rational actor model predicts. But behavioral economics teaches something more. There are predictable patterns in the ways that human behavior diverges from rational actor predictions. We routinely overvalue potential losses and undervalue potential gains. We rely on heuristics that "frame" problems in a manner that leads to well-understood skewing in our decisions. And so on. In his keynote address, Professor Boyle will argue that there are equivalents to these behavioral patterns in the ways we think about educational materials and technology: systematic biases in the ways that we understand (or faily to understand) their potential and to plan for their future. In particular, we systematically overestimate our ability to predict the uses of technology, and systematically undervalue the productive power of collective, common or "open" resources. Knowledge of these two cognitive biases, he argues, provides useful rules of thumb in designing new educational systems; if we cannot overcome our biases, we can at least learn to compensate for them.

MP3 of the plenary: calicon06PlenaryBoyle.mp3

Video (WMV format): calicon06PlenaryBoyle.wmv

James Boyle
William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law
Duke University School of Law