Teknoids

"Please Pay Attention" is the working title of the new podcast series. We would love to get suggestions from listeners to name this podcast.

Elmer Masters and I talk about legal education-related IT topics several times a week and we have threatened in the past to turn some of those conversations into podcasts because we believe that others might benefit. Alternatively, others might listen and set us straight.

So we have followed up on our threat and recorded the first in a series of podcasts. The general topic area is IT in legal education/law schools. We don't expect to be the only voices on this podcast as we will be inviting "guest speakers" - that is - real IT folks who work at real jobs in real law schools.

But for this first podcast, we decided to keep it between just me and Elmer and talk about Drupal (Elmer attended DrupalCon in Boston last week), Drupal, the massively popular open source content management system and related topics on law school website design, development and administration issues.

Here is the link to the screencast version of my talk at the 2008 Annual CALI Members Meeting held on Friday, January 5, 2008 in New York during AALS.

I had previously posted the podcast/audio recording and Powerpoint slides.

Here ...

AALS2008Carnegie.mp3

... is the recording of the AALS Session: Rethinking Legal Education For The 21st Century. The speakers included...

• Moderator: Edward L. Rubin, Vanderbilt University Law School
• Speakers: Vicki C. Jackson, Georgetown University Law Center
• Robert Mac Crate, Esq., Senior Counsel, Sullivan and Cromwell, New York, New York
• Martha L. Minow, Harvard Law School
• Suellyn Scarnecchia, University of New Mexico School of Law
• William M. Sullivan, Senior Scholar The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Palo Alto, California
  

Here is the recording of my talk at the 2008 Annual Membership Meeting for CALI during AALS in New York, NY on January 5, 2008 ... AALS2008CALIBreakfast.mp3

Here are the slides ... 2008AALSBreakfast_final.ppt

I will be posting a screencast version soon and posting more information about ELangdell into the future.

I lurk on the LawProf discussion list and was privy to the discussion about student note sharing websites that surrounded SwapNotes.com over the past few days.

I was a bit perturbed by the vehemence of some of the responses and invited Adam Steiner who is a 3L at Cardozo Law School to talk about his company.

In many ways, it's a familiar Internet entrepreneur story. Students were already sharing their course notes via email and other (somewhat) under-the-radar file repositories and Adam saw a way to make the process more efficient by creating a centralized, Creative Common-based respository of student-contributed notes. He pays the hosting/bandwidth bills via advertising on the website.

Some faculty object to this for copyright reasons. I don't go into this aspect in the interview because neither I nor Adam are copyright experts. I direct the reader to Professor Michael Madison's cogent analysis here.

I spent a wonderful day last week at the Berkman Center and gave a fast-paced talk about past, current and future CALI projects. The Berkman folks are involved in all kinds of imaginative, challenging and exciting projects that overlap with my work at CALI in all kinds of ways. I had a great time.

The kind folks at Berkman have already posted a podcast and video of my talk.

I am always looking for sources of interesting podcasts and one of my staff pointed me to this collection of gems.

Hamline's Conversations in Law.

Lots of intersting topics relating to law, society, culture and even Malcom Gladwell, author of Blink and the Tipping Point.

Professor Garrett Power has spent 30 years writing his casebook which is titled: Constitutional Limitations on Land Use Controls, Environmental Regulations and Governmental Exactions.

He has posted the 704 page PDF to SSRN and the University of Maryland's Digital Commons website.

In this 24 minute conversation, we talk about his motivations and expectations for the casebook and open-access content.

Click here to listen or right-click to download - GarretPower2.mp3

Florida Coastal School of Law is currently using Apreso Anystream software in conjunction with dedicated AV capture stations for creating podcasts for 5 classes. We will be expanding this to include all classes for the future. We are looking for a solution whereby the built-in security is fully automated. Unfortunately, we are not eligible to use i-Tunes U due to the fact that we are for-profit. We researched several law schools and found that the class captured podcasts were available to the general public. We do not utilize Blackboard or WebCT, but beleive either solution could be integrated with Active Directory for securing the podcasts based on security groups. We can create an Intranet with individual Faculty pages and setup a secure login page for our users; however this will only limit access to all of our users. We are trying to steer away from the next step of securing individual Faculty and course pages with podcasts to the students enrolled in each class as this would require a manual process from semester to semester. With all this said,

Every year, the membership of CALI meets during AALS to elect new members to the Board of Directors and I give an overview of the previous year plus a look-ahead to the coming year.

2006 was an amazing year for CALI and I expect that 2007 will be even better.

You can watch/listen to my screencast here.

Alternatively, you can listen to just a podcast of the presentation. Click to listen or right-click to download the MP3 - AALS2007CALIMembersMeeting.mp3

I welcome comments, ideas, suggestions, complaints and kudos. Drop me a note at jmayer@cali.org.