Teknoids

Thank you for your interest in Drupalfest! We have reached our maximum capacity of 25 and registration in now closed. If you would like to be added to the wait list in case we have any cancellations, please send an email to Elmer, emasters AT cali DOT org. See you in Baltimore.

Agenda

1. Session 1 (Elmer)
   • Intro
   • What's on the stick
   • Basic requirements
     • PHP and MySQL stuff
     • Apache for clean URLs
     • Info architecture stuff
   • Quick Drupal install
2. Session 2
   • Basics of how Drupal functions (John)
     • The vocabulary of Drupal
   • Intro to admin interface (Josh)
   • Taxonomy (Elmer)
   • LDAP and other authentication (Mike John Elmer)
3. Session 3 (Sara)
   • Organic groups: Set up a student organization site
     • What are the rules?
     • Handing over the reins
   • Panels: an interface for laying out whole web pages
     • Mini-example: OG-Panels-driven home page
     • The kitchen sink: using and re-using panels-driven layouts
4. Session 4
   • Theming (Mike)
     • Workshop: Convert an HTML mockup to a Drupal template
     • Theming nodes
     • Theming views: Lists, tables.

Notes on Drupalfest08.

PortableApps

• Can we add plugins to Firefox?
  • Firebug
  • colorzilla
  • measureit
  • Web developer
  • x-ray
  • DOM Inspector?

We have a theme!!!

"Transforming Legal Educaction" is the theme for the 2008 Conference for Law School Computing.

We'll be posting links for registration and putting out a call for speakers soon. All of these links will be here.

The 2008 Conference for Law School Computing will be held on Thursday - Friday, June 19 - 21, 2008 at the University of Maryland School of Law in Baltimore, MD.

We haven't set up the website or even put out a call for speakers yet because I am stumped on deciding a theme for this conference. After AALS, I was thinking of something like "From MacCrate to Carnegie: Back to the Future", but it doesn't have that much to do with Law School IT.

We ARE planning to have a dedicated track just for law faculty with all sorts of innovative presentations on technology that are specifically aimed at the classroom and teaching, but I can't really figure out how to make this work theme-wise.

So....

Below you will find some mockups for themes. Take a look and send me a note (jmayer@cali.org) with your suggestions or whether or not you especially love/hate any of these. I currently have comments turned off due to frequent comment-spam attacks.

At the unsession at the end of this year's conference, several folks talked about a "deep tech" track (for lack of a better name). The consensus seemed to be (correct me if I've got this wrong) that we wanted a track that emphasized "hands-on" howto tech....like the old installfest only broader. The idea would be to actually demonstrate your topic during the presentation. Some ideas put forth were:

• Build an ajaxish/web 2.0 app
• In-depth stylesheets (CSS, XSLT)
• Put up a Drupal site
• Virtualization (vmware)
• Using regular expressions
• Talking to mysql/postgresql from php/perl/python/etc.
• . . . and others I missed.

The key seemed to be that folks wanted to see people doing things, not just talking about doing things.

Attention Teknoids!

I've tuned up the interface to www.teknoids.net a bit, switching to a cleaner template and re-working the menu system. I'm thinking that this will make it easier for y'all to use the website. Remember, everyone on the list has access to the website.

In response to conversations started at the conference in Vegas, there are 2 new groups on teknoids: LawDUG (http://www.teknoids.net/groups/lawdug) and CALIcon08 (http://www.teknoids.net/groups/calicon08). LawDUG is a Drupal users group for those of us in the legal area. It should come in handy for anyone with interest in using Drupal. CALIcon08 is a group to help plan a more hands-on tech oriented track for next year's conference in Baltimore. If you want to help plan this track, this group is for you.

As with all teknoids groups, there are feeds for both groups and after you subscribe to the groups, you can opt for email updates to help keep up with what's going on. BTW, feel free to create your own groups too.

Finally, let me remind everyone about the teknoids.net feed at http://www.teknoids.net/node/feed that aggregates everything that appears on the teknoids homepage into a single feed. The feed includes main thread posts from the mailing list, public posts to teknoids groups, blog posts from a number of tech oriented blogs, and more.

Questions, suggestions, contributions, just holler.

Elmer

I am so excited to make this post.

Here's the press release.

The theme for this year's Conference for Law School Computing ...

Legal Education and IT:Mirage or Oasis?

I fear that this choice of theme may be mis-interpreted, so let me provide some thoughts.

As conference themes go, it's a little ambiguous - which is good. By leaving wide latitude for interpretation, the speakers can riff of it and it's intended to be a bit challenging and thought-provoking.

This article "Who Needs a CIO" by Chris Anderson (author of the Long Tail book) articulates it better than I can...

http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/02/who_needs_a_cio.html

Like Anderson, I fear that IT in legal education is becoming irrelevant either through outsourcing, technology-shifting to the ends of the network, malaise or lack of vision. I never really subscribed to the "technology for technology's sake" approach and what with the law school's traditional resistance to change, it's hard to introduce new tools, ideas or services that make things more efficient or help law schools achieve their purpose.

This is the mirage. IT slowly disappears into the email that can be had from Yahoo, the research that can be had from Google and so on.

There is another angle to the theme. IT is becoming so pervasive or "built-in" that IT thinking must shift it's focus away from plumbing and closer to the actual goals of legal education. This new type of thinking affects priorities, job skills and decision-making all over the place. You can no longer be simply in charge of the computers or in charge of the lab or in charge of the network - you have to be a collaborator and coordinator of services to the people that use the computers, labs and network. This is the oasis - it's just there, it just works, it nourishes existing activities instead of impeding them.

Finally, there is the strategic. This too is part of the oasis. It's a somewhat distant, but reachable promise that IT can make things possible that were not possible without it. I really am astounded by the power of the tools we have available today, but I think we are only just beginning to figure out how to use them effectively.

As we all know, IT has not always been equal to its hype. Where is our natural language search? AI? ... and what about the problems it has created? Spam! Viri! Phishing! Information Overload!

This too is the mirage - a promise not kept or a hope not realized.

There are plenty of excellent sessions at this year's conference.

Here's the conference home page where you can register and see the preliminary and constantly changing agenda...

http://www.cali.org/conference