CALIopolis

Every year, CALI's members meet during AALS for a membership meeting. This year's meeting was in Washington, DC on Thursday, January 5, 2006 at the Washington Hilton and Towers Hotel.

The following folks were elected (or re-elected ) to the CALI Board of Directors.

Mohyeddin Abdulaziz, U of Arizona
Steve Bradford, Nebraska
Ron Eades, Louisville
Scott Burnham, Montana (re-elected)
Paul Caron, Cincinnati (re-elected)
Ken Hirsh, Duke (re-elected)
Peter Strauss, Columbia (re-elected)

We wish to express our sincere appreciation to the following who are leaving the CALI Board of Directors.

Barbara Glesner-Fines, UMKC
Michael Norwood, U of New Mexico
Kinvin Wroth, Vermont

The complete list of the CALI Board of Directors is here.

After the meeting, I gave a little talk (25 minutes) on past, current and future activities planned for CALI. You can view and listen to that talk as a screencast here.

Included in the talk are statistics on CALI's membership, lessons and lesson usage (50% increase over last year!) as well as announcements about the Legal Education Podcasting Project, The Law School Disaster Preparedness Project (more on this soon), Crossword Puzzles and pictures of my dog.

As always, comments, ideas, suggestions and complaints are welcome.

The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI www.cali.org) has a launched a project where over 50 law faculty from 44 US and one Canadian law schools are creating podcasts of their courses in the Spring 2006 semester.

The goal of the project is to investigate the use of podcasting in legal education. Faculty and students will be surveyed throughout the semester to determine their reactions to this new legal education medium.

About half of the faculty will be recording all of their classroom lectures and the other half will be creating weekly summaries of the course. The podcasts will be posted to blogs hosted on CALI�s Classcaster service (www.classcaster.org).

The individual faculty have the option of putting the blogs behind a password only for their students or leaving the blogs open for the public Internet to listen along.

Besides blog/podcasting space, all faculty have been provided with a personal digital recorder (specifically, and Olympus ws-100) and a lapel microphone which allows for hands-free and podium-free recording in the classroom.

Podcasting is just audio delivered over the Internet. When connected to a blog and an RSS feed, students can set up a subscription so that it automatically downloads new podcasts to their MP3 players (i.e. Apple iPod).

Legal education has a long oral tradition. The classroom lecture is the core of legal education, but once it�s done, it�s done. CALI posits that when students can re-listen to classroom lectures or weekly summaries created by the instructor, they will benefit educationally. CALI seeks to understand the qualitative benefits from the student and instructor viewpoints.

Some students take too many notes and do not listen carefully to classroom lectures. Even the best students may miss something or need to hear it more than once before it sinks in. Some students are better aural learners than visual learners and would benefit from access to audio recordings of lectures or weekly summaries. Every student is different and every instructor is different. One size does not fit all.

CALI expects that this project provide excellent insight into how a podcast-enhanced course might be done differently and better than a non-podcast-enhanced course. Ideas that arise from this project will manifest as new features and services from CALI and especially in design changes in the Classcaster service.

A forum for faculty to discuss technical issues and share experiences has been setup and interim observations and analysis will appear from time to time at CALI�s blog at caliopolis.classcaster.org. A list of participating faculty and their schools and courses can be found at www2.cali.org/index.php?fuseaction=help.faq&topicid=0000000010#66.

On Monday January 9th, 2006, Prof. Jennifer Martin at Western New England College of Law recorded her Business Organizations class and posted the lecture to her Classcaster blog becoming the first law professor to podcast her course using the Classcaster system. This first podcast launches an ambitious CALI project that will see over 50 faculty members from CALI member law schools create blogs and podcasts for their courses during the spring 2006 semester. The project is intended to examine the usefulness of podcasting and blogging in legal education. CALI is providing digital voice recorders and extra support to the faculty members chosen to participate in the project.

Classcaster is a course blogging system that provides faculty, librarians, and staff of CALI member schools with a new way to interact with students and communities. A Classcaster blog provides authors with tools for posting not only traditional blog articles but also tools for podcasting and sharing any documents and/or files with students and communities. For more information about Classcaster, please read the Classcaster FAQ or the Classcaster whitepaper. A forum for discussing Classcaster is available here.

Professor Larry Lessig has posted a screencast of a talk on Google's Book Search project. It's an 80+ MB torrent download. I played it into Camtasia and tweaked the settings until I got it down to a 22 MB SWF which is a little more bearable - without too much loss of fidelity.

It's an interesting talk and worth a watch if you want a precis on the issue and how the legal issues may play out.

A recent survey by Kineo of the use of audio for learning provides some insights for the law faculty podcasters.

You can listen to a Matt Fox of Kineo walk you through the survey results here.

The best tip ...

...And a best practice tip? Make sure audio learning is sufficiently and suitably chunked for non-linear usage – it makes for a flexible and learner-centered model...

I couldn't agree more. I believe that when we survey law students at the end of the Legal Education Podcasting Project, the majority will prefer the "weekly summary" model to the "recorded classes" model - primarily because these will be shorter and fewer. Students are efficient-learners and seek the shortest distance to the highest grade. This is not necessarily bad or wrong behavior. It will be difficult, however, to really measure this since students will not have access to both models within a single class.

MBS said it surveyed students at campuses that offered the digital textbooks and discovered that the biggest factor in students' decision to buy digital textbooks was their price. Student said the books should be discounted between 33 percent and 50 percent. According to MBS, the most popular electronic books sold were in the fields of history, law, and technology.

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: E-Book Program Expands

Note that law is one of the areas listed as most popular with students.  I'm still looking for hte original source for this.

technorati tags: ebooks, education, caliopolis

The good news for the technophobics is that podcasts are (relatively) simple - the MP3 files generated by podcasters are relatively easy to create and don't require high-priced equipment, allowing teachers to record without a large investment of time or money by the school.

EducationGuardian.co.uk | Advertisement feature | Podcasting for schools - the basics

Good article that outlines what you need to get started podcasting including a number of good links to podcasting tools and resources.

technorati tags: podcasting, education, caliopolis

Through this event, we are looking to highlight the ways in which tools of new media and the social web are impacting higher education. Are you doing something with blogs or podcasts in student admission? Are you developing online communities for alumni? Have you tried classroom podcasting? Are you a student who's pioneering the use of blogs or wikis at your institution? We would love to hear about your thoughts and experiences.

Thomson Peterson's Syndication for Higher Ed >> HigherEd BlogCon 2006 Call for Presenters

Sounds like a natural for Classcaster and our recently launched podcasting project. John and I will put something together for this.

technorati tags: higher ed bloggercon, classcaster