CALIopolis

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.

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.