CALIopolis

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.

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I won't say which one is my favorite. You can probably guess.

I am so excited to make this post.

Here's the press release.

Cambridge, MA – Today at the 17th annual CALI Conference on Law School Computing, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and the non-profit Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) proudly announced a new partnership to stimulate innovation in American law schools through a new educational resource sharing platform. This work will be perpetuated by the establishment of the CALI-Berkman Research Fellowship.

“We are looking forward to renewing a fruitful relationship with Harvard Law School through the Legal Education Commons project, which will provide innovative tools and access to open-licensed course materials to our more than 200 member law schools” said CALI Executive Director John Mayer.

The partnership will establish the Legal Education Commons – known as eLangdell for Harvard Law School’s first Dean and the Law Library’s namesake, Dean Christopher Columbus Langdell – where law faculty can share and use openly-licensed course materials to offer students free or low-cost course packs, casebooks, podcasts, and video. Berkman and CALI will also research and develop innovative teaching tools to advance practice skills like client interaction, negotiations, and trial advocacy.

The first CALI-Berkman Research Fellowship will be held by current Berkman Fellow Gene Koo, a 2002 graduate of Harvard Law School, whose research has centered on the use of technology in legal instruction. Gene also helped found Legal Aid University, which provides training and development to poverty lawyers across the country.

“The Berkman Center is happy to build on the relationship Harvard Law established some 25 years ago as co-founder of CALI,” added Berkman Center Executive Director John Palfrey. “Gene’s devotion to improving education through technology will certainly make this effort a great success.”

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

Hope to see you there.

The 2007 Conference for Law School Computing will be held at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas William S. Boyd School of Law on Monday-Wednesday, June 18-20, 2007.

Here is the website where you will soon be able to register, get hotel information, etc.

In the meantime, if you are a faculty, staff or librarian at a law school and you would like to speak at the conference, drop me an email at jmayer@cali.org. (We are working on an automated submission form - early next week).

The theme of the 2007 conference is...

Is Your IT a Mirage or an Oasis

If you are interested in sponsoring the conference - contact Austin Groothuis at agroothuis@cali.org/.

Since the conference is going to be in Vegas, we expect a hefty crowd.

I gave the opening keynote at the 2006 Conference for Law School Computing yesterday. Here is the powerpoint deck from the presentation.

1759-JohnMayerThursdayPlenaryFINAL.ppt (17 MB)

Here is a link to a WMV video of the presentation.

Here is a link to an MP3 of the presentation.

Update: Tom Boone at UNLV Boyd School of Law provides an excellent precis here.

This is the CALL FOR SPEAKERS for the 2006 Conference for Law School Computing.

Registration will be up in a few days.

The hotel will take phone call reservations, but not web reservations
just yet - don't let that stop you as hotel rooms GO FAST and we lose
them 30 days before the conference.

EVERYTHING can be accessed at www.cali.org/conference


2006 CONFERENCE FOR LAW SCHOOL COMPUTING

RIP MIX LEARN

*** CALL FOR SPEAKERS ****

What: 16th Annual Conference for Law School Computing
When: Thursday - Saturday, June 15-17, 2006
Where: Nova Southeastern Shepard Broad Law Center, Fort Lauderdale, FL

Submit proposal ideas at www.cali.org/conference

Register SOON at www.cali.org/conference

$395 - CALI members
$695 - Law school/non-members
$995 - non law school attendees

Hotel information at www.cali.org/conference

SHARE YOUR KNOWLEDGE, EXPERIENCE AND IDEAS

Are you ...

‒ law faculty,
‒ law librarian or
‒ IT staff

with experience using, installing, supporting or building IT-based
systems for teaching at your law school? Are you an...

‒ Administrative systems developer,
‒ Help desk staffer,
‒ Webmaster,
‒ Instructional designer,
‒ Graphic artist/Flash programmer, or
‒ A/V/Classroom Technology guru?

If so, you have real-world experience to share as a SPEAKER at this
conference. Speaker registration fees are discounted $395, though you
will have to cover your own transportation and hotel costs.

If several people propose similar topics, I may group them into a
panel-o-presenters. If you are interested in becoming a speaker or
panelist, let me know. If you want to speak, but can't decide on a
topic, send me an email with your areas of expertise and I will try to
accommodate you. This is YOUR conference, help me to make it GREAT!

In the past, I have included a list of possible session titles. I am
going to break from tradition and see what comes flying in over the
transom. Get your creative juices flowing.

I've been doing some of the think-work in preparation for the 2006 Conference for Law School Computing to be held at Nova Southeastern Shepard Broad Law Center on Thu-Sat, June 15-17, 2006.

I fear that for some attendees, this conference is getting....stale.
We have consciously designed the conference to attract folks from three major communities...techies, law librarians and faculty. The original idea was that these folks didn't interact and share ideas and concerns as often as they might and that the CALI Conference was a way to mash-up the disparate needs of these three broad communities under the common rubric of technology in legal education, research and administration within law schools.

You may or may not have noticed that the idea of "tracks" in the conference has consistently been downplayed. If you look hard, there are tracks sort of meant for faculty and sort of meant for tech staff and sort of meant for tech administrators, but the slight ambiguity was purposeful to encourage some cross fertilization of ideas.

By far, the biggest number of complaints I get are from the "hard" techies and from the faculty. Both seem to feel that the conference does not have sufficient numbers of sessions to attract their attention. It has been suggested that we be much more specific about tracking or even sponsor *seperate* conferences for different constituencies.

Both of these ideas (tracking and seperate conferences) work against the original goal of the CALI Conference and that worries me.

A second important goal of the CALI Conference was to establish a sense of professionalism for tech staff at law schools. Faculty have AALS, Librarians have AALL, techies have techie conferences like COMDEX, Educause, TechShow, etc., but nothing aimed directly at the common problems of law school computing that all tech staff confront.

Balance, I believe, is important, but I struggle to find that balance every year. I fear that new tech staff don't know about the conference and that the sense of Law School IT Professionals has diminished as our jobs have diversified and roles have become both more defined and less defined.


More defined in the sense that 10 years ago, the typical law school IT staffer was a "jane/jack-of-all-trades". This is less so today where responsibilities are more clearly defined and we only need (or want) to know about things that are specific to our roles within our institutions.

When I was Director of Computing Services at Chicago-Kent, I adminstered the network, programmed in dBase and VB, repaired and sold student and faculty computers, changed toner cartridges and created strategic plans for future IT initiatives. Today, these responsbilities would fall under network administrator, programmer, help desk, lab technician and CIO/Director with much clearer lines of delineation. Of course, today, you must add a plethora of new responsibilities...webmaster, faculty liaison, classroom technology, instructional design and support, audio/visual....forgive me if I don't list everything here.

Less defined in the sense that what we do in law schools is no different than what anyone does in any school and so a conference aimed at "law school" computing makes less sense today. I don't believe this. There are all sorts of things that make law schools different from anything else, but this requires us to realize that we need to understand our institutional goals and not just our technology. The more defined our roles as webmasters, programmers, network administrators et al, the less we see the "law school" differentiator in them.

I ran across a very interesting article that sparked this post

http://www.centralityjournal.com/archives/homophily_of_professional_conferences.html

Give it a read and tell me what we can do so that the CALI Conference remains relevant, interesting and valuable.