Spotlight Blog

We're about to publish casebooks that are free for law students and law professors to use on multiple formats (iPad, Kindle, PDF, etc.). AALS meeting attendees got a preview of some casebook chapters, and now you can, too, at elangdell.cali.org.

Your reaction to eLangdell has been overwhelmingly positive. Read some early write-ups and mentions here, here, and here. We especially like this part from The Librarian at Law. Read it below...

If you're in San Francisco for the 2010 AALS Annual Meeting this year, you should stop by and say hi to the staff at CALI's exhibitor booth. We'll all be there! Ask us about our electronic casebook initiative, eLangdell, if you're interested in adopting open casebooks that are freely available to your students. We'll also be demoing a new version of CALI lessons (hint: this version is compatible with iPads and smartphones).

So you're new to CALI.org? Welcome to our site. But what do you do next? How do you access all of this great content? Well, like most websites, you create an account. But to access the lessons there's one tiny registration step that's a little different than most websites: the CALI Authorization Code. Sound confusing? It's not. Watch this 2 minute video to learn how to create an authorized account at cali.org.

With turkey day over, law school exam season is in full swing. Most students have hours and hours of outlining, reading, and supplemental material reviewing ahead of them. You know what your students would appreciate? A study tool that's just as (or more) effective and free to them, but that's also a break from the same old study routine. Suggest CALI Lessons. Read more...

Our website has a handy bookmarking feature. You click the "Bookmark this" button and that lesson magically appears in your "My Bookmarks" page linked from your right hand menu. Your bookmarks are stored there, safe and sound until you delete them, for you to run the lessons at a later time. For you Internet Explorer users experiencing bookmark problems and error messages, there are workarounds. Read the FAQ on bookmarks.

CALI lessons are easy to assign to students. Just copy the URL that leads directly to a lesson; paste it wherever you want, see: /lesson/815. This works for referring to CALI through email, a website, or any Course Management System. But there is a right and wrong way to post links to CALI in a CMS. Make sure you set all CALI links from within your CMS to open in a new window. Read more.

We have a bunch of FAQs to help you along at cali.org; they can help you do things like register, save your score, or track student lesson usage (only if you're a prof on that last one, of course). Now the FAQs are even easier to find and navigate. Just click the Help tab in the upper right, and choose the appropriate topic to see a list of FAQs in that topic.

Law profs: want to learn how to use blogging and podcasting to engage your students? CALI is hosting live webinars on how to create and maintain a class blog using our free blogging network, Classcaster. Part one on Wed., Nov. 17 will show you how to create a class blog and introduce basic features. Part two on Wed., Dec. 1 will teach you how to integrate audio and create an iTunes podcast. Sign up to join us live.

Some of us CALI staff got a peek at a working build of eLangdell this week, and we're very excited by what we saw. eLangdell, of course, will be our online tool that allows educators to publish, edit, and remix casebooks and coursepacks for free (students: how do free casebooks sound?). In the meantime, we're on track to release a few original casebooks authored by great law faculty we've chosen through the eLangdell stimulus project. We'll then publish their work using eLangdell. Read more...

If you’re planning to be in San Francisco for the AALS conference, join us on Saturday morning for a delicious breakfast and conversations with colleagues about legal education. There will be a brief presentation about CALI’s work in electronic casebooks and open educational materials and updated information on the continuing development of new interactive web-based lessons. Read on for more information.

The leader of the Law.Gov movement to make US law more accessible, Carl Malamud, issued a challenge: submit a written or video essay about what Law.Gov means for a chance to win $5,000. As Law.Gov becomes a reality, it's going to affect most lawyers. And what law student couldn't use $5,000 these days? We hope some of you poor law students consider making a submission. Profs, tell your students about it (class project?).  Read it.

Deadline Monday, November 15, 2010

The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) is seeking nominations of qualified and enthusiastic individuals to fill vacant positions on its Board of Directors. If you know of someone who would like to contribute to the research and development, strategic planning and governance of CALI, then consider nominating them for the CALI Board of Directors. It would be a good idea to clear it with the person first to make sure they want to be nominated. Self-nominations are acceptable.

Law profs: have you ever thought about recording your in-class lectures, or even creating your own lecture recaps, then making the recordings available online for your students? We at CALI might give you a free digital recording device if you're willing to try it out with us next semester. And with Classcaster, our free blogging platform for legal educators, it's simple to set up a class blog to deliver your recordings to students...and even send your recordings to iTunes as a podcast.  Read on for more...

CALI's free blogging system just keeps getting better. We recently added a feature that makes it really easy to map a custom domain to your Classcaster blog. It's a nice feature if you own your own domain and don't want to use the default classcaster.net domain. Example, you just created a Classcaster blog at ilovecali.classcaster.net, but you want caliisawesome.com, which you own, to be the domain.  Here's an FAQ explaining how to do it.