There are over 140,000* law students in the 201 ABA accredited law schools in the US. According to the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), higher education students spend an average of $1100 per year on books.
The 2011-2012 school year was a landmark year at CALI. I am, of course, thinking of the fact that we were founded 30 years ago, but 2012 is significant in more ways than an anniversary that happens to end with a zero. This year CALI:
We just published our 900th CALI Lesson on cali.org! The 900th lesson was Professor Steve Bradford’s “Inventory and the Cost of Goods Sold.” This is a true milestone for CALI. Congratulations to Professor Bradford on another great lesson, and to each of our lesson authors.
It’s getting easier to publish ebooks using freely available tools like Sigil and Calibre. What’s this have to do with your law school? Think open, ebook versions of your law reviews, journals, or custom course materials. All published in-house and at little cost. Review workshop requirements and reserve your spot.
We’re asking legal educators to consider adopting free, open eLangdell books and supplements for their Summer or Fall classes.
Consider the advantages of free, open education materials:
In February I wrote that every book is a website and we need to embrace the webiness of books. This led to some good discussion about the nature of books generally and casebooks in particular and about the nature of websites. The discussion helped clarify a couple of things in my mind.
The CALI Conference for Law School Computing’s agenda is starting to round out nicely. You can now review some of our accepted sessions, and today we’re very excited to announce our keynote speakers:
Recently there has been an explosion of advances in the ebook arena. New tools, new standards and formats, and new platforms seem to be coming out every day. The rush to get books into an “e” format is on, but does it make a real difference?
There’s still time to join our free online course, Topics in Digital Law Practice.
If you haven’t yet, register for the course and catch up by watching video of last week’s class (below).
Then join us live Friday at 2pm Eastern for special guest Marc Lauritsen‘s class on Document Automation.
Want to know what we’re up to here at CALI? John Mayer, our Executive Director, gave his annual “State of CALI Address” during the 2012 CALI Member Meeting at the AALS Annual Conference in January. You can watch it here:
We updated our Terms of Service on February 10, 2012. I know what you're thinking: "someone else telling me what I can't do on their site," right? Well, not quite this time. Read what we did and why we did it...
The stories are legendary – of great tech companies from HP to Google starting in garages.
The theme for this year’s conference is "Some Assembly Required."
We are constructing our future, here in the present. We have many excellent technologies, but figuring out how to use them to serve the educational, scholarly, professional and public service missions of law school is an ongoing challenge. This year’s theme is a double entendre meant to explicitly evoke that our future is not pre-packaged or purchased from a vendor – some assembly is required to make the pieces fit into our institutional cultures. (Read More...)