Spotlight Blog

Learn about Classcaster - free blogging & podcasting for your class

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.

eLangdell Update

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...

Annual Meeting for CALI Members

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.

What Does Law.Gov Mean to You?

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.

Call for Nominations for the CALI Board of Directors

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: record your classes with us

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...

New Classcaster Feature: Use A Custom Domain

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.

Saving Your CALI Lesson Score

Whether you're tracking your progress for your own benefit, or whether your professor has assigned a CALI Lesson (especially with LessonLink), the only way to keep a reviewable, detailed record of your CALI Lesson usage is by using CALI Lesson's built in ScoreSave before you exit the lesson. This ScoreSave FAQ explains the process. Once you've saved your score, check out "My Lesson Runs." You'll see lots of details, like how you answered each question in the lesson.

Atlantic Mentions eLangdell

Alexis Madrigal of the Atlantic posted a story called "Reimagining the Stodgy Law School Casebook for the Digital Age" that discusses the Berkman Center's H20 project and links to a very early, alpha version of eLangdell (a version that may not much look like future working versions of eLangdell). Be on the lookout in all the usual places for more on eLangdell. There may be substantial news in the coming weeks.

Guess the Lesson, Win a Prize

We're calling it Wordle Wednesday. Every Wednesday we'll create a word puzzle - with the great site Wordle - using one of our lessons. Then we'll post it to CALI's Facebook Page. The first law student Facebook Fan to correctly post the title and link of the lesson we used for that puzzle, wins a prize. Here's the CALI Wordle Wednesday for 9/8/2010.

Using your casebook to find a CALI Lesson

Law students, have you ever been lost after having just read something in your casebook? Wish you had an easy way to find the CALI Lesson that covers what you just read? Well, stop wishing; that's actually a thing. For some casebooks, we can tell you which lessons match up with specific sections of the casebook.

Legal educators can now phone it in (literally) with Classcaster

Our free blog publishing platform for educators, Classcaster, has a handy - or handsfree, depending on how you roll with your phone - new feature. You can simply call a number and speak into your phone to create an audio file and post it directly your Classcaster blog.

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