Spotlight Blog

CONGRATULATIONS CALI LESSONS! We know how much you needed some changes. But, you're always spending your time helping desperately stressed-out law students learn the law. That's why we rounded up the crew and decided to give you an Extreme Makeover: CALI Lessons Edition.

Today, 8/10/2011, is the day we officially unveil to the whole world your new look and features. We've made the new lesson viewer the default. Read on...

Watch out for big changes here at cali.org on Wednesday, August 10, when CALI Lessons will work on smartphones and tablets, have a completely new look, and add a host of new features. Because this Wednesday we officially send CALI users who push the Play/"Run Lesson" buttons to the new CALI Lesson Viewer.

A note on the LessonLink score tracking feature for faculty users:...

The fine folks at Fastcase just named the Fastcase 50: "the fifty most interesting, provocative, and courageous leaders in the world of law, scholarship, and legal technology." John Mayer, CALI's Executive Director, and Sarah Glassmeyer, our soon-to-be Director of Content Development, were among those honored. ...

Update 8/10/11: The new viewer is out of beta, it's now the default when you click the Run Lesson.

Law students with iPads, iPhones, and other tablets and smartphones, your wait is over. Today we made a beta version of the new CALI Lesson viewer available to all students registered here at cali.org!...

There is not a lot of hand-holding in law school. As an incoming 1L, a certain base level of skills and knowledge is expected of you. In order to make it in law school you should a) recall the very basics of the law - high school level civics stuff, b) be able to write free of many grammar and punctuation problems, and c) recognize what plagiarism is and know how to avoid it.

Coincidently (or not), we at CALI have three CALI lessons that deal with each. Respectively:...

• Where Does Law Come From?
• Punctuation and Grammar Basics for Law Students (part 2/advanced also available)
• Plagiarism - Keeping Out of Trouble

If you're set to become 1L this fall, get the CALI authorization code from a law librarian at your school and run through each of these lessons. Do it now, before the busyness of attending law school sets in.

If you work at a law school as a librarian or professor, think about assigning one or all of these lessons to your incoming students.

 

You can find video of yesterday's webcast on the new, smartphone-compatible on Youtube.

Faculty and staff already have access to the new interface. So watch the webcast video, run a lesson with the new interface, and let us know what you think!

Tomorrow, July 12, at 3PM eastern we're hosting a live webcast where we'll discuss the new CALI Lesson interface. Make sure you register!

Please join us as we demo the new lessons, explain the timeline for implementation, and answer your questions.

CALI Lessons are going to look a lot different for the upcoming 2011-2012 school year. Content of the lessons will remain the same, but the new-look lessons will include features you've been asking us about for awhile:

• CALI Lessons will finally work on tablets and smartphones like iPads and iPhones. They will, of course, continue to work on your computer.

If you're coming to the CALI conference in Milwaukee, please sign up by June 9 for the group outing to the Sausage Race at Milwaukee's Miller Park. As pre-race entertainment there will be several innings of a baseball exhibition between purported professional baseball teams: the Minnesota Twins and the hometown Brewers. The teams will resume their baseball match at the conclusion of the race. Video footage of a previous race below...

CALI conference attendees can hear the "Abbott and Costello of law school IT" (John, our Executive Director, and Elmer, our Director of Internet Development) discuss this year's CALI Conference in the recently posted Law School Tech Talk podcast, Episode 14.

Still time to register and join us for the conference in Milwaukee, if this thoroughly engaging duo piques your interest.

Richard Nash is an entrepreneur and innovative thinker in publishing, ebooks and a perfect choice as Keynote Speaker for the 21st CALI Conference. The theme of this year's conference is “UNBOUND” and Richard's experiences and activities in publishing guarantee that he will stimulate and inspire the attendees. I learned of Richard primarily through Twitter (@r_nash) where he has over 75,000 followers. Here is his bio from his website...

We love each of them equally, we really do. But there's something special about new CALI Lessons. They're adorable at that age; pure and uninfluenced by the mean and hurtful things stressed-out law students will eventually say about them during exam season. And, the new ones really come out in bunches this time of year (read more about our baby CALI Lessons or we'll think you don't like them and get some sort of complex about it...)

The Conference for Law School Computing (a.k.a. CALI Conference) was conceived to be a place where techies, law librarians and faculty could get together and talk about projects, applications, workflow, staffing and new ideas that had some technical aspect. The common theme was law schools + technology. 21 years ago, this was a small crowd (we had about 70 attendees at the first conference), but today, a lot of technology is moving into the woodwork – effectively...(Read on for more)

We at CALI were saddened to hear about the recent death of Professor Craig Callen. Craig was an author of several very popular CALI lessons in Evidence. By my counts, his lessons were used by law students tens of thousands of times over the past 8 years.