John Mayer
Executive Director
Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction/CALI
Website: http://www.cali.org
Blog: http://caliopolis.classcaster.org

Elmer Masters
Director of Internet Development
Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction/CALI
Website: http://www.cali.org
Blog: http://www.content4.symphora.com/

In the Spring of 2006, Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) launched the Legal Education Podcasting Project where over 50 law faculty signed up to either (1) record their classes for their students or (2) create weekly summaries. In this presentation, we will demonstrate the tools that we developed to make this happen, the support issues we encountered and the reactions from both faculty and students (via the forums and from surveys conducted).

The main blogging tool we used is called Classcaster (www.classcaster.org) which we developed as a combination of Asterisk, pLog (now LifeType) and our own glue script so that faculty could either upload MP3s or make a telephone call and leave their podcast as a logn voice mail. (One faculty recorded a 3 hour lecture this way!).

We also provided all 50 faculty with their own Olympus WS-100 digital recorder which they used to record their courses and their summaries. We will talk about how we came to making that decision and the pluses and minuses of using digital recorders generally in classroom podcasting projects.

This presentation consists of the following components.

1) An 8 minute screencast that provides background about CALI and its project and mission. This was created seperately so that people who are interested can view it and those that are not interested can go on to the other presentation materials.
2) A 20 minute screencast about the Legal Education Podcasting Project.
3) A self-contained wiki file (created with Tiddlywiki) that lays out some of the technical issues with links and explanations about the Classcaster software that we developed in support of this project.

In addition, we have provided two PDFs that contain the Powerpoint slides that were used to create the screencasts: What is CALI; Legal Education Podcasting Project.

Welcome to HigherEd BlogCon 2006, an all-online event highlighting innovative uses of blogs, wikis, RSS, audio and video podcasts, and other digital tools in academia.

We are looking for informational and inspiring presentations on the use of these Web tools from institutions and individuals. Presentations should be suitable for posting in a blog, with optional links to examples, images, video, screencast, or audio.

Institutions and individuals may submit proposals via the event wiki.
Want us to link to your blog, podcast, wiki, or other site? Drop us an email (higheredblogcon@gmail.com) with the URL and a brief description.