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.

Many thanks to those of you who have written to tell us about your new media resources or applications. Today we are highlighting a few of these on this page. Feel free to share more applications by leaving a comment below.

Communications and Alumni

• Advanced Organizational Communication is a team blog by Walter Carl’s class at Northeastern University. This semester, the class is collaborating with John Cass from Backbone Media to better understand the reasons, conditions and factors it takes to make a successful corporate blog. Student involvement consists of helping to design questions for the interview protocol, conducting interviews with corporate bloggers, transcribing the interviews, performing a thematic analysis of the interviews, and contributing posts to the class blog that articulate the initial findings and what they learned from the project. Blog and description submitted by Dr.Walter J. Carl.
• “What’s hAPPening!” is the blog of the Appalachian Alumni Association (Appalachian State University) consisting of links to news articles, photos, alumni profiles, campus news and other information relevant to our alumni base. Submitted by Rob Robertson.

Library and Information Resources

• The FLICC/FEDLINK Environmental Scan wiki is a collaborative project to describe external trends and issues that could affect FLICC/FEDLINK’s strategic planning. We describe, annotate and link to societal, information use, library, publishing and government library trends that will help set the stage for a Business Plan being created by FLICC/FEDLINK, a Library of Congress-sponsored consortium of federal library and information centers (http://www.loc.gov/flicc/). Site and description submitted by Cindy Boeke.

Teaching and Learning

• The collegiate education experience becoming increasingly reliant on technology. Yet our high schools and universities have failed to educate their students with the means to take full advantage of the tools available. College v2 aims to arm students with the tricks, tips, and knowledge to put them ahead of the pack. College v2 will also post an occasional news story or photograph that will help you in you everyday life. My aim is to help you take over the world, or at least get out of taking 18 credits alive, and intact. Site and description submitted by Sean Blanda.
• Jason Heath, bass instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and Trinity Intenational University, maintains Jason Heath’s Bass Page, a blog for players and enthusiasts of the double bass and electric bass as a way to communicate with both both personal students and for the Chicago bass community in general, providing double bass concert news, lesson schedules, recommended repertoire, lesson summaries and assignments, and the like.
• Skate of the Web highlights new tools for learning by Dr. Antonio Vantaggiato at Universidad del Sagrado Corazón.