Zeugma

Final reflections, CALI

Was it David Lodge who said that conference going is to the academic community what pilgrimages were to folk generally in medieval Europe -- you leave loved ones and home behind, go on journeys to unfamiliar places, meet new people, encounter new things, and come back home with an increased reputation for seriousness.

CALI, day 3, Building AltLaw.org, Stuart Sierra

Final session. I'm dropping in on a stream that I wasn't even aware of until John Joergensen at lunch pointed out that there's a conference stream on open-access to primary legal materials. Stuart Sierra, Columbia, is working on The Next WestLaw Killer, by his own admission. Clearly there are links to international projects such as AUSTLII and BAILII, but this one is different. Following on from the Project Posner (posting the Opinions of Posner on the web, around 2,000 of them), they put up other resources, and got into the game that way. Got cases from court web sites, building a bunch of PERL scripts to crawl the pages. Got about 100,000 cases from Appeals & Supreme Cts. Got help from Cornell LII and Justia.

CALI, day 3: RSS & Widgets: How to put your law school on iGoogle, My Yahoo, Facebook, and MySpace, Len Davidson

A widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within a ny separate HTML-based web page by an nd user. A Library widget box, accessing Blogger, Typepad, many other social software bits. Great idea, cinch to install, great access to Library too -- guess how many students at Penn State installed it? 310. Out of 70,000. 0.4%. Why? Len Davidson guessed that it wasn't cool enough to live on students' FaceBooks.

CALI, day 3: Stopping to think: reflections on the use of e-portfolios in legal education, Barton & McKellar

Karen and Patricia presented on their work in e-portfolios at the professional end of legal education in Scotland, putting the whole approach into a professional educational framework outlined by Lee Shulman and others. Slides here. They described how e-portfolios can be used for summative assessment or formative learning purposes.

Media migrations: reflections on CALI so far...

In her book Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance, Lisa Jardine has this passage, on the development of printing in northern Europe:

CALI, day 2: Case management systems for law school clinics

I'm at this session to see what it can say to me about SIMPLE and case management. The obvious use in education is CM and clinic - about a third of the audience are here from that background. Use of calendar entries, completed documents, case notes and timeslips -- rules-based calendaring, sort of workflow stuff. Examples include TimeMaters, Amicus Attorney, Abacus Law, Practice Master. Normally software is free, but development and training aren't.

Day 2, CALI conference: Building the Casebook (Gene Koo, John Mayer)

Session on the future of the casebook, headed up by Gene and John Mayer, based around the CALI e-Langdell initiative, built on Druple. One of the motives behind this is the attempt to create distributed authorship -- more, better, faster. Can it work?

Lunchtime, CALI day 2: SIMPLE case study

SIMPLE was given a good airing on the first day of the conference both at the plenary and also at a lunch time 'birds of a feather' session. Today we gave a third lunch time session, in which we took folk through a case study and showed how the tools were used. Since the session was fairly impromptu, the slides may not be up on the conference -- they can be accessed here. Patricia and Karen took us through the case study of the Civil Court Action, and focused on how one side, the claimant side, looked to the simulation designer. They then both took the audience through the process of building the defender side of the transaction, step by step.

A number of queries were asked re clarifying the toolset. Lots of comments on the simulation engine, particularly from Gene Koo. Good session.

Day 2, CALI conference: Patrick Wiseman

Attended Patrick Wiseman's session, 'The Rich Syllabus'. Consisted of an overview of the evolution of Patrick's syllabus Property I, from basic HTML in the mid- to late-nineties, through VLE use to Google Earth, podcasts, loosely-coupled pages etc (he even has an RSS feed to podcasts of the class meetings and whiteboard). It's rare that someone focuses on the evolution of educational resources in this way, and it was fascinating to see how a course put together by someone with an abiding interest in technology and teaching that Patrick has can be enriched over a period of time. But Patrick is moving beyond this...

Day 2: CALI conference

Meetings, meetings -- great to see folk, and talk about projects. Fascinating conversation with Conrad Johnson about the realist reforms at Columbia in the 1920s, which I discuss in my book, chapter three. While I was concerned to analyse the effects of Dewey and Thorndike on the reforms, and look at the line of curriculum development onwards, Conrad noted that the previous split earlier in the century had influenced the reforms post WW1. I hadn't really considered that in my chapter, in part because I didn't summarise the situation that far back; but Conrad has a point. Actually, his point raises the issue as to why curriculum reforms didn't happen more effectively at NY Law School. Without having researched it, I'd guess it was a resource issue as much as anything else. If, as Oliphant observed in a memo to Dean Stone, one of the motives underlying the reform movement at Columbia was to 'out-Harvard Harvard', writing different casebooks is not the answer, albeit the content is entirely different. In the same memo Oliphant briefly considers what is an early version of problem-based learning, but then dismisses it because 'this mechanical problem cannot be the center of interest in a study of the curriculum'. But the problem is neither mechanical nor peripheral. Dewey recognised this, as Tanner points out in her great study, and his Lab School at Chicago was founded on the principle.

Day 2 of the conference began with Joel Garreau. Interesting presentation, on the effects of technological change on how we think and live. Slides here.