The 2006 CALI Conference for Law School Computing

Audience: Anyone
Technical Level: Medium

Hurrican Katrina, 9/11, floods, ice-storms, flu pandemics, electrical outages…the list of possible ways that your law school may be shut down is long. This doesn’t mean you have to lose an entire semester or endure major disruptions to your faculty and students’ lives. CALI is proposing the creation of a Law School Disaster Preparedness Plan where two web servers will be hot and ready to go with a variety of pre-installed software that law schools can use in case of small and large disasters. At the very least, this can be a single location to get information out to your constituency and at the most, it can be a place to deliver educational content in the form of web pages, blog posts, podcasts and video so that you don’t have to cancel an entire semester just because your building is unavailable for a couple of weeks. Ben Chapman and John Mayer will lay out the basic plan and then use the majority of the session to discuss details like what other services should be offered, how can schools pre-prepare for disaster and what are law schools willing to do about disaster preparation.

MP3: ChapmanLR4Sat1030.mp3

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Ben Chapman
Assistant Dean for Information Technology
Emory University School of Law

John Mayer
Executive Director
CALI

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The CALI LSEPP instance is currently located at http://els423.law.emory.edu/moodle/ . If you’re interested in this project, please take a moment to log in and register. If you have additional comments, send them along to ben.chapman@emory.edu or to jmayer@cali.org or post them to the general forum on the Moodle instance at http://els423.law.emory.edu/moodle/.

Slides from today’s presentation are located at http://people.law.emory.emory.edu/~bjchapm/cali06/

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

Gordon Russell will present an overview of a model of outsourced Administrative package (Sonis), Email (using hosted solutions and beta GMAIL for the organization), Library ILS (using EOS web and IBM self checkout and referring URL technology), Jotspot to build a wiki internet service), Exam4 hosted solution for student exams. The presentation will exam what has worked and what has not, describe what has been hosted locally and how the school has made use of newer burstable T1 to interconnect the scattered building that the school is temporarily making use of while supporting a growing student body that will number 600 students by the fall of 2006 and a faculty and staff of over 60.

MP3: RussellLR3Sat1030.mp3

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Gordon R. Russell
Professor of Law
Charleston School of Law

Audience: Low
Technical Level: All

Recently the web has shifted closer to Tim Berners-Lees vision of a collaborative web developed through community. Myspace, Blogger, Flickr, Technorati, and Wikipedia are applications that gain value through community interaction. Yet, for the most part, web sites of higher education have remained fixed, static repositories without much community interaction.

The panel will argue that embracing the social web is important for institutions of higher learning that desire to enrich collaborative learning environments. Our panel will review what is known about the online habits of the next generation of law students; what characteristics of new social web applications are "hot"; and specific ways in which these characteristics can be integrated into legal education. We anticipate lots of time for discussion and examples from the audience.

Nicholas Drury
Web Services Manager
Duke University School of Law

Scott Lenger
Web Editor
Duke University School of Law

PDF’s of our presentation slides will be available here early next week.

Audience:
Technical Level:

Washington College of Law has developed or implemented some cool tools to meet various needs of our users. Korin Munsterman and Greta Dawson will show the tools they use for: surveying users, off-loading website content updates to the administrative offices, offering a means for committees to share documents and information, providing users with tips and tools, how to guard against viruses and spam, updating faculty webpages, RSS feeds and blogs, creating custom podcasts, promoting the work of the SBA, providing outline databases for students and Westlaw webinars, and more.

We invite other schools to join us to show off the tools they use. People should contact Greta Dawson at greta@wcl.american.edu or Korin Munsterman at kmunster@wcl.american.edu if they would like to participate.

Greta A Dawson
Asst Director of Technology/Network Services Mgr
American University Washington College of Law

Korin Munsterman
Director, Clinical Technology and Information Syst
American University Washington College of Law

Audience: All
Technical Level: Samsonites

Using RSS feeds to distribute news, files, podcasts, and videocasts is one of the hottest new ways law school libraries can capitalize on the CALI Classcaster for promoting their resources and services.

Informing legal researchers/patrons in real-time about premium level content and indispensable legal information that can be found and is readily available in your library is quite easy once you start using one of the newest services provided by CALI to all its members: the ClassCaster server.

Faculty, librarians and staff at all CALI law school members can now open accounts on the CALI ClassCaster and create real-time distribution channels for ‘piping hot content� from their units.

This session will present WSU Arthur Neef Law Library’s approach to ‘piping hot content’ to its law faculty, law students, law library and law school staff via several ClassCaster blogs and �IntraBlogs� (ClassCaster blogs providing feeds to law library and law school Intranets)

This session will also present the collaboration between a law librarian and a law school faculty in producing weekly summary podcasts for the �Legal Education Podcasting Project (LEPP)�. A step-by-step overview of the hardware, software and ClassCaster account set-up will end the session.

MP3: SamsonLR5Sat900.mp3

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Michael Samson
Law Librarian
Wayne State University Law School

Audience: All
Technical Level: Medium

With the number of natural diasters that we have seen lately diaster recovery has become a very huge buzz word in the tech community. However many only think of the servers, many do not think of the workstation recovery.

In addition this session will introduce/refamiliarize the audience to various tools and software available for backing up workstatsions. It will include why one product may be better than another in ceratian environments.

At the Washington College of Law, Greta Dawson and Korin Munsterman inplemented backup solutions for workstations. Not all workstatsions are backed up with the same devices or software. Some of the solution is outsourced some in in house.

Solutions at WCL include 2nd copy and Connected by Iron Mountain.

More disk space please! Data must be preserved, it must be easily accessible, it must never be deleted. This presentation will explain how Duke Law School went from "out of disk space" headaches to SAN city.

The strategy of storage management is not just at a technical level, it is a conception in that the capacity and structure of data is a critical aspect for every network system. This is about the manageability of network files from MS Word, Powerpoint to databases, images and Email archiving.

Duke Law School went from ripping out several individual servers, to learning about SANs and mixing a closet full of CPU’s into an organized mounted rack. Data in virtually every organization continues to grow and storage decisions have become a vital role in security, recovery, and resource management.

MP3: DawsonLR4Sat900.mp3

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Greta A Dawson
Asst Director of Technology/Network Services Mgr
American University Washington College of Law

Becky Mangum
Network/Systems Manager
Duke University School of Law

Korin Munsterman
Director, Clinical Technology and Information Syst
American University Washington College of Law

Audience: Tech Staff
Technical Level: Medium

Each year, during the start of the new academic year we will have a new incoming class of law students (150 – 250) zooming by with newer and more complex computer problems. They can come in the form of a virus, trojan, worm, or spyware. Have you ever received the ever popular blue screen of death with a message informing you that Windows registry hive is missing or corrupted?

Working with limited staff, time and resources, what is your best option for fixing student laptop issues, installing software and running computer maintenance. The answer is to streamline the process and to automate the procedure.

In this session, we will discuss how to create the ultimate rescue CD that allows you to streamline the computer repair, maintenance, setup, and application installation process. We will focus our discussion on the two wonderful technology innovations: BartPE and AutoIt.

BartPE, Bart’s Preinstalled Environment is a bootable live Windows CD/DVD. BartPE supports various types of hardware and can be configured to use a variety of plug-ins to add applications, drivers or tools. For example, you can add the Firefox plug-in to make the browser available on the CD. When we build our BartPE CD’s we add the Windows XPE plug-in allowing BartPE to emulate the Windows XP environment, making it BartXPE.

AutoIt is a freeware BASIC-like language for automating Windows GUI and general purpose scripting. The two applications working in tandem can automate most of your end-user support tasks. For example you can automate applications and utilities to run automatically while under the BartXPE environment. Allowing you to boot off the CD and just walk away while AutoIt runs the utilities you automated.

* Additional materials including those from CALI conference can be found at http://law.asu.edu/it/bartpe

MP3: ChuLR3Sat900.mp3

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Wayne Chu
Technology Support Analyst Associate
Arizona State University College of Law
Wayne dot Chu at asu dot edu

Edward Garcia
Technology Support Analyst Sr
Arizona State University College of Law
Edward dot Garcia at asu dot edu

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

In the Spring of 2004, Fordham Law School started conducting its student course evaluations online. This proposed session will outline the development of the online evaluations application which was created in-house, the requirements and how the online process has affected the course evaluations. The session will also present the advantages and disadvantages of online student course evaluations compared to hand-written ones. The sessions will also include unexpected effects, good and bad, as Fordham Law School continues to conduct its online course evaluations on its seventh semester.

Mohyeddin Abdulaziz
Director of Information Technology
University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law

Marianna Balquiedra
Web Administrator
Fordham University School of Law