“Just say No to Outsourcing” – Developing an in-house info system to take care of your daily needs

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

At the University of Arizona Rogers College of Law we still use Westlaw, Lexis, Raiser’s Edge, Admit-M, examSoft and other major applications. But there are many other important needs and functions that are critical to the mission of our school that we simply cannot find anywhere to buy or, if available, they don’t quite meet our needs, too expensive or suffer from any other deficiency. We will explain our design concepts and development strategies and tools that allowed us to build easy to use applications that all have the same ‘look and feel’ to meet our daily needs such as:

Catalog Request (for prospective students)

Alumni Forum (browser interface to Raiser�s Edge)

Forums (our main class communications platform for posting class materials, class communications, etc.)

Class/Room scheduling/events calendar

Facebook/seating charts

Career Services � Job Postings/OCI

Evaluations/Exam numbers/Ranks/exam, paper e-filing

Faculty Directory/Publications/Scholarship/myEDM (Internet network storage access)

College Publications

Student email/info

Search engine

Library functions and highly dynamic websites

MP3: AbdulazizLR4Fr400.mp3

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

Erica DeFrain
Educational Technology Librarian
University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law

Paul G Kealey
Internet Developer
University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law

Garnette Knoll
Support Systems Analyst, Sr.
University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law

Lisa Wagenheim
Electronic Services Librarian
University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law

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WEX – An Online Legal Encyclopedia

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

WEX is an ambitious attempt to collaboratively develop an encyclopedia-like resource for law novices. This is not an easy course to steer — collaboratively-developed open encyclopedias like Wikipedia have sparked a lot of controversy, and it is far from clear that they are an unalloyed good thing. This session will discuss WEX, and the idea of open legal encyclopedias in general, from a number of different viewpoints. First of all, do the potential benefits of such a resource outweigh the drawbacks? Second, what happens at the intersection of wiki-like software (such as MediaWiki, which WEX uses) and educational legal content? After all, WEX works as a species of content-management and authoring system that can aggregate little bits of new, used, and repurposed information in new and interesting ways.

This session will be of interest to wiki geeks, online-resource developers, and others interested in collaboratively developing legal-education materials (including library materials like pathfinders and research guides).

Here is the FreeMind map that goes with this presentation. You can get the appropriate software to read it at http://freemind.sourceforge.net/

The file is here: CALI Wex presentation.mm

Thomas Bruce
Director, Legal Information Institute
Cornell Law School

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Life of a Law Student:: Student Podcasting

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

As an incoming 1L, Neil Wehneman had a simple (and some would say naive) goal: capture as much legal knowledge as he could, and make it freely available to as many people as possible, both as to cost and copyright. The Life of a Law Student podcast was born.

Life of a Law Student relies on Fair Use to assimilate into audio the public domain caselaw along with knowledge gained from textbooks, professors, hornbooks, and other sources. Since that first day of class, Life of a Law Student has been listened to by thousands of current and incoming law students across the country, run into friction from some existing law professors, and been featured in the New York Times. The podcast is currently focused on bringing on additional students in order to "franchise" the idea across law school campuses and across the world.

This session will focus on the policies and goals of Life of a Law Student, the Fair Use argument underlying the methodology, and how this type of podcast fits into a holistic legal education experience.

MP3: WehnemanLR2Fr400.mp3

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Neil Wehneman
Student
University of Cincinnati College of Law

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Mixing Digital Forms for Learning and Teaching

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

Law schools serve both students and teachers. So, for law schools and for West, ripping, mixing, and learning necessarily expands to include teachers using digital forms to structure (to some extent) what and how they want their students to study and learn. This presentation mainly demonstrates a mix of digital forms available to teachers for teaching.

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Justin Hummel
Manager – Business Development & Academic Technologies
Thomson West

Steve Nickles
C.C. Hope Chair in Law and Management
Wake Forest University School of Law

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Collaborative Building Scheduling

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

Scheduling your Law School’s classes, events, exams, make-ups, meetings, etc. can be a daunting task. While there are many commercial solutions for handling room and building scheduling, they are expensive, and often times inflexible. Efficient building wide scheduling requires a multi-user, permissions based approach in which specific departments and users can be delegated the rights to schedule assigned rooms and calendar categories. It also requires a public web based interface where faculty, staff, and students can view the entire school schedule at a glance. An intuitive and responsive web based interface utilizing the latest web technologies, is just icing on the cake. The University of Pittsburgh School of Law has developed, in-house, a flexible scheduling solution which addresses these requirements. Come for a demonstration of the application and a discussion of the underlying implementation.

MP3: KurpiewskiLR4Fr230.mp3

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Matthew Kurpiewski
Assistant Manager of IT
University of Pittsburgh School of Law

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Implementing tools for collaboration across boundaries

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

In the last 12 months, the Marquette Law School Media and Technology group has adopted several software tools and several administrative practices to promote collaboration. Technologists provide the foundation and framework, librarians provide the subject expertise, and professors reap the benefits. We are using both commercial software products and free web services. We have combined social bookmarking & RSS to identify and distribute relevant content. We have also turned our blog into a collaboration point for technology staff with different responsibilities and reporting structure.

Products discussed: Microsoft Sharepoint, Microsoft Corporate Communicator, del.icio.us, furl.net, airset.com, WordPress, RSS Bandit

Marquette tech blog – http://law.marquette.edu/blog/index.php

Marquette Tech del.icio.us – http://del.icio.us/mulaw_tech

Marquette Tech furl.net – http://furl.net/members/mulaw_tech

MU Law Librarians furl.net – http://furl.net/members/mulaw_library – faculty tags are "private" at this time.

MP3: NelsonLR3Fr230.mp3

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Steve Nelson
Technology Manager
Marquette University School of Law

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Collection Development through Data Harvesting

Audience: Library folks
Technical Level: Low

Much is being written lately about both the long term risk to libraries in relying on vendor supplied online resources, and about the loss of valuable government information due to the GPO relying on online availability. In this session, a solution to both problems will be presented.

The presenter will show how the Rutgers-Camden Law Library is developing and maintaining an electronic collection of government document materials through the use of wget, and other simple tools that can automate process of collection development. Practical discussion will include: 1. selection of materials; 2. the use and features of wget; 3. techniques for automating the collection process.

MP3: JoergensenLR1Fr230.mp3

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John Joergensen
Librarian
Rutgers, The State University of NJ, Camden

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Comparing Two Models of Distance Education

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

Distance education comes in many different styles. In addition to synchronous and asynchronous methods, there is also the medium used for transmitting the class, such as video-conferencing, web-based, or a combination of both. Each of these present different advantages and disadvantages. This session will look at the considerations one should use in deciding what is the best distance learning method to use for a class. The focus will be on synchronous video-conferencing and asynchronous web-based courses.

MP3: PodgorLR2Fr230.mp3

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Ellen S. Podgor
Associate Dean of Faculty Development & Distance E
Stetson University College of Law

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Donuts or Stars: Centralization v. Decentralization in IT Management

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

This session explores the issue of centralization (a.k.a. outsourcing) v. decentralization of IT and provides real life examples of what works and more importantly, when to proceed with caution. Are most IT services now a commodity that can be centralized with little impact to service levels or does in-house decentralized hardware, software, and people make for a unique synergy that simply works better every time. You don�t want to reinvent the wheel for services like email, file storage, network printing, web hosting, admin system, help desk, active directory, etc., if you can find lower cost, higher quality alternatives that work in a law school environment. Do not be caught off guard, join the discussion on this culturally unique decision that explores the advantages and disadvantages of several centralized options that you may soon be facing at your law school.

MP3: DurbinLR5Fr100.mp3

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Michael P Durbin
Director Information Technology
St. Louis University School of Law

Deb Ranard
Director, IT
Capital University School of Law

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VitalSource

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

Digital content is in demand. Call them ebooks, digital books, or electronic files – as laptop use continues to increase at law schools – students have begun to search for digital content that is portable, searchable, and reasonably priced. VitalSource has been working with both Thomson West and Wolters Kluwer for over two years to develop these types of content solutions for law students. This lecture will explore feedback gathered from both students and faculty about digital content, the current challenges involved in delivering the content to students, and the features and benefits of the current version.

MP3: PooleLR4Fr100.mp3

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John Poole
Director Higher Ed Sales
VitalSource

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