Search Engines

Audience: All
Technical Level: Moderately Technical, but not past the ken of most

Search engines help you find stuff, and customized search engines configured with your collections in mind are great tools for helping your audience and directing its attention toward important things on your web site. This presentation will discuss the architecture of search engines, and various means of using and configuring them so as to enhance the usability of your site. The SWISH-E open-source search engine will be used as the main source of illustrations, though most if not all of the techniques that will be discussed can be carried out in most popular software, and the discussion of indexing capabilities and search techniques will be sufficiently generic as to apply to most who are running their own engines. Moderately technical, but not past the ken of most.

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 search engine presentation.mm

MP3: BruceLR3Fr100.mp3

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Thomas Bruce
Director, Legal Information Institute
Cornell Law School

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Podcasting for Fun and Non-Profit

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

Dozens of law schools are experimenting with podcasting as a delivery mechanism for distributing classroom lectures and special events–i.e., repackaging pre-existing content (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Exploring the creative potential of podcasting as a medium of expression opens up opportunities to reach new publics in new ways. Find out how and why Jim tries to make law librarianship entertaining.

MP3: MillesLR1Fr100.mp3

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James Milles
Director of the Law Library
State University of New York – Buffalo School of Law

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Creating and Teaching a Law Practice Management Course – Going Beyond The Norm

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

Alumni wished they had it; recruiters demand it; students need it; faculty fight it. How can you successfully develop a practical course in Law Practice Management and meet the needs of all? Combining both practice management and business management into a single full semester course is one way. The University of Florida Levin College of Law has been teaching this course successfully for four years. It is always a full class.

MP3: AdkinsLR2Fr100.mp3

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Andy Adkins
Associate Director, Technology Services
University of Florida College of Law

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Lecture Capture as a Critical Learning Platform for Law Schools

Audience: Anyone
Technical Level: Low

Apreso Classroom is an affordable automated lecture capture and Web publishing system that produces online versions of the classroom experience for on-demand student review. Permanently installed in the classroom, and operating without attendants, Apreso Classroom is the first lecture capture system affordable and practical enough to be deployed campus-wide. Educational institutions the world over are increasingly recognizing the value of making course lectures available to students for online review. They enable students to improve comprehension and retention, professors to improve the effectiveness of class and office hours, and universities to boost facility and technology usage. However, most solutions for getting lecture content online are prohibitively expensive, difficult to use, and lack the operational simplicity required for university-wide acceptance. Anystream’s Apreso Classroom is an affordable automated lecture capture and Web publishing system that produces online versions of the classroom experience for on-demand student review. Apreso Classroom can be scheduled to start and stop automatically, removing the need for professors to learn to operate the system or change the way they teach. It automatically captures and synchronizes the professor’s voice with visual aids being projected in the classroom, and posts an interactive, indexed Web-based version of the lecture to university websites or course management system. Designed specifically for higher education, Apreso Classroom’s enterprise architecture integrates with campus-wide information systems. Permanently installed in the classroom, and operating without attendants, Apreso Classroom is the first lecture capture system affordable and practical enough to be deployed campus-wide.

MP3: JonesLR5Fr1030.mp3

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Mark Jones

Anystream, Inc.

Tim MacEldowney

Anystream, Inc.

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IT leadership skills

Audience: All
Technical Level: Suits not required

A good technology officer must make the institution more efficient and meet the expectations of community members and related parties through the adoption and intelligent use of technology. This session discusses what the technology officer must be, have, and do to succeed. It is geared to current and aspiring IT officers, library directors and deans supervising the technology function, and librarians, faculty, and staff members interacting with the technology officer. The speaker will draw from the experience of well-known technology officers and industry publications to paint an accurate portrait of a successful technology officer.

MP3: MolinaLR4Fr1030.mp3

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Pablo G Molina
CIO
Georgetown University Law Center

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Concord Law School’s Learning Management System and Flash Classroom Chat

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

Concord Law School is a business unit of Kaplan, Inc., which is one of the Washington Post Companies. Concord is a fully online law school that has been in existence for 8 years. Over that time, its Learning Management System (LMS) has evolved to encompass all aspects of the law school experience including synchronous and asynchronous learning, web based registration, exam and quiz taking, assignment submission, grading, community building, faculty/student communication, virtual library resources, and career services. Recently, the synchronous classroom piece of the LMS has been revamped using Macromedia Flash Technology. Craig Gold, Professor and Associate Dean for Technology and the chief architect of the LMS and Steve Burnett, Associate Dean for Business Development will do a live demonstration the Flash based synchronous classroom as well other aspects of the Concord experience. Attendees will be able to participate in the synchronous classroom using their own computers.

MP3: BurnettLR3Fr1030.mp3

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Stephen Burnett
Associate Dean for Business Development
Concord University School of Law

Craig Gold
Associate Dean for Technology
Concord University School of Law

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Legal Journals and Digital Publishing

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

While post hoc collections of journals like Hein Online and ad hoc collections of working papers like SSRN continue to grow, legal journals are by and large still only print enterprises. A great opportunity to share information freely and provide better, more usable and future-protected information is being squandered. The panelists will address why digitally publishing journals is in everyone’s interest, what technologies promise the most good for preserving born-digital information, and other considerations and caveats in digitally publishing journals, with reference to the real-life experiences at two law schools.

MP3: JoergensenLR1Fr1030.mp3

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

Wayne Miller
Director of Educational Technologies
Duke University School of Law

Gary Moore
Assistant Dean for Information Systems
Hofstra University School of Law

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Got Gamers? Law Students and Videogaming

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

In the book, Got Game (Harvard Business School Press 2004), the authors concluded that extensive video-gaming experience has significantly affected the generation of young adults now entering the business world, i.e., they are better addapted to business than the earlier generation, but they present management problems to older managers who don’t have similar video-gaming experience. Do law students have similar video-gaming experience? Could law students be afffected in the same way? Could such law students present a similar challenge to "older" faculty and staff members who lack similar video-gaming experience? Professors Ron Brown and Joe Grohman surveyed law students at Nova Southeastern University and on the CALI website searching for some of the answers. They will present and discuss their findings.

MP3: BrownLR2Fr1030.mp3

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Ronald Benton Brown
Professor of Law
Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad Law Center

Joseph M. Grohman
Professor of Law
Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad Law Center

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Keynote: Professor James Boyle, Center for Study of the Public Domain

Audience: All
Technical Level: Low

Learning By Design and other Fallacies: What Behavioral Economics, Serendipity and Procrastination Can Teach Us About Educational Technology

Behavioral economics has taught economists what non-economists had always claimed. People do not act as the rational actor model predicts. But behavioral economics teaches something more. There are predictable patterns in the ways that human behavior diverges from rational actor predictions. We routinely overvalue potential losses and undervalue potential gains. We rely on heuristics that "frame" problems in a manner that leads to well-understood skewing in our decisions. And so on. In his keynote address, Professor Boyle will argue that there are equivalents to these behavioral patterns in the ways we think about educational materials and technology: systematic biases in the ways that we understand (or faily to understand) their potential and to plan for their future. In particular, we systematically overestimate our ability to predict the uses of technology, and systematically undervalue the productive power of collective, common or "open" resources. Knowledge of these two cognitive biases, he argues, provides useful rules of thumb in designing new educational systems; if we cannot overcome our biases, we can at least learn to compensate for them.

MP3 of the plenary: calicon06PlenaryBoyle.mp3

Video (WMV format): calicon06PlenaryBoyle.wmv

James Boyle
William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law
Duke University School of Law

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Knowledge Management & Collaboration for Researchers

Here are some links to documents from my presentation. First is a list of the software packages we looked at. Next is the paper that I based the presentation on. Finally the slides from my presentation, complete with my notes.

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