The Association of American Law Schools’ annual conference is happening now in New Orleans. I’m in Iowa, and it’s cold. While I had no idea where my legal education would take me when I entered law school in 2008, my mind was filled inspiring opportunities after seeing what was happening on the tech side of legal education at the 2009 CALI conference. I met a lot of great people last summer, and have stayed in touch with many online. Most of them, and many more progressive and aggressive educators, librarians and technicians are in Louisiana this week. Wish I were there. I’ll be following #aals and #aals2010 on Twitter. Any attendees are invited to send some warm weather, great music, fabulous food, and/or job opportunities my way! :)
Today I got the following email from a salesman at ExamSoft, the company that makes the final exam software my school uses, SoftTest.
Hello Laura,
We met at the CALI conference, where we discussed some features that could be incorporated into SofTest that would be useful to students. You suggested that we add a keyboard shortcut to display the word/character count within an exam. Well, we have! I wanted you to be the first to know that the new version of SofTest released for the new academic year on September 1st will include the option of using CTRL+W to display the word/character count. Thanks for your suggestion and no there is no licensing deal for you forthcoming. :)
Bryant Weaver
Client Support Manager
I was disappointed at first that there wasn’t a big announcement on the ExamSoft website naming the ctrl+W functionality after me, but then I saw that their website doesn’t really outline any of the software’s functionality, and I felt better.
So all of you 1Ls who ctrl+W your way to a well-edited exam answer (I had two classes last semester that required word counts on the final), saving you two whole mouse clicks that it used to take to get you that same piece of information, you may not know it, but you have me to thank.
For all of my drum-beating about the glories of online social networking, the CALI annual conference last week was a welcome reminder of how nice it is to actually *meet* people. It was great to match real faces to Twitter avatars, and I made a point of getting to know several folks I’d never met in cyberspace. Face-to-face human interaction is good stuff.
I had the opportunity of moderating part of a group discussion of social media best practices for law schools. More than 50 law librarians, administrators and techies attended this session on behalf of their school, and not a single one of them reported having policy in place to guide them in using social media. Co-moderators John Palfrey, Sarah Glassmeyer, Denise Grey, Susanna Leers, Meg Kribble and Gene Koo collected input on how institutions are using and would like to use social media for everything from recruiting new students to publishing scholarly works.
We collected contact information from nearly 40 people who said they would like to work together in collecting data and crafting guidelines for law schools’ social media use. Preliminary suggestions for students, staff and employers of law students/grads are collected at http://smbp.laurabergus.com. Next steps include building an online community where the best-practices discussion can play out and coordinating schools’ leadership in drafting working documents. Stay tuned!
While at the conference, I also had the chance to go to two of Boulder’s fine restaurants, Cork (where we had a most entertaining French waiter who gave us no crap for ordering Australian wine) and Flagstaff House (where we sat on a covered and heated porch and marveled at a thunderstorm sweeping through the valley). We also wandered around Pearl Street (very reminiscient of Iowa City’s own pedestrian mall) and drove out into the Flatiron mountains. Beautiful part of the country.
CALICON09 is happening June 18-20 at Colorado’s law school in Boulder. CALI, known to every law school in the country (save a few, like mine), is a place where law students learn and professors share, using modern internet technologies. One of the sessions at the conference this year will be presented by Harvard’s Berkman Center’s Co-director John Palfrey, author of the recent book about “digital natives,” Born Digital. (Palfrey will is also the conference’s keynote speaker.) The session will focus on how law schools can get smart about social media, from giving advice to students to addressing serious privacy concerns. My law school’s assistant dean, Steve Langerud, and I were invited to join in the conversation and share our experience at the University of Iowa College of Law in creating a social media best practices plan. (See Berkman fellow Gene Koo’s blog post about the workshop.)
The hope is to leave the conference with a working model for a social media plan that can be implemented for incoming students this fall. The best case will be schools setting up students, instructors and employers with meaningful advice and tutorials for productive social media use. The worst case, short of outright rejection by nostalgic administrators, will hopefully be careful and introspective critiques of the pros and cons of social media use by students, administrators and employers.
Thanks to Austin Groothuis at CALI for noticing Iowa Law’s project and to Gene Koo for connecting us with Berkman in this process.
If you’re going to CALI, I would love to see you there! Check out the CALICON whiteboard for details about a tweetup on the Friday evening of the conference.
In case you missed my earlier posts on Social Media Law Student about this project, please check out Part 1 and Part 2 there.
I recently discovered that my school is one of only five ABA-accredited law schools that doesn’t belong to the consortium called CALI. CALI is the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction. Sounded right up my alley, so I looked a bit deeper and ended up feeling… pretty jealous. Thousands of law students – my peers across the country – have access to a steady stream of interactive lessons on many topics. Online, any time of day or night. From following CALI on Twitter I was introduced to more content– this free for anyone: webinars and online articles on seriously relevant topics like “Engaging Laptop Users” (for profs who know students spend more time on Facebook and IMing than on typing notes…) or using MediaNotes (a CALI program for tagging video for evaluation of mock trial, oral argument, etc.). Check out the Spotlights on their homepage for more.
Granted, CALI’s website looks like it was created in 1998 (oh, color scheme!…[though I should talk, since this blog's contrast is only readable on 1/2 of all LCD monitors]), and there seem to be two competing main sites? But what they’re doing and attempting is amazing: leading law schools along the path to adopting and utilizing modern technology in the classroom. Not for the sake of technology (like every PowerPoint presentation I sat through in college in the late 90s), but for the sake of more effectively delivering content and engaging participation with users who are eternally hunched behind their screens. I’m impressed and I hope my school and the other holdouts will see the value ($5,000 per year = <$9/student at my school) and give it try. We’re only about three decades behind the times, since CALI was incorporated in 1982…
