J. Saltalamachia on Using Classcaster and Podcasting In Her Torts Class

The written student evaluations from each class have been overwhelmingly positive regarding all technology, but the podcasting was a particular favorite. Students revealed that they listened to the podcasts on iPods as well as work computers. They could listen during their commutes, which in our urban environment frequently took several hours each day. One student told me that she was planning to listen to the entire set of podcasts while she was running the New York Marathon. I once even overheard several of my students bragging to students in other sections about how their podcasts were available after each class. Classcaster statistics revealed that my 2006 Torts pages received 4657 hits, while the 2007 page had 7662 hits. On occasion my page has been one of the most frequently used in the entire Classcaster system. Because I did not require a password, students at other schools were also able download the lessons. The lesson I recorded on “exam writing tips” before the 2006 mid-term exam was one of the most popular of all time.

Podcasts, PowerPoint, and Pedagogy: Using Technology to Teach the Part-Time Student

Be sure to take a look at the results of the survey on page 898, showing that 97.7% of her students listened to the podcasts, while 67.4% ran the CALI Lessons she recommended.

Prof. Saltalamachia makes use of Classcaster’s relatively unique telephone podcasting system to record her class summaries so that “[w]ith a cell phone and a laptop, I could do this anywhere without needing any help from the school’s IT Department.”

The blogs, with podcasts, mentioned in the article are here and here. The podcasts are part of an archive of nearly 20,000 (yes that is twenty thousand) hours of recorded lectures and summaries that are housed in Classcaster. The Classcaster podcasting and blogging system is available to faculty, librarians, and staff of CALI member law schools free of charge.

The Rocketbelt Caper: Free eBook, Print Too

“When three men set out on a quest to build a real-life Buck Rogers-style flying machine, their obsession with the Rocketbelt 2000 shattered their friendship and set in motion an astonishing chain of events involving theft, deception, assault, a bizarre kidnapping, a ten million dollar lawsuit and a horrifically brutal murder. From sci-fi to reality, this is the incredible true story of the amazing rocketbelt.” – Description at Feedbooks, where this gripping history from the annals of aviation tech is free.

via ‘The Rocketbelt Caper: A True Tale of Invention, Obsession and Murder’: Free in E and even P | TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home.

New Form Carolina Academic Press: Teaching Law by Design

Professors Michael Hunter Schwartz, Sophie Sparrow and Gerry Hess, three leaders in the teaching and learning movement in legal education, have collaborated to offer a new book designed to synthesize the latest research on teaching and learning for new and experienced law teachers.  The book begins with basic principles of teaching and learning theory, provides insights into how law students experience traditional law teaching, and then guides law teachers through the entire process of teaching a course. The topics addressed include: how to plan a course; how to design a syllabus and select a text; how to plan individual class sessions; how to engage and motivate students, even those tough-to-crack second- and third-year students; how to use a wide variety of teaching techniques; how to evaluate student learning, both for the purposes of assigning grades and of improving student learning; and how to be a lifelong learner as a teacher.

via Carolina Academic Press: Teaching Law by Design.

Form the introductory materials online it looks like a pretty good book.

Video, Audio Tags Scrapped From HTML5, Evil Prevails

The latest rewrite of the Web’s mother tongue won’t recommend the use of specific audio and video encoding formats that could make it cheaper and easier for people to distribute multimedia content.

The major browser makers have been unable to agree on an encoding format they will support in their products, wrote Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML 5 specification for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

via Browser vendor squabbles cause W3C to scrap codec requirement | Developer World – InfoWorld.

Just in case anyone needed reminding about whose side the browser makers are really on (that would be their own). Thing is this wasn’t some sort of complicated technical thing, just a matter of a bit of compromise that would benefit all users. Seems there’ll be none of that. Every vendor seems to have dug in until it just became too troublesome to resolve. We all lose. Sad.

Kaplan Expands in Atlanta

Education and career services company, Kaplan Inc., signed a lease Wednesday for a nearly 100,000-square-foot building in Alpharetta, which the company said would accommodate its growing back office functions and bring 75 new jobs to the northern metro area.

New York City-based Kaplan has occupied a 34,000-square-foot facility at 3750 Brookside Parkway in Atlanta since 2005. Its 344 current employees and will move to Alpharetta in September.

via Kaplan to move operations to Alpharetta – Atlanta Business Chronicle: .

links for 2009-07-01