Classcaster: What's the Catch?

At this year’s CALI Conference for Law School Computing® and as a result of John’s talks at SubTech 2005 and AALS I’ve been fielding a lot of questions about Classcaster. Most take the form of something like “I’ve tried Classcaster and it really seems to work great but what about…” and then I’m asked about things like “is it really free”, “will it keep running”, “does the telephone interface always work”, “is this something CALI will continue to support”, “is there a limit on disk space” and so forth. I’m going to answer these questions and more in this post and then spread it around so folks have something to reference.

The format will be a sort of mini FAQ. There is a support FAQ for Classcaster here, but it doesn’t clearly address some of these basic questions. Here goes.

  • Is Classcaster really free? Will it stay that way?
  • Yes, Classcaster is available as a free service to the faculty, librarians, and staff of over 200 CALI member schools. Classcaster has quickly become a core service of CALI and as such will remain free of charge to members for the foreseeable future.
  • Will Classcaster continue to be supported by CALI?
    • Yes. As I mentioned above Classcaster is key part of our plans for the future and is a central service provided by CALI to our members. As such we will continue to support Classcaster into the future.
  • Is there a limit on disk space a person or school can use on Classcaster?
    • No, at this time we are not limiting disk an author or school can use on Classcaster. We monitor disk space closely and the system is expandable enough that we can easily add disk space as it is needed. Podcasts, posts, and other documents stored on Classcaster will be available there into the future.
  • Does the telephone recording to podcasting feature really work consistently?
    • Yes. Most of John’s interviews with the faculty podcasters of the Legal Education Podcasting Project were recorded using the telephone recording and auto-podcasting features of Classcaster. For the most part the system performed well. Of course there is only one phone line at the moment, so you may get a busy signal, but you can just try again later. We are looking into expanding the number of available phone lines on the system.
  • I would really like all of the faculty at my school to use Classcaster. Will the system support all X faculty (where X is some number)?
    • Sure. The Classcaster blogging system should easily support several hundred bloggers and podcasters. As the system grows we will expand its storage and processing capabilities to make sure that it will provide your communities with access. The telephone to podcast part of the system has only one phone line at the moment, so you may get a busy signal, but you can just try again later. We are looking into expanding the number of available phone lines on the system.
  • Can I customize Classcaster’s look and feel, invite colleagues to contribute to the blog, and have more than one blog?
    • Yes, yes, and yes. All of these features are available. Please review the Classcaster FAQ for details.
  • Can I create a blog for our Library? Admissions Office? Career Services?
    • Yes. Folks from member schools are free to create blogs so long as the blogs are related to the function of the law school. Blogs of a personal nature are beyond the scope of Classcaster.
  • I’m not really interested in podcasting, but would like to have blog, may I use Classcaster?
    • Yes. We know not everyone is interested in podcasting, but may like to try blogging. By all means, try Classcaster.

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    Blogged with Flock

    Chronicle Leads With Challenge to The Book

    The Chronicle: 7/28/2006: Book 2.0 – Good article that highlights work being done at the Institute for the Future of the Book.  It mentions several subjects I’ve already covered including the MediaCommons and the new Rice University Press.  The aritcle mentions the coming academic dustup over the use of electronic works for tenure work.  This may be the most important thing here. 

    Historically, especially in legal academia, any sort of electronic publication is discounted by tenure review committees.  CALI has seen this a number of times when we have had authors of our Lessons actually physically print their lessons and put them in a binder so that the work would get any review at all.  As more and more work moves into an electronic world this prejudice will need to disappear.  Some law professors are now beginning to think of their blog work as scholarship, though most recommend that junior facutly stick with more traditional work writing for law reviews to insure a favorable tenure outcome.  The law reviews themselves are experimenting with online versions of their publications and the day is not far off when the traditional forum for legal scholarship, the law review, in only available online. 

    Blogged with Flock

    Yahoo! Messenger Gets Plugin API

    There are two categories of plugins. Conversation Plugins interact with the chat environment itself. For example, with the event finder plugin, two people chatting can bring up a Yahoo map and find pegged restaurantes, venues, etc. to discuss them. Another plugin that I saw demo’d was the “avatars space” where users can interact in a virtual environment using avatars, pull in flickr photos and othe props, etc. The other type of plugins, Personal Plugins, pull content directly into the IM client itself. Users can add news, Yahoo 360, calendar plugins, etc. The idea is to pull core web services into the IM client, avoiding the need to open a browser.

    TechCrunch » Blog Archive » Yahoo Opens IM to Developers

    So, can we run CALI Lessons inside of Messenger? The idea would be intriguing since it would allow a certain level of collaboration between students. Or imagine a prof walking a student thorugh a Lesson while chatting (text or voice, remember Y!M has VOIP built-in). Or we pull content through the WebAPI of eLangdell. Something to look into.

    Blogged with Flock

    Does eLangdell = Textbender?

    Textbender is a distributed system of collaborative writing, with a basis in genetic theory. As a distributed system, it differs from the typical centralized approach (e.g. of a Wiki) where writers push contributions to a single, central copy of the text. By contrast, textbender has no central copy; instead, each writer has a separate copy of the text, and selectively pulls contributions from other writers. As a consequence, there are multiple variations of the text. Collectively, the text has spatial diversity.

    freshmeat.net: Project details for textbender

    This is crazy:)  From a quick look Textbender seems to have a lot of the authoring features that I’m looking to build into eLangdell.  Basically it lets you take an existing document, slice, dice splice, and create your own version.  Further you can include pieces of other documents in the repository.  I’ll need to run the code to see how it works. 

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    Online Courses Required in Michigan. What About Law Schools?

    This morning Jennifer M. Granholm, the governor of Michigan, signed a bill that will require all high-school students in the state to take at least one course online before they can graduate. This is apparently the first such requirement in the nation.

    The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Michigan Requires Online Attendance

    The thinking behind this is that students are likely to see online education and traing in college and the workforce so this prepare them for that eventuality.  This is a reasonable assumption as the use of online educational resources spreads.  What I wonder about is law schools.  In the nearly 4 years since the ABA added standards for distance education (approved August 2002) very few schools have added DE courses to their cirriculum.  Why doesn’t every ABA accredited law have at least one course offered using DE?  I can think of any reason beyond some sort of academic inertia.  Certainly every law school, especially every CALI member school, has the tools available to put one 2 or 3 credit, upper level course online and offer it to their own students.   Of  course it may be that all this is happening in a space I don’t see.

     

    Web-based Note Taking

    mynoteIT is an extremely powerful utility for any student at any grade level. You can store all your school information in one place, and access it anywhere in the world instantly.

    mynoteIT

    Uses PHP, some AJAXy stuff thrown in.  Very straight forward, clean feature set.  Student and class centered.  Groups are created using school/class/teacher/time boundaries.  Includes basic calendaring.  Editing is done in a basic box using FCKeditor (my personal fav, BTW) with an AJAX wrapper.  There is some stuff to glean from this:)

     

    Publishing a Book With RSS

    RSS4Lib: RSS Book Publishing Timeline – This reminded me that you could use RSS to handle the time release of complex material like a casebook, or course material generally.  Profeessor would create the feed and add material to it based on the syllabus.  Students would subscribe to the feed and receive the material in their aggregator on a day determined by the professor.  Thie needs to be an eLangdell feature.  Prof creates online syllabus, adds course material to the syllabus, cases ,statutes, etc. for reading.  Dates are selected to release the material via RSS feed.  Students get an aggregator and subscribe to the feed.  The aggregator grabs the materials on the selected date and makes it available to the student.  No need to visit a website, follow a blog  or anything.  Coolness.

     

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    More Sony Reader Info Emerges

    Sony inked a deal on Monday to sell its new Reader device in Borders bookstores across the United States, including some airport locations. The Sony Reader, demoed at this year’s CES conference in January, offers a high-contrast, high-resolution (800×600) electronic paper display for viewing e-books and text documents.

    BetaNews | Borders to Sell Sony Reader Device

    Borders will also sell prepaid cards for the Sony’s CONNECT service where e-books and such can be purchased online.  The reader will also display PDF and JPEG files.  Internet material such as RSS feeds will be available through CONNECT.   This is from the Sony website:

    The Sony Reader isn’t just about reading eBooks. Using
    the included CONNECT™ Reader PC Software, you can easily transfer
    Adobe® PDF documents, BBeB Book, and other text file formats to the
    Reader. Seamlessly search, browse and download user-selected RSS Web
    content from CONNECT™ Store to the PC and transfer to your Sony®
    Reader. Take along your favorite Web newsfeeds, blogs and more to read
    where ever you are.

     

    Sounds like a text-centric version of iTunes, which is OK by me.  Of course, I can also run Linux on my iPod or just use it as a giant disc drive and get at data w/o iTunes.  One would hope Sony would have learned its lesson with the Libre and make the Reader more accessible. 

    Launching learnthelaw.org

    After a few months of work we’re going to launch www.learnthelaw.org as a site where pre-law students can purchase a one year subscription to the 1L CALI Lessons.  The site is live now and announcements will be going out on Monday morning.  For $50 pre-law students will have one year of access to the very same material that 1Ls across the country use to learn property, torts, contracts, legal writing and more.  We will also be adding more information about going to law school and such that is of interest to pre-law students.

    For the technically inclined, Learnthelaw.org is powered by Drupal using a couple of Paypal modules and a bit of custom coding to interface with the CALI Web API. Using Drupal allowed us to develop and delpoy the site in weeks instead of the 6 months to a year we would typically spend custom building something.