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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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Yes, yes, and yes. All of these features are available. Please review the Classcaster FAQ for details.
- 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.
- Yes. We know not everyone is interested in podcasting, but may like to try blogging. By all means, try Classcaster.
technorati tags:cali, classcaster, podcasting, legal_education
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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.
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MSFT Exchange Server 2007 Beta Available
Microsoft Corp. today announced availability of the public betas of Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007 and the new Forefront Security for Exchange Server. Exchange Server 2007 builds on the leading e-mail, messaging and calendaring server with new features for improved security, remote and mobile access, compliance management, and unified messaging. Forefront Security for Exchange Server helps provide advanced protection against viruses, worms and spam, and is the first product available under the recently announced Microsoft Forefront brand for business security products.Exchange Server 2007 beta 2 is available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/beta2, and Forefront Security for Exchange Server beta can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/forefront/serversecurity/exchange/download-beta.mspx.
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