Category: Closed Course

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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. 

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Where’s My Pod?

A study done by Bridge Data suggests what many of us already suspected: Podcasting is popular, but it has little to do with the "pods," that is, the iPods and other portable players for which "Podcasting" was supposedly born. The study concluded that 80 percent of podcasts are either listened to and/or watched on a PC, or simply deleted.

Podcasts don’t cast into the Pod

Interesting article raises a good question: what is a podcast? and why is it a podcast?  Results of the CALI mid-semester podcasting survey of Classcaster users turned up much the same with 3/4 of students listening to podcasts of course materials on their PCs and not on portable MP3 devices.   So everyone buys into the Apple marketing of iPods everywhere, but in reality it’s jsut regular old computer users listening while they work or surf. 

 

 

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If You’re Wondering Why Feeds Seem Chaotic…

Behold! This list is pretty much all the ways you can read MAKE via RSS, OPML/reading lists, favorites – if you’re into making things as much as we are – this will keep you up on the latest in the world of Makers.

MAKE: Blog: MAKE XML, RSS, OPML, reading lists and more…

Take a look at the page, it’s just amazing.  And it highlights a serious issue with RSS, Atom, OPML, and feeds generally: a startling lack of standards.  This just one big list of stuff with a variety of icons and links, no explanation as to what any of it means.  Not very useful and not very helpful.  Try this: one feed, say RSS 2.0, let users decide where and how to subscribe to it.

 

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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.

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Online Learning Project Shuttered

The AllLearn project, a consortium among Oxford, Stanford and Yale Universities to research online learning, has come to a close. We offered 110 online courses from Oxford, Stanford, and Yale Universities to over 10,000 participants from 70 countries during the past five years. As we looked to the future, the cost of offering top-quality enrichment courses at affordable prices was not sustainable over time.

AllLearn – Alliance for Lifelong Learning

Well, this is a bit sobering. One does wonder what the cause of the failure was.  Perhaps this market does not really exist. It is important to note that the consortium was offering enrichment courses, not credit courses or training per se.

 

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L&C Launches Open Access Legal Scholarship Site

BoleyBlogs! » Open Access Legal Scholarship at Lewis & Clark- Paul L. Boley Law Library – This follows along after last year’s Open Access Law program.  One would hope that this may catch on, But I’m not sure the critical mass is there.  Law faculty are not so concerned about open acces to their scholarship, it seems to me.  Perhpas if there was an actual authoring platform that encouraged open Access to the materials being created, this would pick up steam.

 

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Would Langdell Have Been A CALI Author?

Good question.  I found this article which does a good job
of describing Christopher Columbus Langdell’s contribution to legal education in America.  I
thought this quote was particularly interesting:

"Langdell’s innovations initially met with enormous resistance. Many
students were outraged. During the first three years of his
administration, as word spread of Harvard’s new approach to legal
education, enrollment at the school dropped from 165 to 117 students,
leading Boston University to start a law school of its own. Alumni were
in open revolt."

It’s hard to imagine today someone changing the way law is taught to
such an extent that the school loses a third of its students, but they
stick with it until it becomes the standard.  In a way, I think, CALI is
heralding such a sea change, but instead of it being focused on a single
school, we spread the risk out across the entire consortium. Lessons,
Classcaster, and, soon, eLangdell, taken together represent a change
every bit as challenging and revolutionary as the introduction of the
case method except that the changes introduced by CALI will not take 40
years to become the standard.
 

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Talk to the Ether

Get your free Ether Phone Number. Set your rate. Set your hours.Your phone only rings when people pay to talk to you.

Ether: Earn money selling what you say.

Intriguing concept.  I do wonder about how this would really work though.  Is there a feed back system, some sort of karma, reputonics, something that helps me find just the right person to talk to.  I wonder if I could replicate something like this with Skype and Ebay?  And how does this scale for the seller?  I only have so much time to talkand it is a finite amount of time.  Of course if I get really good I could just keep raising my rates.

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