Category: Closed Course

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Another Easy Way to Have Fun With Asterisk

This article describes how to build a Linux-based telephone answering machine using a low cost winmodem (softmodem) for the telephone interface. We describe how to install the drivers and libraries, and how to select and install the proper modem card. Our answering machine program is a couple of hundred lines of C code in a single file. If you’ve ever used a telephone you should have no trouble understanding the code.

A $10 Linux Answering Machine LG #120

Good as a followup to my talk at ALE last night.  This card, some old PC, and your in business.  You could build a Classcaster box with this.

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LII Launches Wex

Received an email this morning from my friend Tom Bruce announcing the immeadiate availability of Wex, a collaboratively-edited legal dictionary and encyclopedia built on the MediaWiki platform. Here’s a bit from the Wex FAQ:

What is Wex?
WEX is a collaboratively-edited legal dictionary and encyclopedia. It is intended for a broad audience of people we refer to as “law novices” — which at one time or another describes practically everyone, even law students and lawyers entering new areas of law. No doubt purists will be quick to point out the differences between a dictionary and an encyclopedia. We deliberately blur the distinction, as we are interested in providing objective, useful material in a range of formats.

Tom and the LII crew have seeded Wex with the lot of original content that was developed for the LII’s ‘Law About..’ legal subject area series. This looks like it will be another hit for the LII.

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MSFT Memos Point to New Direction

Dave Winer posted the text of a Bill Gates email and a Ray Ozzie memo laying out a broad strategy for changing the course of MSFT. At least we now see why MSFT bought Groove: it is what Gates wants to do with MSFT and they needed the shot in the arm of an outsider (Ozzie) to get things moving. Still there is a lot of danger in trying to stop MSFT and turn it in another direction. For example, a ‘services’ company doesn’t need buildings full of developers building complex systems in near isolation from each other, so there will be a lot of internal resistance to the this new direction.

And what does the ‘product’ look like? Will Windows become a basic OS, controling the physical computer with basic file management and a single app, somne sort of uber browser that open a window to the net and all of the glorious ‘services’ that MSFT will offer? Nice idea, but a hard sell.

Finally, Ray Ozzie’s memo is worth reading in and of itself. It offers up a blue print (or even a manifesto, depending on your POV) for moving forward as the net becomes more disruptive. We are moving toward a time when all of the technologies that have been trotted out over the past 10 years will actually work, but we need to put aside the ‘been there, done that’ attitude that tends to prevade these sorts of announcements. Yes, on a certain level, everything that is in these docs is old news, but only now are we moving to a position where all of this is actually viable.

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Dell Takes a Hit on Bad MoBos

But the motherboard replacement program will account for the bulk of the charge, or about $300 million, he said.The replacements are necessary as some capacitors on some motherboards shipped in its GX270 and GX280 systems failed after a period of months. The failure, which is evidenced by a PC that won’t boot, comes when the capacitors bulge and fail.

Dell Warns of Layoffs, Motherboard Replacements

There was a lengthy discussion on this very topic on teknoids back in September and folks were generally not happy with the situation.

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Explain this to me?

Library Stuff has a great list of Q and A sites.  You have a question, ask it there and maybe you’ll get an answer.  Most seem to suffer from the lack of quality control you’d expect.  John has thought about doing something like this using legal ed as a background.  “Would someone explain estoppel to me?”, that sort of thing.  Could work since focus would help with quality.

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More Classcaster Sitings

By way of correction, we are not using Shockwave to record podcasts.  We are embedding a Flash MP3 player object in the post to play the audio, but the recording is done using a telephone connection or by uploading locally recorded MP3s.  We are using the open source Musicplayer at the moment, but are developing our own player that is more tuned to playing single MP3s from a blog post.

RSS4Lib:: Shockwave Audio and Weblogs

The Neef Law Library blog at Wayne State University is using Shockwave audio files to record blog content.

Classcaster features an Asterisk PBX on the backend that allows us to record phone calls and then generate a blog post containing the MP3 recording of the call. Blogging services are provided through a modified version of pLog. Taken together these tools allow Classcaster to be a full featured blogging and podcasting platform.

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Facebook: A Social Network Success

On the reason why the first generation of social networks failed (as compared to MySpace and Facebook), he thinks that they have not focused on providing a set of utilities to their audience, they were merely about creating connections.

Software Only: The Facebook unplugged at Stanford ETL

This is a great article on the folks behind Facebook and how it is put together.  The above quote makes me wonder: how can CALI create a social network among law students, among law faculty, amng law librarians?  What utilites can we provide that would ignite a community and a social network?

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Podcasting Gaining Steam in Higher Ed

Students in the designated classes subscribe to the lectures by going to the CSS Web site and copying a link into their iTunes or a similar program. After that, the program automatically picks up each lecture after it’s recorded. The student simply goes to his or her personal computer, opens iTunes and either listens to it there or transfers it to a portable MP3 player.

uwnews.org | University of Washington News and Information

Add U of Washington to the growing list of colleges and universities that are using podcasting as a tool for distributing course material to students.  It makes a lot of sense.  Here’s my question: what about law schools?  CALI is trying to provide law schools with tools to do this, but uptake seems to be limited.  I’m not sure why folks don’t want to try this technology now before they start getting battered by students and faculty who want it.  It is a bit frustrating.

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CALI Calls It Classcaster

The Chronicle has a great article (5 day link) on what it refers to as ‘coursecasting’. Those of you who have been following along will recognize many of the things mentioned in the article as central to the ideas that led us to develop Classcaster. With Classcaster, law faculty are able to try out podcasting right now without having to go through all the hassle usually associated with trying something new. All you need to do is log in, dial up, and podcast.

The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Lectures on the Go
More and more professors are turning to iPods and other digital audio devices to record their lectures and send them to their students, in what many are calling “coursecasting.” The portability of coursecasting, its proponents say, makes the technology ideal for students who fall behind in class or those for whom English is a second language.