This post will take around 176 seconds to read.
Explanation: I have worked with UK law teachers for several years and have vague ideas about examining their use of social media as a test case for a range of research techniques, hence I tend to haunt legal events to gather some data. See my Law Teacher 2.0 series (and list of related posts to the right).
So, CALIcon 2012. CALI is a sort of US pendant to BILETA on the legal education side - find out more in the CALI infographic. The conference is aimed at “law school IT professionals, librarians and professors”, the first two of which at least I would have thought would be heavy social media users. Surprisingly, however, the conference presentation felt pretty old school, with no nod to remote, no amplification and very little curation over the event lifecycle.
The conference website is in blog format. I’m increasingly pondering the utility of event blogs – while they can create momentum in the run-up to an event it can be difficult to locate specific information in a reverse chronological format. And without post-event wrap-ups it can look – well – a bit sad. All I’ve found is a (brief) official wrap-up on the CALI blog with the promise of videos to come.
Twitter? No Twitter widget for the @caliorg account or the #calicon12 hashtag. 439 #calicon12 tweets from 21-23 June (archive here; I assume the timings are from my time zone). That’s not a lot for a three day conference with 344 participants - maybe the hashtag was not sufficiently publicised.
So what have we missed? There are three ways of accessing the sessions – the schedule (scan) and sessions list (search) from the agenda tab, plus a tag cloud (browse). I like the idea of a tag cloud, but I wonder if the tags were purely user generated? There’s a creative tag, but this does not bring up three sessions on creativity, for example.
Some great sessions though – below are the ones which caught my eye from running through the tweets. Resources are/have been added in some cases:
- Evaluating presentation apps - Prezi, SlideRocket, Sparkol, XMind, Keynote, MindJet…who knew there were so many? See the slide (PDF file) with 10 factors for app selection.
- The Legal iPad revolution – links with the UK iLEGALL project. There’s a Prezi and I also picked up an iPads in education blog from the tweets.
- WordPress as CMS - slides | handout from the backchannel again, not added on the page
- Institutional repositories for law schools - sadly no further info, but in the light of #OR12 and my former work at UKCLE this sounds very exciting!
- Chrome apps for course websites - slides packaged as a Chrome app, very interesting concept I know nothing about…
Also from the backchannel I found two great reports from law librarian Janelle Beitz/@jbeitz, also possibly the most prolific tweeter: day 1 | day 2.
It would be interesting to see if this event ‘community’ overlapped at all with #lawtechcamplondon. There were some interesting tweets around the role of innovation and technology, and the plenary by @audreywatters on ed-tech and the three laws of robotics, with robots grading papers in MOOCs, would surely be of interest (lots of tweetage on that one, plus here’s a bonus link to Audrey’s slides).
To conclude, as so often, there’s a legacy of conferences (infographic) and no way of getting to all that great information post-event.
Best tweet:
very interested in instructional vids but also curious. isn’t reading always faster? #CALICon12
— Dan Ra (@jadanzzy) juni 21, 2012