H2O at CALICon 2018!

I had the pleasure of giving a few presentations at this year’s CALICon conference, located at American University. The first conference I went to after starting at the Harvard Law Library was at American University, making this a homecoming of sorts: In 2014 I gave a 7 minute presentation on H2O at the LegalED conference; this year at CALI I gave two 1-hour long presentations on Perma.cc and H2O.

Discussing H2O was a natural fit for CALICon – “Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction” conference – given the H2O redesign’s focus on legal textbooks over other concentrations.

The session was fruitful, and I had the time to dig into a few different areas:

• The core precepts we considered integral to H2O as a platform: easy to read and access, easy to build a casebook on, ability to clone and remix others’ content, and ability to export the content as a potential print-on-demand text.
• Changes that we’ve made so far on the redesign, including ‘draft mode’ and the simpler user dashboard: while H2O’s old dashboard served as a collection-place of various items, H2O’s new dashboard serves as the launching point for users to access their casebooks. 
• What’s next for H2O: CAP integration, improved export, and other enhancements such as the ability to share edit access to your casebook.
• Finally, challenges to H2O use and adoption: the workload required of an instructor interested in creating a new casebook (and how to ameliorate that); the continuing interest in paper texts despite the digital option, and how to keep up support for non print-on-demand users.

There was an good back-and-forth on what sort of faculty are more or less interested in digital, open casebooks, as well as helpful feedback from CALI member Elmer Masters (who’s been a part of CALI’s related eLangdell project for some time).

Thanks to everyone that came out and shared their thoughts – and see you next year! -Brett