Opportunities for learning and professional development are quickly expanding as it becomes easier for everyone to develop and add their own content to the Internet.

Earlier this week Mitch Joel, President of marketing firm Twist Image, put together Pixelated, a free full-day online conference with some of the world’s leading speakers on the topic of how business is changing including Sir Ken Robinson, Seth Godin, Chris Anderson, Avinash Kaushik, Chris Brogan and many more. What is incredible is it is all freely available video from around the web, and he has posted it to his blog.

His . . . [more]

The Canarie/Orion summit will be held in Toronto in early November. It’s bringing together a truly impressive variety of speakers and appeals to infogeeks of all kinds. The Cloud Computing session grabbed my attention, as does the session on how Web 2.0 is changing teaching and learning. I see that Nora Young, from CBC’s Spark, is also on the agenda.

If anyone does attend this, I’d be really interested in a report back to the group…please? . . . [more]

The Canadian Bar Assocation’s Practice Link has a substantial and practical article by Luigi Benetton, “How to Secure Your Laptop Before Crossing the Border.” Benetton sets out ten steps you can and should take if you’re planning to travel to the U.S. with a laptop used in your practice:

1. Be Anonymous [… which is not a sure thing, hence… ]
2. Travel with a “Bare” Computer
3. Turn Off Your Computer, Early
4. Back Up Your Data
5. Use a Different User Account to Hold Sensitive Information
6. Partition and Encrypt Your Entire Hard Drive
7. Protect FireWire Ports
8. Store Data on Small Devices

If you’re a lawyer and you’re reading this, you’re unusual. If, by chance, you’re reading this on an RSS feed reader, you’re extraordinary. The 2008 ABA Legal Technology Survey Report is out, with results that confirm most folks’ general impressions:

[W]ebsites and e-mail newsletters are still the digital way that most at­torneys stay current with the news. A small minority reports reading blogs; but actually creating a blog is something the geeky lawyer down the hall—or, more likely, across town—is into.

RSS feeds—a technology that displays headlines from many sites on a single webpage, which greatly speeds the consumption of

The Sedona Conference Institute is offering the 1st Annual Sedona Canada Program on Getting Ahead of the e-Discovery Curve, to be held at the Boulevard Club in Toronto on October 23 – 24.

This information-packed Conference will include panels focused on (1) The Sedona Canada Principles; (2) Management of Electronic Information; (3) Cost-Shifting and Sanctions – Judicial Advice; (4) Legal Holds: The Trigger and the Process; (5) Multi-Party, Multi-Jurisdictional, Class Actions & Other Complications; and (6) Cooperation with Opposing Counsel on eDiscovery
Issues.

For a complete agenda, a run-down on the faculty, and a registration form, visit the Program . . . [more]

While we’ve had discussions from time to time about Second Life, but we missed telling you about a novel virtual workshop on innovative forms of library services through virtual worlds. The workshop explored the benefits and challenges of operating a virtual world law library program, leading to practical advice on how to create and present a program or topical resource within Second Life.

The website noted that a legal community is developing in Second Life: over 65 lawyers and firms have an official Second Life presence, the “Second Life Bar Association” has 200+ members, and the ABA has recently . . . [more]

Law library podcast The Law Librarian is set to continue recording next Friday, August 8th at 3 pm CST. The show is hosted by Richard Leiter and Brian Striman, and we first made note of it back in May.

Today’s guest is Margie Maes (some readers may know her as Margie Axtmann), Executive Director of the Legal Information Preservation Alliance, a committee of AALL. Margie is also an active CALL member; I first met her on a CALL Vendor Liaison Committee panel a number of years ago when she was serving on AALL‘s equivalent . . . [more]

The Library and Information Technology Association (LITA), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), conducted the Top Tech Trends panel at the 2008 ALA Annual conference in July. Consisting of ten library technology experts, including two virtual participants, the key topics discussed included:

• Open source software and APIs
• Increasing demands on bandwidth and infrastructure from streaming audio and video
• Growing usage of mobile devices
• Future of bibliographic control

The full audio of the Top Tech Trends panel is posted at the LITA blog. . . . [more]

If you’re planning to be near Kingston Ontario come August 7, 8 and 9, you might want to check out “copyright’s counterparts,” an academic workshop on the connection between copyright and creativity. From the “about” page:

In some forms and circumstances, copyright, the main reference point for the workshop, can encourage creativity, promote and regulate the circulation and preservation of knowledge and creative work, and ensure compensation for authors. But this workshop ventures in a different direction: it will invite scholars to compare the workings of a number of existing alternative systems, both ancient and emerging,

The ninth International Conference on Law Via the Internet will be held this year in Florence, on October 30 and 31, and is to be hosted by the Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques of the Italian National Research Council. The topics to be discussed are as follows:

* Free access to law: the situation in different geographic areas
* Legal aspects concerning management, creation and filing of digital information
* Legal blogs and wikis
* Open legal archives
* Quality of legal information available on the web
* Right to legal information as a fundamental right
* Semantic

The AALL’s Computing Services Special Interest Section (CS-SIS — which does come off sounding a whole lot like our wholly different CSIS, no?) is offering a free online 5-week course for law librarians to introduce them to the new web technologies. The course will take a couple of hours a week, and the weekly outline looks like this:

• Week 1: Blogs & RSS
• Week 2: Wikis
• Week 3: Social Networking and Second Life
• Week 4: Flickr & Social Bookmarking
• Week 5: Next Steps: Web 2.0 @ Your Library

You can get more info — and sign up — at . . . [more]

The Lawyer’s Weekly reports that the law society of Saskatchewan has introduced mandatory professional development for all lawyers in the province to begin in 2010. Apparently, in the current set-up, where attendance at annual conferences would keep liability insurance at a lower level, a lot of lawyers were prepared to pay the “fine” of higher insurance fees that truancy cost them. The explanation put forward is that they didn’t want to lose a day’s pay to attend.

One wonders whether (cough, cough…) modern legal research will be on the required curriculum. . . . [more]