Category: Closed Course

John pointed the CALI staff to this presentation done by Sam Ruby for IBM’s New Paradigms for Using Computers.  In a nut shell the presentation points out the ‘always connected’ nature of today’s teenagers.  Of course these teens are becoming today’s law students.  There was not a lot new for me in the presentation but it did bring into focus the some of the challenges we face in bringing technology to legal academia.

As time marches on  incoming law students are more comfortable with different communication channels having been raised in a world of plentiful bandwidth, cheap cellphones, and ready Internet access.  Unlike some previous technological innovations (word processing, email) the sorts of things that today’s new law students are accustomed to using are available right in the classroom.  That is the real challenge to legal academia and law professors everywhere: how to deal with the pervasiveness of the net in the world of today’s law students.  For us the challenge is to position CALI as a resource for both teachers and students in an environment where the net is always on and the students are always logged in.

We need to be able to provide teachers with resources to harness the possibilities of the pervasive net, to turn it from a distraction in the classroom to a useful teaching tool.  Certainly one way to keep students from surfing the web is to engage them and their computers, focusing them on the task at hand: learning the law.  At the same time we need resources for students that draw them into the new world of collegiality and professionalism that is the practice of law.  Tools that foster the social networking and collaborative skills  they will need to succeed in the practice of law.

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The Chronicle: 7/28/2006: Book 2.0 – Good article that highlights work being done at the Institute for the Future of the Book.  It mentions several subjects I’ve already covered including the MediaCommons and the new Rice University Press.  The aritcle mentions the coming academic dustup over the use of electronic works for tenure work.  This may be the most important thing here. 

Historically, especially in legal academia, any sort of electronic publication is discounted by tenure review committees.  CALI has seen this a number of times when we have had authors of our Lessons actually physically print their lessons and put them in a binder so that the work would get any review at all.  As more and more work moves into an electronic world this prejudice will need to disappear.  Some law professors are now beginning to think of their blog work as scholarship, though most recommend that junior facutly stick with more traditional work writing for law reviews to insure a favorable tenure outcome.  The law reviews themselves are experimenting with online versions of their publications and the day is not far off when the traditional forum for legal scholarship, the law review, in only available online. 

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