Digital Migration

To paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes’ famous statement, the law should be stable but should never stand still. The same also could be said of legal education. Even though the history of the law goes back centuries and law schools are themselves steeped in tradition, law schools must make room for progress—both literal, physical room and pedagogical room. As IT director for the law school Jim LaPointe explains, the imperative for the School is to enable “the best of the traditional ideas in a world of diverse and evolving technology options.”

If you’ve spent any time at all recently at the School of Law, or looked at the brochures, or visited the Web site, you probably have noticed how technology has changed the look of law school. Students now come equipped with a silver (sometimes black) folding typewriter-like appendage called a “laptop computer,” and in the classrooms professors look up into row upon row of their students’ strange insignia—“IBM,” “VAIO,” “Dell” or sometimes just an apple that glows white. All jokes aside, the 21st century classroom is an inevitable product and a reflection of the way we live now, and the story of how the law school meets the educational challenges created by multimedia technology and the increasing technological savvy of the student body is an evolving one. It’s also a story of how technology gives faculty more options in how they choose to teach the law.

Ebay, for example, might not immediately spring to mind when one thinks of a law class, but for Professor Camille Nelson, it’s just one of several web sites and multimedia tools she employs to teach her law classes. She says that technology supplements existing methods of teaching and testing. “I can get more information to students, which thereby enables me to cover issues more in-depth. The web sites and media provide a foundation that the class uses as a springboard to delve into more sophisticated issues.” The illustrative and educational possibilities of video clips, web sites like craigslist.com and the online version of media such as The New York Times offer her class novel ways of examining whether “traditional contractual principles and doctrines hold up in a forum that was never even imaged by the original lawmakers.” 

Professor Mark McKenna says that he uses PowerPoint in every class, “primarily to display relevant statutory text, post hypotheticals, to display audiovisual materials relevant to the cases, and to structure discussion about particular cases.” He gives students “concrete examples of what the cases are about, particularly in the area of intellectual property, where the cases often are about products or creative content that we can evaluate in class.” Students can download the PowerPoint slides from his TWEN site after class if they want to review them. (Produced by Westlaw, TWEN is a course management tool in the form of an electronic site where faculty post course material for students to access.) While PowerPoint alone is not exactly “bleeding edge” technology, consider the implication of students being able to get class materials whenever, wherever they want: Learning the law is no longer dependent solely on a classroom or a library or a even a book—all the elements of what is traditionally considered “school.”

Not all faculty are fans of having technology in the classroom, in particular students taking notes on their laptops. There are some aspects of learning the law that have nothing to do with hardware and everything to do with establishing personal relationships with clients. Professor Barbara Gilchrist, who teaches Judicial Ethics & Court Procedure and Lawyering Practice, is one of a number of law professors nationwide who believe that laptops have become a disruption, so she doesn’t allow them in her classes. And while she understands that law schools must remain technologically competitive and facilitate students’ desired mode of learning, she feels that technology might put undue pressure on professors to be more “entertaining” in class in order to compete with the myriad dazzling temptations students can access on the Internet. “They’ve become a distraction, not a useful tool. In practice, you’re not going to be checking e-mail during opposing counsel’s argument.” It’s one thing if someone isn’t paying attention during class, but it’s quite another if that student distracts those behind him or her by the progress of an online solitaire game or videos on YouTube. Even LaPointe would like to “restore the visual connection between student and professor” because laptops literally divide the space between them.

“Students are becoming stenographers. They’re not hearing and thinking; they’re just typing the words,” Gilchrist says. What do her students think of Gilchrist’s policy? When she asked them, they let her know—politely, diplomatically, but in no uncertain terms—that she is behind the times. Some of the arguments for the use of laptops in law classrooms cut both ways, though. Associate Dean for Academic Programs Dana Underwood says the fact that students are habituated to learning and taking notes on their laptops is precisely why it’s sometimes better that they put them away for law school. “Law school classes are process-oriented. It’s a different kind of approach to learning than what they’ve experienced before.”  

Professor Frederic Bloom, whom the students voted Teacher of the Year in 2007, says that while he is not “allergic” to technology, he nonetheless opts not to use it to teach his Civil Procedure and Federal Courts classes. His approach to teaching is influenced in part by methods that engaged him and were the most enjoyable and effective when he was a law student. For example, he does not present PowerPoint slides in his classes. “I don’t structure my classes that way,” he says. To him, PowerPoint “feels less organic, more scripted and anodyne.”

“Current technology doesn’t provide—yet—what I need to really engage the students and make them push everything from their desks” and focus, Bloom says. He does allow that if he taught another class—Evidence, for instance—video clips might be appropriate. And he does e-mail supplementary materials to his students to clarify or maintain a class discussion.

No matter the extent to which the faculty utilize technological aids in their classes, the law school must remain administratively and philosophically agile so that it can respond to each professor’s preference as well as shifts in pedagogy, even if those shifts are rooted in cultural trends that originated outside of the ivory tower. Two years ago the law school began a pilot program that allowed students to take exams on their laptops rather than use a standard bluebook. Last year, the school implemented the laptop option for all first year students, and close to 90 percent of the current first year class has chosen to take exams this way, with the percentage slightly less for second and third year students. Associate Dean Underwood says that once students start taking exams on their laptops, they want to keep that option. For one thing, more undergraduate institutions allow students to take laptop exams, so some of the first years already are accustomed to this method of exam-taking; moreover, the exam software that the law school uses is the same one that’s used to administer the Bar exam.

As one of the newer faculty members, Professor Molly Walker Wilson, who teaches Torts, Family Law and a seminar in Law and Psychology, has both given and taken laptop exams. She believes that having students complete their exams on their laptops rather than in a bluebook not only produces a better exam, but also prepares students for how they will work once they’re practicing lawyers. “Few attorneys, if any, draft complaints and other documents by handwriting them. Why should the exam-taking process be any different? Most lawyers compose documents directly on their laptops. Students should be able to create answers to exam questions that, as completely as possible, demonstrate their knowledge and synthesis of the material. Laptop exams optimize students’ ability to do this because they allow for editing and organizing of concepts.”

Professor McKenna gives take-home exams that the majority of the students in his classes typically compose on their laptops, and he gives them eight hours to complete the exam. He echoes Wilson’s reasoning that students are able to achieve a “depth of response” on their exams because their answers are better organized and edited. He feels that timed bluebook exams reward those students who merely “regurgitate” information quickly, whereas he is more interested in seeing how the students develop their arguments and analyze the exam question. What’s more, the students learn time management skills that they’ll need once they go into practice. “Forcing them [students] to manage their time in terms of how they study and space out their exams is actually teaching them a valuable skill, and giving students some time to work through a problem more thoroughly is a much better approximation of what they’ll do as lawyers.”

But as anyone who has seen a science fiction movie can attest, people and technology don’t always “interface” successfully, as it were. Behind the scenes, the administration at the School of Law takes great pains to anticipate and prevent any problems at exam time and has established policies and procedures to safeguard against them. (Final exams are stressful enough for students without the heart-stopping panic that they would feel if their exam crashed and burned.) The law school defines the standards regarding the hardware and operating systems that students have on their laptops to make sure they’re compatible with the exam software. Sometimes, though, it’s the students who create the technological problems when downloading the exam software on their laptops; if they upgrade another software program on their laptops before exam time, doing so can render the exam software inoperable or lead to other difficulties. Despite the occasional glitch, the law school has successfully integrated its laptop exam protocols.

Ultimately, each professor has the discretion to choose how he or she wants to conduct a class. Some professors embrace the opportunity to access Web pages and video during class, while others want students to unplug themselves from their various gadgets and devote their undivided attention to developing those intangible but invaluable communication skills, so vital to success as a lawyer. It is this very difference in attitudes towards the modern classroom that allows the students to have a full range of educational experiences.