JURIST - Garland: From Punch Cards to CALI - My Pedagogical and Scholarly Experiences Online

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From Punch Cards to CALI:
My Pedagogical and Scholarly Experiences Online

Norman Garland, Southwestern University School of Law

1. Early Experiences

In the summer of 1964, I went directly from law school to Washington, D.C., to prepare for the D.C. and Illinois bar exams, and to enter the Prettyman Program at Georgetown. I also found an interim job with the Office of the General Counsel of the FAA, who was putting the legal opinions of the Agency into a computer. I never saw the computer, because my job was to develop the nomenclature for classification of the opinions so they could be input, via punch cards, into the system. The system I was helping to develop was essentially an index of the legal opinions. Doing this job gave me a big leg up years later, since it taught me to visualize the interrelationship of terms and concepts in a way very helpful in crafting searches on Westlaw and Lexis. I remember, for example, looking at a stack of punch cards that had been selected using my index and seeing straight through all the punches for the terms “airport,” “instrument control,” “landing,” and “fog.”

In 1968, I became a member of the faculty and Dean of Admissions at Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago. It was the beginning of the post-war baby boom and the explosion of the population of law school applicants. I decided to computerize the admissions process at Northwestern, which meant I did it mostly by myself at first–there was no budget from the University for such an endeavor. Again, it was a punch-card operation, but soon I hired a group of grad students from the Business School to write an admissions program–nothing existed for managing a data base with 27 variables for each record. These grad students did a good enough job so that I could abandon my effort to learn computer programming (fortran, basic, cobal) after only one lesson. The grads should have been good enough since the project they were working on for Mead Data Corporation became Lexis a few years later.

In those days, I dreamed of being able to do legal research on computer. Never in my wildest imaginings did I consider what we can do with computers in the law and legal education today. Westlaw and Lexis were an idealized possibility and I certainly never conceived of anything like the internet.

2. Lexis, Westlaw, and the OJ Trial

A 300 baud modem, a “portable” p.c. (that weighed 50 pounds, at least), and a legal research program! I considered myself very fortunate by the early ‘80s to have these tools. And, as the Westlaw and Lexis databases grew, computers developed sufficiently to make electronic legal research a reality. By the time modems progressed to 9600 baud capability, some of us didn’t have to go to the library much any more either.

By the time of the O.J. trial in the mid ‘90s I had become completely dependent on computer research and writing. So, it was not much of a leap for me to participate in the O.J. frenzy by producing a piece or two for electronic publication in the Westlaw electronic data base devoted to commentary on the “trial of the century.” I am not sure how many people ever looked at this material, but Westlaw paid by the line, so I felt pretty good about the experience. I am not sure to this day whether the Dean ever counted these works as “publications” for academic purposes.

3. Overhead Transparencies and Slide Shows

I have been interested in information delivery for most of my professional life (does anyone else remember the program “Maxthink?”). For many years I produced materials to accompany my class presentations, culminating in the use of lists and outlines on transparencies projected “overhead” on to a screen. Of course, today this has morphed into full blown slide shows–Powerpoints or Corel Presentations. I was a bit hesitant at first to try creating slide shows. But both of these programs are easy to master for anyone used to a basic word processing program. I prefer Corel Presentations because it has more flexibility and more choices for background design, animating objects, and utilizing sounds and images.

Actually, I now have a full set of slide shows for two of my major classes–Evidence and Constitutional Criminal Procedure. I have them uploaded on my TWEN page, my own Web page, and this past semester my Foundation Press distributed my Evidence slide shows on CD to authors who adopted the Waltz and Park case book (which the slide shows accompany).

4. The West Education Network (TWEN)

One of the most exciting innovations in law teaching is The West Education Network. There are many ways for us law teachers to utilize the internet and he Web to augment our classes, but I have found no other program or system that is better than TWEN. I post all my slide shows, which are essentially an outline of my entire course. The shows can be posted statically (one slide at a time) on TWEN and I can also upload the text content of the shows so that students can download, in text, a complete outline of the course. This enables a student to prepare for class knowing what I will cover and, moreover, to come to class with a pre-prepared outline either printed or in the computer. The student can then edit the outline to incorporate developing class discussion. In addition, I have posted a link in the TWEN pages to my own web page where the slide shows can be “run” on line while connected to the web, one bullet point at a time.

TWEN has forum capabilities that function like bulletin boards for threaded discussions. And, most significantly, any reference to legal material that appears in any message or document posted on a TWEN page is automatically converted into a hypertext link directly into the appropriate West database. Clicking on the link takes the user to the document without leaving the TWEN environment. This is an extremely powerful tool and one that I have yet to find any other system to beat.

I have gone to great lengths to develop student participation in TWEN. I have contests regularly for students to post solutions to hypothetical problems from the case book. I choose the best solutions and award prizes, some of them quite valuable–such as Corel Legal Suite 8 (donated by Corel) and copies of White & Strunk’s, Elements of Style (good writing is still necessary, especially in this computer age).

I encourage students to post questions to me on the TWEN page, though forums set up just for that purpose. Class announcements and email messages are easily delivered from TWEN. And, finally, TWEN is a great vehicle for distributing old examinations for students to use for practice–I prefer using TWEN for this purpose rather than giving up control over release dates and choices to the central administration which has no sense of my academic goals (i.e., releasing all my old exams in August so that students come to the first class asking about old exam questions!).

5. The Ninestep Guide

I began teaching evidence the first semester I ever taught–in the fall of 1968. I was on the faculty of Northwestern Law School and it seemed natural to use the new casebook co-authored by one of the NU faculty–Jon Waltz. The book was Louisell, Kaplan, & Waltz and Jon Kaplan wrote the teacher’s manual, which included a suggested three steps or questions to deal with relevance. I quickly adopted that approach and, over the years, increased the “steps” from three to nine, covering hearsay as well as relevance. In 1989, I published the Ninestep Analytical Guide to Relevance and Hearsay in the Southwestern Law School Law Reivew.

It had always been my intention to convert the Ninestep approach to some form of computer interactive publication. While I was directing a summer program for SWU in Vancouver, I ran into John Driggers from Lexis, who was helping me put my summer program materials into Folio Views. We discussed utilizing Folio Views for converting my Ninestep guide into an interactive format. I began work on that project, incorporating some questions from Harvard exams of Morgan and Maguire, that had appeared in the Louiselle, Kaplan, and Waltz case book. Ultimately, the project was produced in HTML and now appears on the front page of lawschool.lexis.com I think the result is quite excellent. I have presented the old Harvard questions with hyperlinks to the parts of the text of the original article that explain the concepts necessary to solve the problem. I also have provided suggested answers so that the article now works as a lesson on relevance and hearsay.

6. CALI Lessons and Lessonettes (TM)

I am not sure whether I was aware of CALI (or what became CALI) prior to its formation in 1982, but I have been a user of Professor Roger Park’s evidence lessons at least since then. My desire to put my Ninestep guide into an interactive format finally led me to consider the development of CALI lessons myself. In 1998, I agreed to produce a small CALI lesson on hearsay exceptions. The resulting lesson, covering four exceptions under Federal Rule of Evidence 803 is one of the regularly distributed lessons, both on the Web and on the CALI disk.

The experience was very rewarding. At the time of my development of this lesson, CALI was utilizing the Iolis program. I confirmed my suspicion that the creation of an interactive lesson utilizing a structured program like Iolis was one of the most rewarding experiences I could have as a teacher. Taking a defined universe of material and converting it into a format that allows students to learn or confirm learning is a terrific challenge for a teacher who has developed a deep understanding of a subject.

The CALI lesson development whetted my appetite for more. So I applied for a CALI fellowship to craft small lessons, or lessonettes (TM), covering an entire subject–in this case the fundamental subject of basic criminal law. I and four other fellows are attempting to craft a series of short lessons (called lessonettes (TM)) covering a systematically indexed topic listing of topics (called a “topic grid”) covering the entire subject of basic criminal law. CALI developed a new authoring program, which we CALI fellows are using to develop the lessonettes (TM).

The fellowship project is about half complete at this time. We have had a terrific learning experience helping to debug the CALI Author program and testing the approach of subject coverage by this method of short lessons and a topic grid. I have been honing my skills using an interactive lesson program and now have planned a new project to begin after the fellowship work is over.

I want to take my Ninestep guide and create a new lesson for it in CALI Author. It will combine what I have learned about developing CALI lessons with another dimension of teaching hearsay and relevance that I have used over the years. In my class on Evidence, after covering the materials introducing relevance and hearsay, I use the Morgan and Maguire Harvard questions, three to six at time, for class discussion. I apply my Ninestep approach in a Socratic approach with the students. My plan is to use CALI Author to produce lessons for the Morgan and Maguire questions. The result should be very useful for students to learn, relearn, or hone their understanding of relevance and hearsay.

© 2000 by Norman Garland. All rights reserved.
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The views expressed in this column are solely those of its author, and do not reflect those of JURIST, its Advisory Board, its staff or its host institutions.
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Talkback

Where you have the last word...

I enjoyed this biographical and historical romp from one who has long been taking on the new technology.
It would be wonderful if we had more from fellow technologists, and yes, the humanists as well.
Jim Elkins
College of Law, West Virginia University

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