LESSONS FROM THE WEB

It is 8:50 a.m., Tuesday, September 20^th, 2010. Room 102 at State Law School is about half-full of students engaged in typical pre-class banter. Eric Cartman and Wendy Testaburger [2] enter the classroom and find their seats. They each place a finger on their desk's digital fingerprint scanner. On a 17" flat-screen LCD monitor attached to each desk at a 45 degree angle, their names appear. Upon confirmation of their identity, a chair, attached to the underside of the desk and controlled by the electronic fingerprint scanner, swings open. Eric and Wendy sit, connect their hand-held computers to the desk, and continue their conversation as they wait for the class to begin. Had Eric or Wendy chosen to sit at a different location in the classroom, the fingerprint recognition device would not have allowed the chair to open and the monitor would have directed them to their assigned seats. Had they entered the wrong classroom, the system would not have allowed them access to the seat and would have pointed them to the correct classroom.

At 8:55 a.m., Professor Charlene Smith walks down to the front of the classroom and stands behind a desk that is five feet high, six feet wide and three feet deep. She places her palm on a digital hand geometry recognition device on the lower right corner of the desk top. On a 22" LCD monitor which angles 45 degrees from the desk, right above the palmprint recognition device, the name "Professor Charlene Smith" appears. Under her name, the monitor shows a list of classes that Professor Smith teaches at State Law School. Because it is nearly 9:00 a.m. on Tuesday, September 20th, the law school's central computer assumes professor Smith will be teaching torts, which meets from 9:00 to 10:00 a.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays in this classroom. "Torts - Fall Semester 2010" appears highlighted at the top of list of classes. With her right index finger, Smith presses the word "Torts" on the monitor's touch-screen. Because the computer keeps track of the class materials of all law school classes, the screen displays a schematic of this classroom, showing the classroom's seating arrangement. A photograph of each student in Smith's torts class is displayed indicating their assigned seat. The pictures of all students in attendance appear bright and in color. Those of absent students (or those who are not yet in their seats) appear in faded black and white. Under each student's name, there is a row of icons indicating, among other things, whether the student has read the day's assignment. Another icon indicates the number of times the student has participated in classroom discussion since the beginning of the semester.

Professor Smith's torts class meets for one hour on Tuesdays and Thursdays. However, her students must spend at least two hours prior to each classroom discussion logged onto the class materials web page. Each student must log on to the class materials web page using either a fingerprint or palmprint scanner. The class web page contains both passive and active learning tools to supplement the classroom discussions. Prior to each classroom discussion, students log on to the class materials web page to find the assigned electronic text book and/or supplemental readings.

The electronic materials include short introductory video lectures on the concepts that will be discussed during the following class, links to pertinent cases and articles, and questions that guide the students' reading of these materials. The software that operates the class materials web page also monitors each student's use of the materials. The class materials are adapted to each student's learning style and provide assistance particular to each student's need.

Outcome assessment exercises linked to each legal concept in the course determine each student's progress. When students complete the readings for a given concept, the software provides them with interactive hypotheticals that assess each student's understanding of the concept. The score on these outcome assessment exercises determines whether the student is ready to progress to the next topic. If the student receives an unsatisfactory score, the computer will guide the student through a tutorial prior to requiring the student to complete one or more outcome assessment exercises. If a student fails to achieve a satisfactory score on the outcome assessment exercises on a given topic, the class materials software automatically matches the student with a mentor, usually an upper level student. When students reach or exceed a pre-determined score for each concept, the software permits them to proceed to the next topic. This process ensures that students with different styles and abilities arrive to class similarly prepared to discuss the assigned materials. The software also alerts Professor Smith of the student's need for extra tutoring enabling her to monitor the student's progress and, if necessary, provide further assistance.

Today, Professor Smith's classroom monitor notifies her that Eric Cartman is not prepared for class. The monitor indicates that Mr. Cartman has come to class unprepared four times since school began. Professor Smith touches Mr. Cartman's photo on the monitor. This automatically checks Professor Smith's and Mr. Cartman's schedules and sends Mr. Cartman an email requesting a meeting and providing Mr. Cartman optional times and dates to meet.

The class software also cross-checks every student who is absent with the number of allowed absences and contacts any student who is about to violate the attendance policy. While the computer determines the preparation level of the students, Professor Smith's screen lists a number of presentation slide-shows related to the topic for today's discussion. The slides have been previously prepared by Smith or borrowed from other torts professors at State or other law schools. Professor Smith highlights one of the slide-shows and touches the screen. This automatically lowers the classroom lights, turns on the ceiling-mounted LCD projector, and projects the first slide on a screen that has descended from the ceiling above the blackboard.

As soon as the slide is projected, Professor Smith's monitor inquires whether she wants this individual slide to be automatically transmitted to each student's desk. She responds affirmatively. Unless a student instructs the desk computer otherwise, the slide will automatically be downloaded into the students' hand-held computers. On this day, the slide-show contains a short outline summary of the topic of the previous class discussion: false imprisonment. In addition, the slide show includes a computer-generated video-clip depicting a scenario to test students' ability to apply false imprisonment legal principles to new facts.

In the animated video clip, a young woman working as a temporary sales clerk at the jewelry counter of a department store is brought into the manager's office. Most of the video takes place inside the office, where the manager, a security guard, and two other store employees surround the woman and advise her she had been accused of stealing a watch. The woman appears angry at the suggestion but readily agrees to take a lie detector test. She takes and passes the test, the manager apologizes and tells her she is welcome to continue working at the store. The video ends with the young woman looking at the audience and asking whether she can bring a law suit against the department store. The slide-show then projects a series of multiple choice questions based on the video clip. The questions consist of a body of facts, a question, and a series of alternative answers labelled A, B, C, and D.

Each student desk contains an electronic "Classroom Performance System," which permits instant assessment of the student's classroom performance. The CPS wireless pad on each desk resembles the dial pad on a telephone, with buttons representing a letter from A to J or a number from 1 to 10. Students have a pre-determined amount of time to select the correct answer by pressing the button representing their choice, then the "send" button. Professor Smith's monitor shows each student's entry and notes the student who first answered the question correctly. She can choose to project her monitor onto the large screen so the whole class can watch. Smith can also ask any student to explain his or her answer and award points for a correct answer and a correct explanation.

After a few minutes, another question is projected and the students follow the same process. After five questions, the CPS grades each student's performance and sends the score to each student's desktop monitor. Professor Smith can determine whether and how the graded assessment exercise will count toward the course grade. After class, the CPS permits students to review their performance on any given classroom exercise. The review session is interactive, containing explanations and tutorials to further assist students comprehend the class materials.

When the slide-show ends, the projector shuts down, the screen recedes, and the room lights brighten. Professor Smith begins her Socratic dialogue on the next topic, intentional infliction of emotional distress, by engaging the class in a discussion of the pertinent cases and the construction of the black-letter law of IIED. At 9:55 a.m., a "Five-minute Warning" icon flashes across professor Smith's monitor. Unless she presses the flashing icon, the system will shut itself down at exactly 10:00 a.m.

1. Professor Lasso's article exploring the use of technology in legal education, "From the Paper Chase to the Digital Chase: Technology and the Challenge of Teaching 21^st Century Students" will be published this fall. Its citation will be 43 Santa Clara L. Rev. 1 (2002).

Although this article reflects professor Lasso's not infrequent flights of fantasy, all the technology described in here is currently available.

2. My apologies to fans of the television show South Park. I use the names of SouthPark's characters in my classes because it seems to be one of the shows most watched by my students.

JURIST's Lessons from the Web series is edited by Professor Patrick Wiseman, Georgia State University College of Law.

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JURIST welcomes your comments on this column and the issues it raises...

• Monday September 02, 2002 at 11:10 pm
  A long time ago I took a "junior year abroad" (paid for by my college). This experience abroad released my creative enrergies and led to an immensely productive period of education for me -- because at my host foreign university -- unlike at my highly-rated American home university -- classroom attendance was not mandatory and students were encouraged and expected to educate themselves in directions that interested them. The motivation, Professor Lasso, for your law school classroom of the future is noble, I suppose -- but your envisioned classroom of the future amounts to a system of control and regimentation that I would have found intolerable. Have students changed so much over the years? Do they need to be controlled, supervised, monitored, and rated from day to day? Or do they in fact need exactly the opposite: Do they need _more_ time on their own, more time to follow _their own_ intellectual inclinations and beliefs? Is a regimen of daily (or even weekly) multiple-choice exams the right way to foster creativity, let alone love for learning? American law teachers have long imagined that they provide an education that is superior to that found in the typical American undergraduate college. But those law teachers are sorely mistaken. Law schools need more seminars with free-flowing discussions and, if some kind "regimentation" and control are necessary, law schools should offer more weekly exercises in, say, truly creative writing -- rather than more multiple-choice exams! The solution to the malaise that almost all American law students experience in their 2d & 3d years of legal education is _not_ the use of technological devices that will allow law teachers to force students to come to class and to participate in class discussion. And if I am wrong about this, yours is a brave new world of legal education in which I do not wish to participate!
  
  a fellow American law teacher
  an American law school
  American State, U.S.A.

• Tuesday September 03, 2002 at 1:08 pm
  My fellow American law teacher. Have you been talking to my wife? Her reaction to my little scenario was that I was advocating some sort of "1984 meets 2001 Space Oddissey." I apologize for my less than clear writing. First of all, the class that I describe is, by definition, a large first year class so the type of intimate interaction that we can have in a seminar is much harder. Also, in the law school of the future (at least as I envision it), students will actually have much more time to learn on their own, at their own pace. As you noticed, classes would only meet for a couple of hours a week and most the "learning" would be done in small groups or individually at times other than the classroom meeting. As to the control issue, if what you mean is that there is a loss of privacy with the identification devices, you are probably right, but, as they say, "that ship has sailed." We have been losing our privacy in so many ways in the last decade. But the fault is not technology but rather the uses humans seek with technology. In the classroom, what I envision in keeping track of students is really not much different than what we attempt to do now --identify those who are falling behind in school so they can be given extra help. My experience with the multiple choice live "quiz" is that students like them (because they are confortable with a screen) so it has actually resulted in students participating in class more. Also, students really appreciate regular assessments so they have a better idea what to expect for the final exam. I agree with you that they also need more writing exercises -- and, by the way, software that allows us to give such exercises is pretty close to ready for the market.
  
  Rogelio Lasso
  Washburn Law School
  Topeka, Kansas

• Tuesday September 03, 2002 at 10:56 pm
  You're much more fun than your futuristic teaching methods! I would enjoy your class -- despite your desire to give me multiple choice quizzes. (You have odd students. Or maybe I'm just a cowardly fossil.)
  
  your fellow law teacher redux
  U.S.A.

• Tuesday September 03, 2002 at 10:57 pm
  You're much more fun than your futuristic teaching methods! I would enjoy your class -- despite your desire to give me multiple choice quizzes. (You have odd students. Or maybe I'm just a cowardly fossil.)
  
  your fellow law teacher redux
  U.S.A.

• Wednesday September 04, 2002 at 1:32 am
  Seems Prof. Lasso is having technical solutions (counting minutes beeing logged in) to social problems (students - or better pupils in this vision - not beeing properly prepared). This usually doesn't work out.
  
  Hans Acker
  Niuwe

• Wednesday September 04, 2002 at 9:24 am
  God help us if that is the classroom of the future. There is already too much monitoring in daily life. Fingerprint recognition systems....please! Technology has been available for potential classroom use for years. Televions, videos, overhead projectors, yet, as time has told, the most effective means of education is to primarily use books. Moreover, I agree with the comment about then European educational system's lack of mandatory attendance. The responsibility should be on the professor to make class interesting enough so that students want to attend. Generations of excellent lawyers have been produced without all of this technology.
  
  Michael Landau
  GA/USA

• Wednesday September 04, 2002 at 6:44 pm
  I don't think that that monitoring of the class is the problem and actually benefits the students from the learning perspective and gets rid of the administrative work for the professor. This gives the student an advantage having the professor know if the student is having trouble with the material. However, I believe the problem with this advanced technology classroom is that there is so much technology of the student doing everything via video and computer that it almost makes the professor obsolete. I believe that the hands on approach such as reading and hearing hypotheticals is an important skill for a lawyer since clients come to the office and tell the lawyer the problem. A technology advanced classroom is great as long as it is not interferring with the long term goals, being a proficient attorney in a world without such an extreme amount of technology. Schools need to remember the important ways that people learn reading material and writing notes and being as "active" in the learning process as possible without too much video. Video is see and do and forget. The material that we learn in law school is not like undergraduate, we have to soak up as much as possible because people's lives will be in our hands. Also, regarding your above comment on letting the student learn at their own pace defeats the purpose of stressing us out during law school. You said yourself in class the stress of lawschool prepares us for the stress of being a lawyer.
  
  Sheri Gibisch
  KS, USA

• Wednesday September 04, 2002 at 11:09 pm
  The comments of Ms Gibish, who is one of my torts students, are not much different than those I have received from several other students. Most entering students, who were born around the time PCs were introduced, seem much more at ease with technology than those of us who were born (many) years before the widespread availability of computers. As to Ms. Gibish's comments that "A technology advanced classroom is great as long as it doesn' interfere with the goal of being a proficient attorney in a world without such an extreme amount of technology," my point (which I was less than clear in making) is that in a few years we will be practicing in a very technology-filled world. As to her comment that this technology will have the deleterious effect of decreasing law school stress . . . I have faith we will be able to come up with other ways of causing the necessary level of stress! cheers, Rogelio Lasso
  
  Rogelio Lasso
  Washburn University School of Law
  Kansas/USA

• Friday September 06, 2002 at 11:42 am
  As the technology that we are surround by evolves, we too must evolve. It has become very evident in just this first year of school that you need technology to keep up with everything. Good or bad, you make the argument. The only certain thing is that these methods are going to be implemented in schools with mixed reviews. The only way to see if this technology is good or bad for students would be to slowly implement it into the classes. Who would have thought ten years ago that there would be numerous laptop computers in classes? We have to change or get left behind. It could be a larger shock to a lawyer who didn't expose him/herself to this technology to present a case to a jury that has this kind of technology to use. There are pros and cons to all of this, but you can't stop (or even slow) the evolution we are a part of.
  
  Paul Kitzke
  KS

• Sunday September 08, 2002 at 1:40 pm
  There are many ways in which we can evolve. Technology does not (I think) dictate the uses to which it will be put; new techologies can be used in many different ways. For example, even before the advent of computer technology, we had the ability administer daily machine-graded multiple choice quizzes & homework assignments. But most U.S. law schools and U.S. law teachers chose not to do those sorts of things. (Analogue: the technology for electronic eavesdropping of all telephone conversations in and out of hotels existed for quite a few years. While the Soviets, by all all accounts, chose to eavesdrop on all or practically all such telephone conversations, the U.S. government, we are told, did not.) One pertinent question (not the only pertinent question, to be sure) is whether a suggested use of computer technology fosters or impedes desired forms of education. I believe that the kind of monitoring of student work and attendance that Professor Lasso favors impedes rather than encourages the kind of learning and student scholarship I would like to see.
  
  your friendly fellow law teacher
  American State, U.S.A.

• Sunday September 08, 2002 at 9:12 pm
  What ever happened to a little hard work goes a long way? I believe that law school is an environment that promotes stress, hardship and difficulty. In addition, law school demonstrates the rewards and benefits of having endured such an environment. Technology or no technology, law school is a challenge and when it comes down to it, it is up to the students(and the professors)to make the best of whatever resources that are available to them; whether those resources consist of high-tech computer monitoring systems or regular old-fashioned study groups. Technology certainly has its advantages and disadvantages. For one, technology allows us to slack off! We don't have to think or work as hard. Just look at the new "computer-like" calculators! Technology is good in a law school setting (for the purposes of Professor Lasso's vision) when it aids in the developement of individual learning techniques and mental growth. The disadvantage comes when we start to use technology as a means to replace those things that we can already do effectively, but do not want to devote the time and energies to doing them. I think that it is important to remember that some of the most intellectual lawyers have come from an era with little to no technology as we know it today. Don't get me wrong technology, has been and will continue to be a great developement for our generation and for those generations to come. However, when it comes down to the students who will enter room 102 on September 20, 2010, they will be just as successful without all of the technology, as long as the classroom consists of those individuals who are truely passionate and devoted to the study and practice of the law.
  
  Allontay Thomas
  KS, U.S.A.

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