Law School 2.0

The 2009 Horizon Report

The annual Horizon Report was just released, and it contains some interesting predictions about the future of educational technology.  It introduces six emerging technologies or educational practices that it predicts will be entering the mainstream in the near term, and longer term.

In the near term, they predict that mobile and cloud computing will be increasingly used in education, and in the longer term, what they call "geo-everything" and the "personal web" will become mainstream.  Examples of "geo-everything" are GPS-enabled cameras and maps on smartphones (such as the iPhone), and examples of the "personal web" are Netvibes and such sites.

Here is the 2009 Horizon Report. You might also be interested to visit their Wiki site. Recommended reading for anyone interested in where educational technology is going.

New Learning spaces at M.I.T.

Interesting article in the NYTimes today, entitled "At M.I.T. Large Lectures are Going the Way of the Blackboard."  It describes how, in the past, the basic freshman physics course was taught in large lectures with little student feedback or interaction.  But now M.I.T. has built two special classrooms - now used for the basic physics course, and others, that emphasize "hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning."  It also reports that instead of blackboards, the walls are covered with whiteboards and "huge display screens."  The teachers who have used this room have found that students learn better in this classroom than the huge lecture class.

Of course, it took a $10M donation to build these classrooms.  New technology is not free, and rebuilding law school classrooms will require similar investments.  But these sorts of learning spaces can help law students learn better as well.  I describe this more in the LS2 book (p. 133), and a great book on the subject is Diana Oblinger, Learning Spaces.

Article in the Fall issue of The Law Teacher

My article about using Wikis in teaching Administrative law has just been published in the Fall issue of The Law Teacher.  In the article, I explain how students in that class used wikis for two purposes: to develop group research projects on 10 different federal agencies, and to develop a comprehensive outline for the class.  The work the students did on the research projects was fabulous, detailed, and very helpful to them and to the other students in the class.  The outline the students developed collaboratively in the wiki was an extraordinarily good one, and that and the textbook were the only things they took into the final exam.