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Rapp, G C --- "Can you show me how to ... ? Reflections of a new law professor and part-time technology consultant on the role of new law teachers as catalysts for change" [2009] LegEdDig 42; (2009) 17(3) Legal Education Digest 42


Can you show me how to ... ? Reflections of a new law professor and part-time technology consultant on the role of new law teachers as catalysts for change

G. Rapp

58 J Legal Educ, 2008 pp61–78

New law professors are extraordinarily busy. The transition from full-time legal practice, clerkships, and even research/teaching fellowships to a tenure- track professorship involves significant personal and professional adjustments. Building a syllabus, preparing lectures, even picking a casebook, all take far more time than most law professors imagine prior to taking on the job. But to some extent, while the time involved may exceed a professor’s expectations, these are known costs of embarking on the satisfying career of law teaching.

Most new law professors are caught completely unaware on at least one dimension of their jobs that takes a significant amount of time. That area of responsibility is serving as an ad hoc, part-time consultant to more senior colleagues on all manner of technological devices and their application.

This time-consuming activity is central to the positive role new law professors can play on a faculty. Armed with a new generation’s perspective on and experience with technology, new law professors can spur more senior colleagues to rethink the way technology is a part of their teaching, both inside and outside of the classroom. The results benefit law students, whose technological preferences are far closer to those of new professors.

New technology has always prompted new methods of teaching law. My first year of law school was the first year the school’s classrooms were ‘wired’. Each of us had an ethernet plug at our desks and we could access the internet during class if we wanted to. But we rarely did so. Students were only beginning to embrace wireless technology. Only one professor used PowerPoint presentations in class; the overhead projector augmented by transparencies was a far more common component of classroom instruction.

Less than a decade later, the changes I notice when I walk around my law school are dramatic. Nearly every student has a laptop and is logged on to the internet nearly every moment of the day. Everyone has a cell phone, typically with multiple internet-based applications. At least half of the professors at my school regularly teach using PowerPoint, and all but a handful make use of the Smart-board technology set up in each classroom. Yet these changes no doubt pale in comparison to those that occurred during the teaching careers of my more senior colleagues. Most of them attended law school before computers got ‘personal’. The idea of writing a law review note or comment, much less publishing a law journal, using typewriters is frightening to today’s students. For many senior law professors, it was a real part of their law school experience. Although legal education does not always keep pace with the rate of technological advance, there has always been considerable interest in incorporating new technologies and new media into legal education. Specific benefits of technology in legal education include: (1) accommodating different learning styles; (2) facilitating design and implementation of innovative methods for testing and evaluation; (3) expanding access to course materials and supplemental resources; (4) making lectures more interesting by allowing incorporation of graphics; (5) reducing the cost and constraints of legal education by relaxing limits on distance learning; and (6) increasing student participation through hand-held wireless transmitters and ‘instant’ polling.

Without the presence of new faculty members, law schools are unlikely to be able to realise the returns associated with incorporating technology into legal education.

Veteran law teachers can sometimes become attached to traditional teaching methods and can resist technological change. Faculty members expend significant costs in designing courses and lectures, and the prospect of adopting new approaches can be daunting, particularly where the promise of new technologies has yet to be demonstrated. Wary of continual transition costs, law teachers may prefer to sit on the sidelines even as promising new technology finds its way to American law schools.

New law teachers, by contrast, are generally unburdened by ‘sunk costs’. They are preparing courses for the first time, and incorporating new technologies can often be done at little cost.

Incorporating a new technology often requires the patience to wrestle with it until it suits one’s needs. This patience seems often, though not always, more prevalent among new teachers. New law professors are willing to learn by doing and can share their insights with more senior colleagues.

For example, in my first year of teaching I struggled to find a way to make PowerPoint slides and in-class-generated overheads available to students without posting them on the public internet. With administrative assistance, I was able to put electronic materials onto my ‘faculty biography’ web page and add a password protection. This was not a flawless solution. Administrative policy meant that I, like all faculty members, could not alter my web pages myself. In addition, each semester I had to generate a list of enrolled students who would individually be granted access to the page by information technology support personnel.

In my second year of teaching, the university rolled out a new web-based system for document sharing. With their university network identification and passwords, students could individually reach a site for each of their classes (to which they were automatically given access upon registering for the course). This roll-out was announced in a single email to faculty and staff, and no instruction was offered on how to use the system to build course web pages. The law school’s technology support personnel were not given passwords to access the system and thus could offer only limited assistance. I had to tinker with it until I was able to load materials into a clear and accessible format.

New law faculty members may be particularly well suited to weeding through the various emails sent to faculty by university IT support staff. Often, more senior faculty will simply tune out such information, trusting that someone will tell them later if it’s something they really need to know. I recently forwarded an amplification notice to colleagues letting them know of yet another new application available on the university’s web site, in this case a means to access a networked drive remotely using a web page (i.e, without having to ‘dial in’ to the university’s server).

New faculty members formally or informally introduce their more senior colleagues to new approaches.

Formal introduction can occur via faculty workshops and presentations in which new faculty members demonstrate a technological innovation and how they have incorporated it into their teaching. For instance, this year I delivered a lunchtime presentation on how to use the University’s Blackboard-based class web page program.

In my first three years of teaching, I’ve stood over the shoulder of more senior colleagues in their offices, walking them through the process for accessing a course email list. I’ve also assisted colleagues with loading articles onto ssrn.com and in submitting manuscripts electronically via the Expresso. And I’ve helped tenured colleagues set up Typepad accounts so that they can participate as Guest Bloggers on established blogs.

New law faculty members often come from law firm practice where technology is used in a more sophisticated way than is typical in the academy. With that experience, they may be particularly attuned to the dangers such technology can pose. A primary one is network security. Any document posted on a network drive is more vulnerable than a paper copy kept in a file behind a locked office door. There are easy ways to password protect files, which new law faculty may be familiar with from practice experience. For example, this year I sent around a short guide on using Word’s password-protection feature, suggesting to my colleagues that they promptly protect any exams they may have stored on networked drives.

Other dangers can be spotted through greater familiarity with the appropriate and inappropriate ways students may use technology in the classroom. One first-year student came to law school classes with a large joystick and a second keyboard, which he attached to his laptop at the beginning of each class. More senior professors may not have noticed, or may not have realized that the only reason a student would need a joystick in class is to play video games (in this case, an advanced flight simulator).

University IT support departments may be overworked and thinly staffed. IT personnel are not always available on weekends or during the evening hours when faculty need quick answers to technological problems. New faculty are easy to find and can often play an important troubleshooting role.

New law faculty also enhance the role of technology in legal education as consumers.

A prime example is the growth of the legal blogosphere. I believe that the rapid growth and success of law professor blogs is due in large part to their voluminous consumption by new law teachers. Certainly, a number of new law professors have involved themselves in the blogosphere as active bloggers, launching or hosting their own blog sites. But new law professors sometimes tread cautiously when starting or joining blogs, both because they lack the substantive expertise to comment on legal developments and because of the possible dangers associated with the ‘extreme sport’ of blogging while untenured.

Although it would be quite a challenge to prove empirically, I believe that new law faculty disproportionately monitor, read, and engage legal blogs. One of the courses I taught during my first year was Sports Law. I stumbled upon a ‘Sports Law Blog’ organised by two then-Harvard Law School students. This blog provided a wonderful resource for recent updates to share with my class and was particularly useful when it came time to craft final exam hypotheticals. As a corporate law teacher, I have regularly relied on Conglomerate, Ideoblog and Professor Bainbridge in similar ways. I suspect that new constitutional law teachers regularly visit and engage with the Volokh Conspiracy and Balkinization, tax teachers the Tax- ProfBlog, and contracts professors the Contract ProfBlog. Other blogs have become essential sources of legal education ‘gossip’ and information about lateral moves and conferences.

As a result of the growth of the legal blogosphere, the costs of ‘non-involvement’ have risen. Among senior faculty, academic reputation may now be shaped in large part by a person’s bloggership, not just their scholarship. Certain highly regarded legal bloggers may have come to be seen as ‘giants’ in their fields, even where other scholars might have had a stronger pre-blogosphere claim to academic importance. Scholars who have attracted attention on blogs have an easier time placing law review articles with top journals and obtaining invitations to present work at conferences, offer lectures, or teach in distinguished visitorships at other law schools. New law teachers may choose to adopt casebooks in part based on familiarity with authors’ online personae.

When a new law professor has implemented a new technology in her teaching, students may quickly become addicted to the benefits that technology offers.

A prime example is the distribution of electronic classroom presentations. I developed a way to make PowerPoint presentations available after class to students, responding in large part to repeated student requests. After I had done so, more senior colleagues soon became inundated with requests that they too make similar information available for student download. A number have adopted similar approaches in response to these heightened student expectations.

New faculty can also serve as interlocutors between students and faculties with respect to technology and its application in the law school setting. Student expectations about faculty members’ access to and willingness to use technology – particularly as a communications tool – are not always consistent with what it is reasonable to expect of law teachers.

I sometimes hear students complain in the halls about emailing a professor and receiving no response. I make it a point to discuss the use of email to contact professors (including myself) with students during the opening days of class. I typically advise them that emails that ask for confirmation that they ‘understand’ a particular doctrine are often challenging for faculty members because, where a student has misstated a doctrine or ignored its complexity, a quick response cannot be offered. Faculty members are loath to respond to a one-line email with a two-page articulation of doctrine, and may choose simply to ignore the email instead. I encourage students to bring substantive questions to professors in their offices or after class, rather than to send them via email. I advise them that a response to one of their questions along the lines of ‘Please come see me’ should not be considered rude, but simply a reflection of the fact that it is so much easier to grasp the source of a students’ misunderstanding and clarify a subject in a face-to-face session than over an email exchange. I encourage students to be patient when using email to communicate with professors: not all professors are as ‘plugged in’ as students, and they certainly shouldn’t be expected to instantly respond to student questions (particularly at night or on the weekend) delivered electronically.

Armed with comparatively greater experience existing in the digital world, new faculty members can often help warn more senior colleagues about ‘netiquette’ and other codes of behaviour that can help ensure one lives a happy and fulfilling online life.

For instance, many professors new to the blogosphere may not appreciate the dangers of ‘commenting’ on blog posts. Comments can often become a permanent part of one’s online persona, and it is far too easy to respond quickly and sometimes angrily when a blogger has written an irksome or snide post.

New law professors, through their involvement in new media like the blogosphere, help alter the role of technology in legal education by stimulating changes in tenure and promotion policies.

At my school, promotion and tenure decisions hinge on three factors: publication, teaching, and service (although promotion to ‘full professor’ depends only on publication and teaching). With respect to publication, the law school has traditionally drawn a somewhat ambiguous distinction between ‘publications’ and ‘writings’. A publication is a ‘traditional’ law review article, while a ‘writing’ is anything else. Promotion thresholds are determined only by publications, not writings, although once one has met the minimum numerical requirements for promotion or tenure writings may then have an impact.

New technology challenges these categories. When I joined the Sports Law Blog as a full-time contributor, I was only the second person on my faculty to take on such a role. The other was a very senior Distinguished University Professor who has since retired and taken emeritus status. Since he was ‘maxed out’ in terms of promotion, the law school had never considered how to treat blog posts for promotion and tenure purposes. Singly, most of my blog posts look more like ‘op-eds’ or even letters-to-the-editor, which would typically be considered ‘writings’. But collectively, the energy expended and volume of publication (as well as the attention garnered) from blogging is far closer to, if not in excess of, that associated with a traditional law review article. The law school has not developed a formal policy for processing such activity. However, my vitae for promotion and retention purposes now includes a ‘bloggership’ section, listing my permanent position with the Sports Law Blog as well as dates in which I served as a guest blogger on another law professor group blog (without identifying particular posts).

Although my school, like many, has not yet figured out how a formal way to treat such activity, the fact that new professors like me include such writing in their submissions for tenure, renewal, and promotion has to some extent forced the issue.

Given the importance of technology to legal education and the role new law professors play in bringing about technological change, law schools should explore new ways to assist new teachers in the technological change agent role they already play. The use of technology may be retarded by the lack of recognition or award for the activity.

A good first step might be to diversify the faculty workshop. Many schools have formal or informal programs in which professors from the school (or outsiders) present works-in-progress for feedback and evaluation.

Administrations should consider opening these types of workshops to non-substantive presentations. Rather than or in addition to presenting their unpublished work, new law teachers should be encouraged to host sessions in which they share technological insights and methodology with more senior colleagues.

While the ‘service’ category for tenure and promotion is typically a place where a faculty member’s formal committee service, bar association involvement, and AALS section work is recognised or rewarded, the category should be broadened to include the day-to-day technological service that new law teachers perform.

Finally, law schools should be generous with new teachers with respect to the bottom line involved with new technology. Typically, law professors receive a research or faculty development budget to fund conferences and other projects. A single new software package (like STATA or SPSS) can quickly swallow the bulk of a year’s budget, as can a new piece of hardware like a wireless PowerPoint clicker useful in classroom presentations.

By no means are new professors alone in helping to bring new technology to the law school and into its classrooms. Law library staff, in particular, play an important role at many law schools in this regard. At my own school, one of the most influential technology change agents is now an emeritus professor with four grandchildren. Passion for and patience with technology are far more important than age or ‘juniority’ for anyone who wants to play a positive role with respect to technology in legal education.

Change is not always positive; change for change’s sake rarely is. But technology is critically important in legal practice and should be in legal education as well.


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