Yahoo! News - Schools Look to Wireless to Boost Learning - Most U.S. public schools are equipped with desktop computers and computer labs, but the relatively new wireless Internet technology called WiFi gives pupils instant access to the Internet to help with any subject in any classroom.
WiFi is already available in many universities, which generally have more resources, but now the technology is trickling down into lower-level schools. It is one of the fastest-growing budget items for technology.

So what happens when these kids, raised on wireless laptops and using the web as a learning tool hit law school and the faculty tells them they cannot use laptops in the class room and exams must be hand written?  It won't be pretty.

Legal academia needs to take a long hard look at how it teaches the law.  The methods that have worked for the past 100+ years are oncreasingly becoming out-moded and irrelevant.  Law school has long been about learning to 'think like a lawyer' but somebody needs to think about how lawyers think in the 21st century. 

Much of the way the legal profession works is premised on the notion that the law is complicated and the average person does not have the tools to discover and iterpret the law.  The Internet now provides access to many of the tools necessary to at least discover the law and in some cases interpret it.  This will change the practice of law because for possibly the first time, lawyers will be dealing with informed consumers and that is very different from the sort of clientel lawyers typically see.

Legal academia needs to get in fornt of this shift and change the way it educates tomorrow's lawyers.  One step in the right direction would be to openly embrace the technology available to augment learning in the law school environment, to encourage students and faculty to use and interact with the tools that everyone else is or will be using to communicate, exchange ideas, and learn.

10:06:52 AM    comment []