Spring Semester Tech Happenings

• CPS is alive in Criminal Law again – a larger class, a bigger room but otherwise the same as last year.
                                            
• We are videoconferencing with George Washington Unversity School of Law the Government Ethics class each week to 4 students who are taking the class but are externing in DC.

   

• We have sent in our application to be a part of iTunes U.

• We will be demoing Adobe Connect this semester with the Legal Profession class in hopes of using it for distance learning in the fall.

Legal Education Conference in UK

 Steve Friedland and Catherine Dunham presented a session entitled “When technology meets engaged learning: a critique of legal education in the 21st century” at the recent Learning in Law Conference. They discussed Elon’s engaged approach to legal learning and how the law school is confronting established problems, such as the use of laptop computers and other technology in the classroom and a lack of diagnostic an formative feedback, in new ways.

Friedland’s presentation focused on the advantages of using engaged and active learning methodology in all aspects of legal education. His remarks combined research on the ways people learn with the cognitive and practice-ready objectives of a law school.

Dunham talked about the interface between technology and legal education learning. She presented data to demonstrate how student learning has adapted to modern technology. She also sampled methods faculty can use to actively engage technology-savvy students in the classroom.

Steve is a contributor to our Best Practices blog.  May be he will post more info on his presentation.

Class Blogging

Last semester The Gender and Law class blogged using the Forum option in TWEN.  This semester the Intenational Business Transactions class will be blogging at http://ibt_news_blog.classcaster.org 

Using the “Submit a Story” feature in Classcaster, the professor is asking students in this seminar class to post or comment on current events related to the course and even find relevant links.  The professor will then publish her students’ posts for others in the class to read and comment on.

Congrats Professor Ota!  The blogosphere is growing at Albany Law School!

“Legal Education in the Age of Cognitive Science and Advanced Classroom Technology”

Interesting article by Deborah Merritt at Ohio State U Moritz College of Law that focuses mainly on the use of PowerPoint but can be applied to other technolgies.

 Link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1007800

Abstract:  Cognitive scientists have made major advances in mapping the process of learning, but legal educators know little about this work. Similarly, law professors have engaged only modestly with new learning technologies like PowerPoint, classroom response systems, podcasts, and web-based instruction. This article addresses these gaps by examining recent research in cognitive science, demonstrating how those insights apply to a sample technology (PowerPoint), and exploring the broader implications of both cognitive science and new classroom technologies for legal education. The article focuses on three fields of cognitive science inquiry: the importance of right brain learning, the limits of working memory, and the role of immediacy in education. Those three areas are fundamental to understanding both the effective use of new classroom technologies and the constraints of more traditional teaching methods.

Thought Sparker

“I’m getting tired of hearing people continue to ask for the evidence that technology helps students learn. It doesn’t matter. We know — that good teachers help students learn. We need technology in every classroom and in every student and teacher’s hand, because it is the pen and paper of our time, and it is the lens through which we experience much of our world.” –  from http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/2006/05/22/curriculum-is-dead/

 On this note -
We now have technology in E115: Tandberg Media Place

 

 Faculty can connect their laptops and project content, use a document camera, play videos and DVDs and VIDEOCONFERENCE!!

 We also have technology in E117: SmartBoard 3000

Faculty can connect their laptops and project content, use a document camera, play videos and DVDs and ANNOTATE this content.