Using Technology To Teach Effectively: Confessions of a Bleeding Edge Professor

Professor Weicek with a "Teaching Cart

For several years now, members of the college of Law faculty have been pioneering in the use of computer technology for classroom teaching. Law schools generally have been laggards in adapting computers and other advanced technologies for classroom use, but Syracuse has begun to close the gap between the law school and other disciplines.

Like many other teachers, I have relied for decades on reproduced materials in my classes. In my legal history courses, I have compiled those materials as a "casebook." There is no published casebook, my own included (Hall, Wiecek, Finkelman, American Legal History: Cases and Materials, 2nd ed.), that satisfactorily meets my needs or that provides a good fit between off-the-shelf teaching resources and what I try to do in the classroom. So for several years I have used a customized collection of primary sources, mostly cases, to provide the bulk of readings for my courses. (Year after year, for a secondary source I continue to rely on the eminently satisfactory Kelly, Harbison, Belz The American Constitution, 7th ed. as a textbook that provides comprehensive background. Urofsky, A March of Liberty, would do just as well, being an excellent text in its own right. But I like to teach against the Belz text as a foil because it is grounded in ideological prepossessions different from my own, whereas Urofsky and I pretty much see eye to eye on controverted topics in constitutional history.)
Traditional photoreproduced materials are a nuisance, however, for instructor and student alike. They are bulky, costly, and inefficient. You cannot "add value" to them except in primitive ways like writing in their margins and interleaving other materials that you have copied elsewhere. They are inert, colorless, and inconvenient. Like other teachers, I had been looking for something that enabled students to interact more intimately and spontaneously with their primary sources.

Then along came the electronic casebook, or at least the idea of using computer technology to enhance traditional teaching methods in the classroom. Technology has been creeping along since Langdell's day, going from chalkboards to overhead transparency projectors, and then to the out-of-class CALI (Computer Assisted Legal Instruction) materials that students have used on discrete terminals for almost two decades now. Meanwhile, the computer demonstrated its power and versatility in legal research with the development of the Westlaw and Lexis databases, revolutionizing but not supplanting traditional "manual" legal research in books. The success of CALR (Computer Assisted Legal Research) in the law office and academy led many of us to wonder if we could adapt the computer's power, speed, and scope to classroom uses.