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Using TECHNOLOGYTo Teach Effectively: Confessions of a Bleeding Edge Professor (Pg 2)
When the LCD projector panel became commercially available, and when laptop prices dropped into affordable range for personal use, it became feasible to load our reproduced documents onto a laptop's hard drive and then output them onto a screen through the panel, which sits on top of a conventional overhead transparency projector. The whole assembly was somewhat haphazard, however, and did not work satisfactorily unless we had available a high luminosity projector. Moreover, existing classrooms did not lend themselves well to this technology. If they had windows, the incoming light (in daytime), even on cloudy days, tended to wash out the screen image. In larger classes, sight angles in rooms like Walker and Andrews (the 130 seat tiered-row classrooms located in the Grant Auditorium wing of the law school) put some students at a disadvantage.
Nevertheless, some of us were excited enough about the technology to put up with these inconveniences and experiment with moving from paper to electronic texts. In the 1995-96 academic year, a number of extant hardcopy texts began to appear in electronic form, with Michie leading the way, followed by West and then Foundation. Michie's prominence was no accident. It is a sibling firm in a conglomerate put together by Reed Elsevier that includes FolioViews (a relational database system), Lexis-Nexis (for law and other databases), and various cite checking companies. The products of all these firms are effectively integrated and marketed by Lexis in a suite known as "Cffice for Legal Education," which enhances the value of the package by providing add-on attractions like law student forums (chat sites) and other inducements. Lexis now distributes "Cffice" free to students and faculty, relying on sales of its other products for revenue.
So how does an instructor today actually begin using an electronic casebook First, the law teacher must be backed by unstinting and competent technical support personnel. Few of us (I least of all) are technoids, and we depend on computer professionals to set our equipment up and to help us out with the inevitable technical difficulties. (These difficulties can range from the complex and incomprehensible to the mundane and embarrassing. Sometimes an RGB panel [Red Green Blue panel - a device to project large screen /images] simply will not lower from the ceiling like the well-behaved deus ex machina it is supposed to be. There's nothing we instructors can do about that. At other times, though, we simply forget to connect the screen output jack or something obvious like that, and then look like fools when a support person has to come in to correct such a banal and simple error.)
 
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