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Is Chicago Law a Nest of Luddites?

The Chicago Daily Law Bulletin reports that University of Chicago law professor Saul Levmore has “removed Internet access in most of its classrooms.” (HT: Smith) UCLA has had the same policy for a while. Personally, I think it’s pretty silly. The story continues:

When Levmore proposed to the faculty in early March that the school might cut off Internet access in most classrooms, some faculty responded that computers should be banned, he said.

Some professors believe that students who take notes on laptops during lectures interfere with their own learning.

“Back in the day when we took notes by hand,” Levmore recalled, “some people took fewer notes and learned more.”

He said some law professors already have “no computer” rules during class.

But he said some students convincingly argued that note taking on laptops is a help to them.

The heart of his decision to prevent Web surfing in class, he said, is that the students “are going to go out to law firms and other settings where they’re going to miss these years where they had opportunities for human interaction and contemplating ideas.

“And that’s partly what the classroom is for. They don’t realize the value of what they’re being distracted from. That’s really what I believe in most.”

BTW, what is the deal with one-sentence paragraphs? It’s like all journalists have turned into Bill Plaschke.

Anyway, returning to the merits, I hate to break it to Dean Levmore, but texting or web surfing or what have you is just the up to date version of an age-old issue. Back in the day when I was one of his students at Virginia, there were times when we didn’t pay all that much attention in class. And while we didn’t have laptops, we had lots of other ways to distract and amuse ourselves. Crosswords. Turkey bingo. Day dreaming. Passing notes. Doodling. Writing letters. Editing law review articles. Doing the reading for another class. Hiding a book inside your case book. When I’ve sat in on my colleagues’ classes, I’ve observed the behaviors about which Levmore complains. I don’t think my students are any more distracted than I was back “in the day.”

In the second place, the current generation of students is different than mine in one important respect. For them, multi-tasking is a way of life. Staying connected 24/7 via text messaging, IMs, and email is preceived as an inherent right. Gordon Smith observes:

Yesterday my son brought home his high school’s newspaper, and the front page featured tips for texting during class. Under the table. Behind the textbook. Exactly what you would expect. Apparently, the only teachers in the universe who would be surprised at this subterfuge all happened to end up at the University of Chicago Law School! What will they do when they discover law students engaged in precisely this behavior? (Ban mobile phones!) Or, worse yet, when they discover that students have equipped their laptops with mobile broadband? (That’s it, we are banning all electronic devices!)

Smith concludes, I think correctly, that “the problems accompanying laptops in the classroom are behavioral, not technological.” (Candid admission: I use my iPhone in precisely these ways during faculty meetings.)

Chicago’s trying to force legal education back into the Kingsfield model. A smarter solution would be trying to figure out how to leverage these behaviors. After all, our students aren’t going to stop multi-tasking when they get out in the workforce. Indeed, this week’s Economist has a special report on nomads:

Urban nomads have started appearing only in the past few years. Like their antecedents in the desert, they are defined not by what they carry but by what they leave behind, knowing that the environment will provide it. Thus, Bedouins do not carry their own water, because they know where the oases are. Modern nomads carry almost no paper because they access their documents on their laptop computers, mobile phones or online. Increasingly, they don’t even bring laptops. Many engineers at Google, the leading internet company and a magnet for nomads, travel with only a BlackBerry, iPhone or other “smart phone”. If ever the need arises for a large keyboard and some earnest typing, they sit down in front of the nearest available computer anywhere in the world, open its web browser and access all their documents online.

Elsewhere in the report we learn that:

James Ware, a co-founder of the Work Design Collaborative, a small think-tank, says that nomadic work styles are fast becoming the norm for “knowledge workers”. His research shows that in America such people spend less than a third of their working time in traditional corporate offices, about a third in their home offices and the remaining third working from “third places” such as cafés, public libraries or parks. And it is not only the young and digitally savvy. At 64, Mr Ware considers himself a nomad, and accesses the files on his home computer from wherever he happens to be.

Law firms doubtless will resist these trends. Law firms are incredibly slow in adopting both new technologies and new approaches to human resources. Just as Chicago is trying to perpetuate the Kingsfieldian style of legal education, big law firms are trying to perpetuate the 1980s Wall Street model of lawyering. Just as Canute was unable to keep the sea from rolling in, however, these institutions will find that the tides keep coming. They’ll need to adapt or die.

I don’t know yet how to leverage the technologies that facilitate urban nomadism to improve law school teaching. But it’s an issue about which I’ve been thinking a lot. In small classes, I’ve experimented with using group blogs instead of traditional research papers. I’m thinking about having students build wikis. I make PowerPoint slides and audio recordings from every class available on a course website that my students can access from anywhere. I’m looking at using personal response hardware to make PowerPoint-based lectures more interactive. Indeed, since a lot of my classes are 100-130 students, I think the latter offers a way to involve more students simultaneously than is possible with the traditional oral Socratic method.