Technology Has Both Good and Bad Sides
by
John Paul Jones

Last spring, I succumbed to the siren's call of increased technology in my Constitutional Law class by preparing slides for projection on a big screen. I used Presentation by Corel, a software program virtually identical to PowerPoint. Slides for each session were certainly easy enough to create using that software. Within a week or so, my students had persuaded me to distribute after each class the file itself over our network, so that they did not have to write such extensive notes in class, and could integrate my slides into their outlines.

I am ambivalent about this experiment. Its most profound influence has been on the orderliness of my class. In first-year classes like Civil Procedure or Constitutional Law, I used to prepare each class knowing that, once we got going, the class might take me in a very different direction. Now I am confident that the students and I are completely subordinated to the slides and the order in which they appear on the screen. In Civil Procedure or Constitutional Law, I often found myself in the past teaching Corporations, Criminal Law, or Family Law because the facts of the case, or the substantive law entwined with the procedural issues, confused or distracted students. This is much less likely to happen now that our script is on the screen. I don't know that I like shooting from a script better than improv.

A colleague predicts that I will be discovered a much better teacher in this semester's student assessments because I have delivered the product visually and with greater internal structure (than, by the way, I think the law itself actually offers, legal realist that I am).

The more I use technology, the more I begin to feel like a corporate trainer. For a reason I cannot yet articulate, the image of a corporate trainer in my mind is at odds with the image of someone preparing lawyers.