April 12, 2005

Let's encourage students to IM in the law school classroom.

This is a subject that came up and was batted about at lunch today. My colleague Asifa Quraishi said the students are already using the classroom WiFi to IM each other, and maybe it hasn't been so bad. We got going on the subject of how maybe we should outright encourage the students to IM, including sending tips and cues to a student who is engaged in Socratic dialogue with the lawprof. What's wrong with students pooling their expertise on the fly? The student doing the speaking is not rendered passive. He or she will still have to read the messages quickly and integrate them with existing knowledge. It could be lively and energizing. The students who aren't chosen to speak will have some way to express themselves, which might help them listen to the student who is speaking, and a spirit of community and collaboration might take hold. Am I wrong?

UPDATE: I'm getting a lot of interesting comments on this one, including some saying I'm being naive or foolish, but I see Glenn Reynolds agreed:
I actually do encourage [IM-ing] -- I figure that this way you've got several students thinking about the question seriously, when they might otherwise just be waiting to see if the student I've called on makes a fool of himself. How well it works depends on the class, and how extensively they tend to IM, but I do agree with the point.

Good point. If there is IM-ing and anyone is struggling to answer a question, everyone is implicated. The lawprof could say: "No one is offering you any help? So no one has any ideas?" All would have to take responsibility, instead of idling while the other student tries to speak.

Another thing we talked about at lunch is that all the students would get practice writing apt and pithy answers, as IM-ing trains you to do. I find this notion so appealing that I would like to see a technology that would allow me to ask a question of the whole class, require that every student enter a sentence or two answering, and then randomly display one answer on a screen in front of the class, which we could then discuss. You wouldn't need to know whose answer that was, and everyone would have made a go at typing out an answer, and I think that might put us in a nice position to begin a discussion.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Other technology, from an emailer:
Regarding your recent blogpost, I am a fan and a student at MSOE. IM is nice for class, but nothing beats Microsoft Onenote! After recently discovering the ability to “share” a note-taking page several of my friends joined with me to take down what is going on in class. Not only do we get a full audio recording, but we have triple or better overlap while taking notes that don’t miss any points. Oh, and the audio is linked to the notes, click on a word and have the audio automatically transfer you to that point in the recording.

As you know, MSOE is primarily engineering. Engineering notes are almost never strictly text and often make little sense with hastily drawn in margin notes about every little thing discussed. The only way to capture fully every diagram/handout/equation and still understand what the professor is actually talking about is to break down the responsibilities (often wordlessly) and focus on one aspect of the notes of the class, leaving your friends to take the other half. Often this means someone pastes in Visio diagrams while someone else uses a program like Mathtype.

There are a few difficulties with this approach…. Network access (wired or wireless works fine) must be present in the classroom. Sometimes formatting decisions must be made. Finally, the format is great at MSOE as laptops are standardized and handed out by the school itself. It would also help to have friends you are with between all your various classes. The only remaining problem is the cost of the program itself.

It was really nice to see such subjects as technology in class discussed by professors. I’ve been using this feature throughout this quarter and I almost with I wasn’t graduating this year, given how easy notetaking became.
Sounds great! I guess in the future there will be no excuse for not getting everything down. Once they can't write "Althouse talked too fast" on the evaluations, just think how fast I might talk.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Aspiring Lawyer responds and points out some software that might be just what I'm looking for. I've got a request in to our tech guy about this. I would love to bypass the Socratic agonies and get everyone answering everything!

16 comments:

Mark Daniels said...

I think that this is a very cool idea, especially for students in graduate programs.

After my undergraduate career at Ohio State, I was a student at Trinity Lutheran Seminary. There, I was enrolled in the four-year graduate program for the Master of Divinity degree. One of my professors, Bruce Schein, was particularly demanding, using an interrogatory style that involved putting lots of fragments of evidence together. I can well imagine that students IMing one another could, collaboratively, resolve many of the issues and problems with which Schein presented us.

Jim Gust said...

Though I can support the idea of IMming to the student speaking, what of all the IMs among the students about tonight's dinner plans and other unrelated comments? Isn't there a risk of the class losing focus?

Jordan Golson said...

I use IM in a few of my classes, we use it to make fun, criticize, compliment and plan our strategery for responses. It's very useful.

RFTR said...

Someday we're all going to have wireless internet anywhere we go with our laptops, and lawyers will be able to use the same process in a courtroom... why not give them a head start now?

The Traveler said...

This all sounds quite useful, and could be a great benefit, but whats to stop these students from passing information say, during a test or exam? I see it happen alot at my school, and its causing some big problems.

Ann Althouse said...

Sam: During an exam the students have special software that blocks their access everything but a very simple word processing program. Actually, at my school, we don't allow computers for exams (yet).

The Traveler said...

Ah, that would solve that problem. Wish my school would get it. All laptops, cell phones, palm pilots, you name it, are being confiscated, but your school sounds a bit more up to date than mine.

Jinnmabe said...

I use IM all the time in my law classes and I think it's helpful. I've seen comments in a group IM conversation mentioned in class tons of times, and yes, it's after we've refined it a little bit. You're not going to stop them from doing it without banning the net altogether so why not encourage them to use it for good?

Mike said...

It seems to me that the most important point is that the professor integrates it into his or her method of teaching and teaching material. As examples, I offer up two different classes at my high school (we have a laptop program and school wide wi-fi).

My government teacher takes advantage of the internet a lot in our class; he also asks a lot of questions directed at students and encourages lively discussion. Usually, the "smart" students end up having a side discussion over IM; this side discussion will work its way into the verbal discussion.

My English teacher still uses the internet, but not to the extent of the government teacher. Also, her teaching style is not nearly as discussion oriented (partially due to the material, I suppose). Anyway, the end result is that more often than not, IM simply becomes a way to amuse oneself during a boring lecture. We got the entire class in a chat room a few times last semester during a particularly boring lecture, but we definitely weren't discussing the life and times of John Milton. :-p

It seems to me that it is wholly up to the teacher as to what path the class takes. Granted, some subject material is more receptive to this than others, and there are always students who will misuse wi-fi regardless of the class, but on the whole, teachers who make an effort to integrate the internet and the capabilities of wi-fi into the classroom will be more successful in educating their students.

Ann Althouse said...

John (my dear son): you know I do prefer to take volunteers or to lecture, so this system would help me to branch out into the reluctant sector of the class. I don't enjoy hanging one student out to dry. I just want to engage people and make them care about the subject. If IM-ing could buoy everyone up, I'd like it. The particular interlocutor would still have to put sentences together and be rational, and the follow up questions would test that person and keep him or her on his or her toes. And I'm thinking the mutual support among students would be nice. The chosen student wouldn't have to think: I'm singled out; everyone is judging me. That student could think: all my colleagues are supporting me, in this joint endeavor -- understanding the law.

Old Patriot said...

Several points:
I'm much older than most students - almost 60. I've also been a "student" for most of my life. I had a history professor (Richar Chardkoff) in 1967-68 that used to lecture for three hours, almost non-stop. Note-taking was ESSENTIAL, since half of what he talked about wasn't in the textbook, or in the outside reading (these were 400-level US history classes). I still have my notebooks from those classes. IM, voice-conversion, and shared notes would have been a GODSEND! Even a computer would have been great - I can type three times faster than I can write, even with the nerve damage I have today. And those early notes are readable, but just barely, and only because I can remember (once I get started) what was being discussed.

A side note: Thanks, Ann, for instituting comments again. It saves me from having to email you two or three times a week. Secondly, I found Dr. Chardkoff's email address online recently, and we've corresponded several times now. In my opinion, the Internet is the greatest invention since fire!

Old Patriot said...

Several points:
I'm much older than most students - almost 60. I've also been a "student" for most of my life. I had a history professor (Richard Chardkoff) in 1967-68 that used to lecture for three hours, almost non-stop. Note-taking was ESSENTIAL, since half of what he talked about wasn't in the textbook, or in the outside reading (these were 400-level US history classes), but would be on the mid-term and final exams. I still have my notebooks from those classes. IM, voice-conversion, and shared notes would have been a GODSEND! Even a computer would have been great - I can type three times faster than I can write, even with the nerve damage I have today. And those early notes are readable, but just barely, and only because I can remember (once I get started) what was being discussed.

A side note: Thanks, Ann, for instituting comments again. It saves me from having to email you two or three times a week. Secondly, I found Dr. Chardkoff's email address online recently, and we've corresponded several times now. In my opinion, the Internet is the greatest invention since fire!

Jonathan Dresner said...

I'm not sure that a majority of my students own computers, much less laptops. I get an awful lot of handwritten homework, still (though I haven't gotten anything produced on a typewriter for five years), and a fair number of my students depend pretty heavily on the school computer labs and printers.

Are you folks talking about computer lab classrooms, or are your students just better equipped?

Mellow-Drama said...

I am a law student currently IMing in Secured Transactions. Let me tell you it has saved more than a few people this semester. It can be misused -- in Property, I had a friend who would inevitably IM me whenever I was called on and write things like "Everyone thinks you sound stupid," etc. but it was all in good fun.

The IMing/chat room idea is better than what goes on now, which is a lot of Solitaire or web surfing. At least with IM, people would be reasonably paying attention to the subject matter at hand, rather than reading and responding to blog posts. :-)

Ann Althouse said...

Hmmm.... I suppose some people are reading these comments while in class.

DeanSMS said...

Or, some of us were reading these comments when we should have been researching some point of law. What the heck, my lawyer-clients don't use IM anyway.