CyberOne started yesterday at HLS, and today I had the opportunity to attend the second lecture. (The Extension School / Second Life class has no formal kickoff, though the courseware, wiki, and other websites went live this weekend). I haven’t been in a law school class since 2002, so sitting in the classroom again was a refreshing reminder of how things “normally” work in formal education.
One thing that struck me right away, of course, was the physicality of it all. The typical law school classroom is set up as an ampitheatre with the professor front and center. It assumes that the professor will be teaching in lecture format — and since the tables and chairs are bolted down, it’s very hard to overcome that assumption. Lani Guinier, probably among my professors the one who worked hardest to change this top-down class dynamic, tried to get us to work in pairs and groups, but the chairs are definitely not made for talking peer-to-peer. We often found it necessary to ditch the seating area altogether and switch to sitting on the desks, the aisles, and the leftover spaces in the room.
What’s fascinating to me is that, at least from our experience a few weeks ago, the lecture-style format actually encouraged more cross-chatting in There, in contrast to real life. Or perhaps that’s not entirely a contrast. What I also saw today is that most students are multi-tasking in their chairs. Decades ago students passed notes; in our time, they surf the web and IM (one of my classmates also played Mike Tyson’s Punchout.) In theory, then, students in the relative anonymity of a lecture audience can cross-chat as they would in There, Second Life, or WebEx. In reality, while it was interesting to watch a student look up Charlie Nesson’s Wikipedia entry (today’s topic being wikis), most of the students who were multi-tasking were having personal conversations and keeping up with news or sports. Further, I should qualify that only about half of the class brought laptops, and a good number weren’t using them.
Is it possible for a class to use a chat-based backchannel productively? I know Charlie and other professors had experimented with it in some of his classes back in 2002, and it’s now de rigour at many conferences. I also know that many law professors are considering banning laptops altogether from their lectures. It’ll be interesting to see how this shapes up in the next few years.
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