LESSONS FROM THE WEB

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In this monthly column, law professors and guest columnists comment on the many academic opportunities and challenges presented by Web technology.

As with all JURIST columns, you're invited to Talkback. This month...
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Hi-Tech Law School: The Suffolk Experience
Professor Lisle Baker
Suffolk University School of Law

As many readers of this column know first hand, Suffolk University Law School's $70 million newly built 300,000 square foot Sargent Hall at Suffolk University Law School was the first East Coast site for the annual conference on Computer Aided Legal Instruction (CALI) this last June. You may even have read in the conference brochure:

"It is a stunning facility with a tremendous technological infrastructure. Every classroom wired for data and video, thousands of network ports, touchscreen room controls for everything from projection to closing the blinds. You will be impressed and sick with envy after you see what Suffolk has built. Take the virtual tour at http://www.law.suffolk.edu/video/index.html
Many conference attendees had the chance to use the new technology as presenters, and those presentations were digitally recorded and are available on the CALI website, including one designed to show some of how we use the facility. (In addition to the virtual tour described above, the presentation by Professors Avery, Blum and Franco of the Suffolk faculty can be found here).

How did we acquire this facility?

It began almost twenty years ago when our then Librarian, Prof. Ed Bander, generously donated his large corner office to create a computer lab of ten IBM PCs so I could teach an experimental course involving the legal application of computers. His act of generosity gave us our first computer lab. By the time it came to plan our new building in the early 1990s, we had visited a number of law schools and tried to learn from their experiences as well as attended the ABA conferences on law school construction.

I chaired the the faculty Building and Space Committee when we planned our new building, and in the process sought advice from colleagues, students, alumni and also from those more familiar than we with the new technology: staff from our Library (where our webmaster works), Computer Services, Media Services, Registrar, etc. We also paid attention to non-electronic issues.

For example, all classrooms seating 60 or more are tiered in a deep horseshoe configuration that allows faculty to move around and students to see each other as well as the instructor. Classroom seats are individually adjustable rolling chairs, and all classrooms are accessible to people with disabilities. Lighting can be preset at different levels of illumination for projection on screen or for lecture. We have slots for name cards to help faculty and students in large classes get to know each other more easily.

On the technology side, here is what we now have available at Suffolk:

  • Classrooms where students can see and hear high quality projections of images from broadcast or taped video, other classrooms (even from across the country), images or evidence from a digital document camera, or from computers, be they showing Power Point or Web site content. Simple touch screens located in each classroom permit all instructors to control room environment and technical operations, from lowering the window shades or the lights to operating the cameras, with some preset defaults for lighting for different uses. (In technical terms all this is accomplished with such things as Pentium III computers mounted underneath a teaching station, Logitec air mice, flat panel monitors (mounted on a flexible arm on top of the teaching station so they can be moved out of the way), Bose sound, Sharp Video projectors, AMX touch panels, and Picture Tel codecs (the devices that turn video into digital phone signals and vice versa).

  • High speed data network connections at every classroom and library seat (and even booths in the cafeteria) to the web running over a Multi-Gigabit Ethernet backbone which provides users with switched high speed (10/100Mbps) full duplex connectivity to 2900 ports within the Law School. Additionally, we have implemented BGP (Boarder Gateway Protocol), and Internet routing protocol, allowing connection to two Internet service providers to achieve redundancy and more balanced loads.

  • A collaborative learning classroom where up to 65 students in one class can see an instructor in another city and he or she in turn can see and carry on a conversation with them since each seat is miked and followed by one of 3 broadcast quality cameras.

  • 300 Pentium computers available for faculty, staff and student use and high speed printers for assisting online research including 7 computer labs.

  • A head-end media control center which allows upgrades of equipment around existing wiring infrastructure as well as digitized video, satellite downlinks, packetized data, etc. The control room links every classroom to the media system, and also has its own digital television studio. Having a central facility allows equipment upgrades at one rather than multiple locations as the technology improves. At the same time, where more flexibility is occasionally needed, we have portable classroom video players as well since it is sometimes easier to switch multiple videos in class than programming them through the head end.

  • A simulation seminar classroom with six adjacent small breakout rooms in the law library where students can engage in negotiations, mediations, depositions, or other interactive legal activities. These can be simultaneously observed, advised, and videotaped for later review by the instructor in the seminar classroom next door or by the students themselves at a later time. (This facility has a closet of 7 video recorders installed next to the teaching station so the instructor can exchange tapes easily during the class. Also, unlike other classrooms which are hardwired, the tables in these seminar and breakout rooms are not connected to the network so they can be moved around as needed for simulation or demonstration purposes.) When not in use, these rooms are available for student study groups or simply quiet study.
To the best of my knowledge, no other law school yet has the depth and breadth of this capability. So if we built it, did they come? Have faculty and students made use of what we have? That has emerged more slowly, and we have found that the process is incremental, with one faculty member deciding to try something he or she has heard of to solve a specific pedagogical problem. While we have had some classes for faculty, what seems to work best is one-on-one instruction, as well as learning from the experience of colleagues.

We have also found that staff support needs to be as good as the technology. For example, even the best laid plans can go awry, so one button on the touchscreen in each classroom is "Call Media Services" which activates a pager carried by the Media Services technician on call. Each classroom also has a telephone to allow easy communication within the building and beyond if necessary.

In working to advance our technological agenda, the Dean appointed a faculty Legal Education and Technology Committee which I now chair. Again, following our planning experience, we routinely invite our technical support staff to join our discussions, which range from how to use what we have to what we need to consider acquiring in order to stay up to date. (For example, our Committee recommended replacing our analog document cameras after only two years because the newer digital models were so much better at print reproduction.)

One unexpected dividend is how much the students have begun to use the new technology. For example, in my seminar on law practice management, students make presentations and routinely use Power Point or show off a web page they have designed. The technical capacity we have has also made it relatively easy for faculty to try out online course programs such as TWEN, Blackboard, and Examsoft. It also allows us to use more specialized software such as Negotiator Pro and of course the varied CALI exercises.

As may be apparent, we are wired more than wireless. We don't view wireless technology as irrelevant; indeed we use it in places where technology may not be as actively used, such as faculty meeting rooms or remote portions of the library. While wireless equipment can well manage such things as e-mail, our technical staff report that while improving, it is not yet robust enough to handle the video and other traffic we routinely send over our high-bandwidth wired network. They also report more technical concerns about privacy, interference (since we are a large downtown law school near lots of other users of wireless technology), power output, line-of-sight issues, and for video streaming, problems such as latency times, congestion and picture quality.

Technology at Suffolk University Law School is becoming an integral part of our program of legal education. We invite everyone interested to come to Suffolk University and see our world class facility for themselves.

© 2001 by Lisle Baker. All rights reserved.
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 The views expressed in this column are solely those of its author, and do not reflect those of JURIST, its Advisory Board, its staff or its host institutions.
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