I experimented with a blog in a large law class this spring, but the results so far have been disappointing, not least because the technology doesn’t work well. In order to create a blog-based forum to which only (but all) enrolled students can post, I tried CALI’s Classcaster — but the submission plugin doesn’t seem to work with IE. Alas.
Today, via the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, I learned that my Pittsburgh colleague Luis von Ahn, at Carnegie Mellon (and recent recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship), uses a wiki (a TWiki, actually) to manage collaboration in his undergraduate course on “Great Theoretical Ideas in Computer Science.” I suspect that he’s not the only university faculty member to implement a class wiki. Applying the wiki model to law school teaching, though, might be new. Is it? I imagine dumping a lot of professor-side course content into a wiki (cases, statutes, other readings, with permission as necessary), and encouraging students to collaborate on things like case briefs, course outlines, responses to old exam questions and classroom and other hypotheticals, and role playing exercises. Is this workable? Sensible? Have others tried anything like this in law schools?