Bringing Transliteracy to Legal Education
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To be transliterate is to be able to read, write, and interact across a wide range of platforms, tools, and media. This talk looked at the way legal education is largely disconnected from the demands of transliteracy and ways we can think about incorporating the principles of transliteracy to our teaching.
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Bringing Transliteracy to Legal Education
- 1. Bringing Transliteracy to Legal Education Jill Smith Georgetown University Law Center @jaslawlib
- 2. “Transliteracy is the ability to read, write, and interact across a range of platforms, tools, and media.” Bobbi Newman, 2010
- 15. Source: American Bar Association 2014 Legal Technology Survey Report
- 19. Image Credits (Images used under CC share-alike license unless otherwise indicated) • Bobbi Newman: http://www.librarianbyday.com (by permission) • College: https://flic.kr/p/8ByHJY • Mortarboard: https://github.com/FortAwesome/Font-Awesome/issues/2168 • Supreme Court: https://flic.kr/p/pjUb4N • All other icons provided by http://iconmonstr.com/ • "IOS 8 Homescreen" by www.apple.com. Via Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IOS_8_Homescreen.png#mediaviewer/File:IOS_8_Homescreen.png • "OS X Yosemite Desktop" by Source (WP:NFCC#4). Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:OS_X_Yosemite_Desktop.png#mediaviewer/File:OS_X_Yosemite_Desktop.pn g • "Douglas adams portrait cropped" by Douglas_adams_portrait.jpg: michael hughes from berlin, germanyderivative work: Beao - Douglas_adams_portrait.jpg. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Douglas_adams_portrait_cropped.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Douglas_ad ams_portrait_cropped.jpg • Record player: https://flic.kr/p/k85TYH • Compact disc: https://flic.kr/p/2ETG7n • iPods: https://flic.kr/p/tf5gR • iPod shuffles: https://flic.kr/p/a1Ag4h • William Gibson: "William Gibson by FredArmitage" by Frederic Poirot - Fred Armitage at Flickr. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://tinyurl.com/kqhh9ol • Texting: https://flic.kr/p/oB2AVC • Alvin Toffler: By Vern Evans (Flickr: Alvin Toffler 02) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons • Death by Powerpoint: https://flic.kr/p/6mDHa9
Notas do Editor
- Have you ever learned there is a word for a concept you had thought about but had never clearly articulated? Usually stories about this sort of discovery culminate in epiphanies about emotional states and foreign words that describe them such as the Portuguese “saudade” or German “Schadenfreude.” For me, it was in 2010 when I attended the “Internet Librarian” conference. The word I learned had a profound effect on the way I think about education.
- At this conference, I heard Bobbi Newman say these words, and thought, “Transliteracy: there’s a name for that skill I think is so important!”
- Transliteracy as a concept has been widely discussed at the undergraduate level for about a decade.
- And indeed, undergraduates are frequently expected to “read, write, and interact across a wide range of platforms, tools, and media.” Among other things, they create video and audio, give presentations, and code websites.
- Similarly, in practice…
- …attorneys may have to give presentations to attract clients or critique corporate clients’ investor presentations. They may use e-discovery systems and electronic evidence technologies to ferret out information about their clients’ cases and present it to juries. They take depositions that are recorded and replayed on a variety of platforms. And they may engage in lobbying or advocacy work that means they have to reach out to a variety of constituencies using a variety of methods.
- But in between college and practice, when they are in law school, for the most part, they write. Well, they often write more like this. Well… all too often it seems to look like this. While writing is crucial – and it is frequently a component of the other types of media I have mentioned, as I have already noted, it can be an incomplete picture of an attorney’s work today.
- So why do we need to ask law students to get experience in using tools that are not Word or Pages? We see our students using technology every day with reasonable facility and we assume, like those armchair anthropologists who write cover stories for Time magazine, that there is something inherently different about this generation. We let ourselves off the hook to educate them or ourselves more completely by calling them “Digital Natives” and assuming they already know all about technology; or even more fancifully and possibly dangerously, we buy into the notion that their brains are somehow wired so differently that they don’t need this sort of education.
- But these students were born into a world where technology was shaped by a design ethos that rewards experimentation and play – many systems, especially legacy applications or complex legal research tools, are not as intuitive or easy to use (does everybody remember DOS? Its children still walk among us).
- …and when students who are used to easy mastery of technology run up against these sorts of systems…
- …they frequently get frustrated and quit or move sideways to something that is less frustrating, but also potentially less effective. In practice, this behavior can have potentially serious ethical implications.
- On a very prosaic level, think of part of the issue this way: many of our students barely use their telephones to talk on, but frequently to text or communicate via images. Without experience in transliterate ways of communicating, they are going to have difficulty in conducting a telephone interview, writing a professional yet informal e-mail, or even identifying which sort of communication is appropriate in any given circumstance. If college, life experience, or work has not taught them these skills before, we need to be teaching them now.
- In addition, technology will continue to change. The science fiction humorist Douglas Adams said: 1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal; 2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it; 3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really. But let’s just think about another fact for a moment: all of these technologies currently exist side by side. And the same is true for a lot of different technological methods of communication and legal practice.
- Here is another quote to think about, the science fiction author William Gibson famously said, “The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.”
- So imagine this: a litigator may be in a courtroom on Monday that has the most up to date evidence presentation system and on Tuesday she might be down the hall participating in a hearing via a remote videoconference linkup. On Friday she might be in the very same courthouse, but in a courtroom that has not been allocated the budget for any technological updates at all. By moving just a few yards down the hall, she has gone from practicing in 2015 to practicing in 1915. And yet she will have to be effective in all of these scenarios.
- So I would argue that we are shortchanging our students by not giving them exposure to these technologies while they are still in school and can experiment, fail safely (and cheaply), and see how they can be integrated into practice – not just so they have some facility in using them, but so they have experience in making grounded, rational decisions about when and how to use them. My hypothetical litigator, if she is really good, not only knows how to effectively use those technological tools, she also knows how to select the most effective one and when to leave them entirely alone depending on a vast number of variables, including what she has to communicate and who her audience is.
- What can we do to start today? Clearly this talk is too short to get into many specifics, but here are a few small ideas: exhibit competence – use tech in the classroom with style and clear intent (in other words, don’t give a word-heavy death by PowerPoint lecture). Encourage your students to look into the Suffolk/Flaherty legal tech audit to give them a wake-up call as to the demands of practice. And in general, think about other ways you can assess or evaluate students that has them use different media or methods make an argument or convince. Get them used to the idea that they are going to have to make some (sometimes hard) choices about the best way to do that.
- Alvin Toffler, the author of Future Shock, noted that: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” These skills are also needed to be truly transliterate and “read, write, and interact across a wide range of platforms, tools, and media.” This process is going to continue for our students’ entire careers. And we can do them a great service by starting them on this learning, unlearning, and relearning curve as an integral part of their legal education.
- Thank you.