[Posted: January 17, 1997, 6:30 a.m.]
This is an after-the-fact recap of Wednesday evening, January 15 -- what we did and why we did it.
It is designed to (a) help advance your grasp of what the entirety of the seminar is designed to do, (b) be a useful review and reminder for those who were there, as well as (c) a summary for those who were not.
1. The blank piece of paper. I opened with a blank legal pad. It was intended to be symbolic of the way a lawyer often begins a new assignment -- at least the way we are beginning this one. In real life, and law practice, often there are no "texts" or "readings" (aside from the ones you and I propose as we go along) where we can find "the answer." Indeed, it is you who must first come up with the questions. It was also a segue into the concept of . . .
2. "Constructivism." That's our pedagogical theory. A lot of our past in-school learning has involved "deconstructivism." That means taking something apart and looking at the pieces, whether dissecting a frog or Marbury v. Madison. Constructivism, by contrast, means putting something together, building something, creating a whole. Moreover, as a matter of skills, and student-teacher relationships, it is the student, not the professor, who is doing the construction. The professor assumes the role of "coach," "resource person," "editor," "guide" out of the wilderness. The student is engaged in self-instruction, through doing. (The conventional alternative is sometimes described as "a process whereby the notes of the professor become the notes of the students without passing through the mind of either.") As early example, I told of my junior high geometry teacher who coached us through a semester of writing our own text.
Note on the "frustration factor": This approach to education can produce prolonged, unrelieved frustration while confronting the unfamiliar. That is not my idea of a good learning experience -- although 10 or 20 minutes of it may be. You are encouraged to communicate with your "coach" and "resource person" when you seem to be hitting a brick wall with more pain than gain.
3. Law study and practice as liberal education. Because there is no "law" apart from factual context (with rare exceptions like "jurisprudence"), the study and practice of law both requires, and rewards with, a capacity to learn whole new fields in short order. I gave examples from my own life involving: the oil industry; steel, cement and airlines; shipping and ship building; telephone and television. You have experienced this already with the law school courses you've taken. And you're about to experience it again with this seminar.
4. Factual background required for seminar. In this seminar, we are dealing with businesses that are involved in a range of Information Age-related activities (hardware, software, services). (Getting a sense of what the full range of such businesses represents is one of our assignments, so I won't further elaborate it here.)
5. Blend of skills. The seminar experience offers each participant the opportunity to self-growth with regard to the exercise of (a) innovative thinking ("thinking outside the box," "new paradigms" and all that), (b) the research skills required when working with uncharted, unfamiliar materials, (c) specifically, gaining familiarity with the potential contribution of Internet resources and research techniques for law practice, (d) working cooperatively with a team of lawyers (rather than competitively), (e) participating in group discussion, (f) writing, (g) editing, and (h) presenting.
6. The setting, and its rationale. I provided a little background about the "Information Age" perspective (humankind having passed through the ages of foraging, agriculture, manufacturing, and services. "Ages" for this purpose being defined by what the majority, often over 90%, of what our species was doing of economic significance at any given point in historic time.) I asserted that the countries of Asia, especially southeast Asia and "the Pacific Rim," appear positioned to become as much as 50% of the market for U.S. firms' goods and services during the course of your professional lifetimes. That is the rationale for using an Asian setting for exploring the legal and public policy issues associated with Information Age business.
7. The exercises. We started off three individual/group exercises with the blank piece of paper. The questions we posed to ourselves were: (a) What are the countries of southeast Asia? (b) What are the categories (and examples) of information one would want to know about a country before doing Information Age business there? (c) What sources would one go to to find the answers to those questions? Note not only the substance of those exercises, but the procedure we used. There were no readings, references, lectures, class notes or commercial outlines to draw upon. It was just you, a blank piece of paper, and a writing implement. Note also that each of you responded; each did have something to write. (You know more than you think you do.) Note also, in doing that, you were drawing upon the sum total of your past knowledge, experience and skills -- legal and otherwise -- rather than a "deconstructionist" focus on some academic course materials. Finally, after you had each done your best at individual effort, we got our heads together, as a group, and came up with additional ideas, and syntheses, that none of us, individually, could have created. We worked as a team. Everyone can get credit for their individual work and contribution (there are no freeloaders); but everyone can also benefit from the work of other team members.
This memo does not describe the entirety of the seminar, of course. It just focuses on January 15th. Most especially, it does not deal at all with the assignments for January 22 and beyond. A good deal of time was spent on that, including a useful exchange regarding the research papers and their relation to the early Asia research. That will be written up later. And there is a separate memo posted on the CLS page regarding the immediate tasks and assignments.