Things should get exciting in the fall. According to Frantz Merine, Director of Information Technology, CLS is making major improvements to the CLS online interface. The upgrades should include blogs and wikis for any student groups that want them.

My friends on the student senate hope that a school-wide Wiki could improve student collaboration among law students. They would like our help, since we know how to make a Wiki succeed or fail.

Elliott Ash and I are building a "mock wiki" over the summer. We are using this Wiki to build the backbone for the school-wide Wiki that gets released in late August. When school starts, we will import the "mock Wiki" into the "real wiki".

You may register as a user from the main page. Invite your friends to sign up too. If you want to get more involved, email me or elliott.t.ash@gmail.com, and we will grant you administrator access to the mock web. Please experiment boldly.

Here are some examples of how this Wiki could work:

• Every teaching assistant (or cohort of TA's under a professor) can form a class page. It could have a sign-up list for a daily note-taker, just like we had. We can write software that sends an email reminding the student who is to take notes the next day.
• The teaching assistants can also post handouts there.
• Upperclassmen can post their outlines during the year -- and students can rank the notes.
• The "User's Guide to Law School" can be just what it says -- a place where upperclassmen can explain to 1Ls how law school works.

For many of us, Eben's Wiki seemed more like a poorly supervised playground (and I was the punk kid throwing stones). But we also glimpsed the potential of a well-managed Wiki to make learning more collaborative, if it is well organized.

-- AndrewGradman - 19 Jul 2008