On-line classroom technology: Kent College of Law puts course material on laptop computers

Ebony, April, 1995

For Edmund Greenidge and the other students at Chicago-Kent College of Law, the library never closes, help from classmates and professors is never far away and book bags are never crammed with bulky legal briefs.

That's because they are the first law students in the country to have most of their class materials on laptop computers. The school is also the first to get on-line with telephone technology that lets them converse with professors and classmates 24 hours a day and access books from the college's library at the touch of a button.

"Using my phone line at home, I can access just about everything," says Greenidge, 27, one of 34 students selected last fall to participate in the computer project. "And I don't have to carry all of those books around."

Integrating technology into legal education is something the school has wanted to do for some time. But the administration intensified those efforts after watching the attorneys nationwide with a computer on their desk increase from 7 percent in 1986 to 76 percent in 1993.

Now, with miles and miles of wire in place, Kent students can take notes, read case law, prepare outlines and research and draft legal writing assignments using their laptop computers at the more than 1,000 computer workstations and telephone lines placed throughout the school.

Students say this technology greatly enhances their ability to efficiently organize their research. Time once spent searching and arranging mounds of information can now be used analyzing and learning.

Greenidge says having the ability to get more information on a famous law case by simply pointing to it on his computer turns what would be little more than a fancy typewriter into a powerful research tool.

That's something Rosemary Shiels, director of the school's Center for Law and Computers, says she hears a lot from students.

"Many of my students tell me they don't need a library anymore," she says. "Their library can be pumped to them right over the telephone."