The Tools Team

Topic Owners: Jason + Michelle

"[Videoconferencing] is not just the next thing. It's better than being there." - Rick Shriner of Apple, talking about "Quicktime Conferencing" in 1995.

Fourteen years have passed since that statement, and - while we've augmented IIF with a course wiki and additional high-tech tools each week - we still bothered to get together in person for two hours a week, and we expended effort and money bringing terrific outside guests into our classroom. So, while we met once a week in the real world, we used a lot of different tools to augment these interactions.

Indeed, incorporating new technology tools and assessing their value was one of the goals of this course (for a list of tools that members of the course discussed during a pre-meeting for the course, see here. As such, our job was to occasionally step back and examine the tools we were using to see if they added to the in-person experience, detracted from it, or went beyond it. We also tried to get people to think about the audience for their sessions and for this seminar in general: if we were to incorporate new technology into each week's session, who were the intended beneficiaries? The students in the seminar? Other law students? Future students? The general net-connected public at large? Freida, the hat lady on Seesmic?

Once we got our operation up-and-running, we had two mini-discussions about the use of Twitter and then about Seesmic (in fact, the discussions were far too mini, in our opinion - but for more on how we think we did our jobs and how we think others can do our jobs better than we did, see our not-so-secret Teacher's Manual here). We then led a final, hour-long breakfast recap session that was more wide-ranging and included a few points of comparison to other organization's practices, like those of TED, which we based an introductory podcast around.

This page is an attempt to synthesize and reflect on some of the ideas that emerged out of those sessions, but we've also created pages with a lot more specific information on "Twitter in the Classroom", "Seesmic", and "Lessons From TED". In sum, in our ongoing quest for meta-ness, those three pages represent our specific reflections on certain tools other groups actually used during the course, this page reflects on those reflections, and the Teacher's Manual reflects on reflecting about those reflections. Got it?