rebooting LRW

Professor Carrie Teitcher, at Brooklyn Law School has written an article on Rebooting Our Approach to Teaching Research: One Writing Program's Leap into the Computer Age.  It's available electronically via SSRN at:  http://ssrn.com/abstract=934688.  And here's the abstract:

"In the fall of 2005, Brooklyn Law School's Writing
Program significantly changed its approach to legal research
instruction and entered a new era. In order to make our research
lessons more effective and relevant to our students, we opted for
a fully integrated approach in which we emphasized the importance
of combining books, fee based legal research sources, and free
Internet sources into a comprehensive research strategy. These
changes acknowledge the realities of the computer age, the work
place, and our students' own research experiences which are
steeped in the Internet and computers. Eventually, we hope to
make our students more discerning consumers of legal research
and, ultimately, better analytical thinkers. With this new
approach we expect that students will fully embrace all available
tools while taking maximum advantage of all that today's computer
technology has to offer legal research instruction.

"In this article, I first describe the growth of computer research
technology at Brooklyn, some of the efforts we took to try to
engage the students in traditional book research, and why we
needed to make this latest change to the way we teach legal
research. I then describe the changes we made to our legal
research curriculum. My conclusion is that integrated legal
instruction which acknowledges the realities of today's
technology and computer culture engages our students, enhances
our credibility as teachers, and, most importantly, produces
willing and capable researchers who will consider all available
resources ranging from books, to fee based computer research
tools, to the Internet and its vast collection of free resources.
Ultimately, we will then be able to focus on what is most
important - synthesis and critical analysis of the law - so that
students will become better analytical thinkers."

(spl)