Neteracy

The Technology of Law, Bernard J. Hibbitts, 102 Law Libr. J. 101 (2010).

Neteracy – internet literacy; people learning to work, think, and express themselves in cyberspace.

Teaching our students neteracy (as much as we can ). Students may be net-native but they are not necessarily net-literate. They carry lots of gadgets and use many applications but there is so much “they don’t know, a great deal they take for granted and, in the absence of instruction, a great deal they haven’t tried or though through. On top of this, they’re hit with a style of law school pedagogy that largely delegitimizes what they do know and stuffs them back into the boxes of traditional learning.” p.106.

Reading on the internet is different from but similar in many ways to reading printed text.

• Gathering – looking in the right places. Students tend to think Google/Wikipedia do it all. Fail to look for encyclopedias, archives, blogs, social networks
• Filtering – challenge what they see, where does it come from, when, style of presentation. [Questions they tend not to ask consistently with “classic” legal materials print or electronic]
• Scanning – quickly and effectively with understanding and retention [Quality of the presentation is important, see Writing]
• Navigating – multi-directionality of web versus linear nature of print; need to have more of a sense of where you are going, how to get there, and how to get back [need tools to track research, save for later reading, organize into different trails]
• Comprehended – comprehension may be a shifting plan as “information on web pages and elsewhere continually appears, changes, and disappears. In other words neterate comprehension is pointedly dynamic, not definitive, and readers need to be able to cope with this kind of fluidity.” p.108.
• Evaluated – does comprehended information seem accurate, trustworthy, need verification. The researcher must accept responsibility for the critical analysis of sources.

Writing meaningful text for the web is very different than writing for print, particularly as compared to “legal writing”. Students need to learn to exploit the web for serious professional purposes.  Web pages are scanned so

• verbal constructions should be short
• few subordinate clauses
• points visually highlighted or bulleted
• important information up from as in newpaper lead paragraph style
• effective hyperlinking, limit digression or worst getting lost
• Design (layout, colors, font types) becomes more critical online and not usually thought about in print
• Construction/organization – breaking down large amounts of information into appropriate categories

JURIST.com – edited by students in UPitt course. Hibbitts believes law librarians are the ones to develop environments in which law students and new lawyers can develop their neteracy. Creating subject specific blogs where lawyers provide a service to the community and enhance their reputation as well as that of their firm.

I need to explore my idea of training students on use/application of online tools to build a professional portfolio. Taking briefs or papers and repackaging for the web, highlighting skills learned in class, through volunteer work, internships.