At John Palfrey's suggestion, I've started using the h2o rotisserie system for my cyberlaw class. Tonight the first posts are available for the class to read -- not the public, so I can't link to what the class has said. I also spent much of the day interviewing students for a fellowship program.  Here's my report.

It seems clear to me that large lecture classes are very good for conveying generalized information and preparing for the bar.  They're good for talking about legal reasoning.  They're good for letting you sense the mood of the room about a particular topic.  But they're not good for individual participation, really, because they're so inefficient.  Everyone has to listen to one-at-a-time comments (or the lecturer).  You can't take in more.  Your inner dialogue is always running -- "boy, that's a weird thing to say," or "huh, interesting," or "what's next, let's move on" -- but if you actually started to murmur all this you'd destroy the class.  Terribly inefficient in terms of communications.  Very few channels of real conversations.

Threads of posts may have some benefits along these lines.  You can mutter (constructively, within rules of posting etiquette) and add to what's going on.  You can have several simultaneous conversations about the subject.  You can hear an individual more clearly, without always being focused on whoever is at the front of the room.  But there are also downsides -- if you relied on posted threads for a law school class, it would be a hit-or-miss form of learning.  It's hard to get a sense of the room.  

In the interview sessions today, I was reminded yet again of how much you learn about someone and how much you can (perhaps) teach them when you talk to them one-on-one.  The sense of the room in this setting is the magical third entity created in a conversation between two people -- the shared channel, which can feel almost tangible.  But it doesn't scale -- it takes a lot to have faculty members sit and talk to a single student.  It doesn't happen frequently.

So perhaps a good new model course would be a combination of lecture, thread, and tutorial.  Or maybe just thread and tutorial.  Skip the lecture.  You could meet with the class as a whole a few times during the semester, providing themes and suggested readings; prompt active threaded/rated discussions; and meet personally twice with each student for an hour or so.  It's work for the teacher, but it's more of a 21st century kind of learning (combined with ancient tutorial methods).  Post modern law school life.