From the Daily Bruin:
Fourth-year history student Daniel Benji never used to miss lectures if he could help it. Only an emergency could have kept him away. But that was before BruinCast, a new service being tested in four classes this quarter, which videotapes lectures and puts them online for later viewing.
Now Benji is a little more ambivalent. "Instead of going to class, I watch the lecture (online)," he said. "It's just as good."
My thinking is that what's sauce to the goose is sauce to the gander. Instead of showing up at my assigned time, I could just record the webcast at a time and place of my own choosing.
Indeed, I wouldn't even have to leave home so to do. I could roll out of bed, record the webcast, and go back to sleep. (Contrary to popular opinion, that's not what I do currently ... well, not most days, anyway).
Indeed, I wouldn't even have to be in LA. I could move someplace like, say, Napa and telecommute. The research side of my job has been freed from the need for a specific physical location ever since Westlaw and Lexis became available on broadband connections. Webcasting would do the same for the teaching side.
Better still, since I would no longer be tied to a particular location, I could offer my services to any law school that wanted to outsource its corporate law teaching. Very cool.
But what about the good old Socratic method, you ask? These days, when I walk past law school classrooms, it seems like Socrates is doing most of the talking, so I don't regard that as a serious objections. Besides which, webcasting could be a two-way street, right?
