Answers to a few questions I posed a UT friend of my wife who just completed 1L.

[Felsen]

I'm just summarizing the questions and answers.  I tend to be verbose when I don't restrict myself.

Q:  Is a floppy drive necessary for the laptop?
A:  Not needed.  She doesn't have a floppy on her laptop and has done just fine.

Q:  Mock Trial/Moot Court, when, how?
A:  Moot Court can be done all three years of school.  Mock Trial is only done the 2nd and 3rd years.  The 1L competition starts in the Spring.  It coincides with the Brief Writing class.  You can get into the competition without being in the class, but it helps to be in the class when trying to get into the competition.

Q:  What kind of forums/message boards are there for the Law Students?
A:  The pre-admissions boards shut down once school start, and everyone associates in their mentor and small groups.  She didn't mention any other message boards we get access to, so if there are any that are used, they probably aren't as well frequented as I myself would like.

[LitDoc]

Re: message boards -- maybe this is when the MySpace group will come alive? 

[margee]

baff

[LitDoc]

Blackboard is an education tool similar to WebCT (they're competitors). Usually, the discussion board functions are tied to particular courses -- to be used for out-of-class discussion among students, and theoretically that discussion would be on-topic (for the course in question).

I'm not sure there would be "space" for co-opting these boards for general banter....

[Felsen]

I've already checked out the Blackboard system.  It is an improvement over the boards for Admitted students, but still not nearly as nice as the phpBB system.

I've been half considering if I should just grab some web hosting space, and throw up a phpBB system or not.  This place here is great, but we don't really have much control over it as students.  So we can only make posts, but not categories for married students, individual courses, etc.

[margee]

If more people were going to use it, we could ask Andrew to add more child boards - he'd probably do it unless there were some logistical problem.

[Felsen]

I'm just thinking that we'd probably want more of a closed system.  Right now, anybody could come onto these boards and post whatever they wanted.  It'd be nice if we could restrict postings to current students and faculty, maybe alumni and recruiters.  We'd probably want administrative access over it too, so we could change categories as necessary, possibly add some sticky posts and the like.

[LitDoc]

What are the objections to the MySpace group? Just curious.

[Felsen]

Myspace has too much advertising.  I agree with the dislike for the interface they have.  The screensize they allocate for the forums is rather small.  The forums are just one big area, with no sub-topics; though maybe that can be changed by the administrators.

Its what you get and have to put up with when using free webspace, though.  I'm rather surprised at how decent LSD is for a forums.  The advertising is still there, but its rather easy to ignore it (not having FLASH banners helps).

[Texas]

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