ABSTRACT
That technology has a profound effect upon society cannot be doubted (Winston, 1998, Nardi, 1996, Slevin, 2000 and Einon, 1995). That it is socially constituted, and mediated by culturally embedded practices is also widely accepted.1 That computerised information technologies in particular are having a profound effect upon the practice and theory of law, one need only look to the changed practices of the legal profession and the administration of justice. In legal education, while the use of ICT generally has a higher prole through the ubiquitous use of learning management systems, the use of ICT is still variable. We have yet to attain what Ernst Cassirer called ‘mature constructivism’, namely the self-reexive view of the development of technology within the history and culture of the domain (1946). In part this may be because of our focus upon learning, at the expense of other contextual factors such as learning ecologies, social economies, motivation and prior knowledge. It may also be because we do not investigate sufciently the introduction and development of technology within legal education. It is the purpose of this chapter to uncover some aspects of that forgotten story, which are valuable not in a historical sense only but also because they help us understand some of the changes we are undergoing in our own technological revolution in the early twenty-rst century. First, we shall consider the context of medieval reading and writing; then the construction of glosses as a device to accommodate the
information explosion around key texts such as Justinian’s Digest; and nally we shall consider the parallels with web-based forms of data presentation, networked learning and social software.
