Law School Exchange , a new online networking and content sharing site from West and Foundation Press, takes the term “knowledge sharing” to a new level for law school faculty in the United States.
With its debut this week, professors now can use Law School Exchange to publish and distribute articles, books and other materials for research, teaching and scholarly purposes – and also search and download the work of their colleagues – across campuses.
We talked about it in this Westcast podcast with Steve Nickles, C.C. Hope Chair in Law and Management, Wake Forest School of Law. “For law faculty around the country, you might think of Law School Exchange as a combination of Facebook, the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) and Amazon.com. There’s really nothing like it generally or specifically out there in any market,” says Nickles, who helped develop the ideas within Law School Exchange. “It creates an entirely new relationship between faculty, authors and publishers.”
Material on Law School Exchange includes text, PDFs, photos, PowerPoint presentations, links to videos and more. Professors also can pull content from selected West Academic Publishing and Foundation Press books, teacher’s manuals and supplements.
Registration and use of Law School Exchange is free.
Beyond the unique ease of publishing and online collaboration that it provides for professors, Nickles says Law School Exchange will enhance the education of law students in the long run.
“The purpose of this in the end is to make better legal education and faculty will be able to find materials on Law School Exchange that they can then adopt and make available to their students in several ways, including through TWEN (The West Education Network),” says Nickles (who also helped West develop TWEN).
“Law School Exchange will allow professors to really mix and match not only materials coming from West and from Foundation Press but those and all kinds of other materials for the subject that you’re teaching that have been added by law faculty across the country. It’s going to allow us to have the richest set of teaching materials that have ever been available for legal education.”
Nickles invites faculty who are interested in learning more about Law School Exchange to e-mail him at snickles@wfu.edu. Or, send an e-mail to west.lawschoolexchange@thomsonreuters.com or call 1-800-486-4876. You also can read the news release for more information.
Again, there’s also a Westcast podcast with Nickles explaining the development of Law School Exchange and its benefits.
Posted by Kevin Hunt, senior communications specialist, Thomson Reuters
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