Student Buzz

I am standing at a terminal in the Alberta Law Libraries Legal Research and Training Centre in the Edmonton Courthouse, listening as 40 articling students are given a tour of the facility. They are fresh faced and eager to begin their legal career, even after sitting through lectures on legislation this morning.

The lesson from this year’s Head Start program is that it is good to have a contingency plan.

The first activated contingency plan took place yesterday when we were bumped from the courtroom that we traditionally use was scooped up by the trial coordinator. Imagine, using a courtroom for a trial. The nerve!

Second contingency (could have been avoided by deciding to plug in the laptop being used for demos rather than running on a battery) was plugging in my (spare) laptop part-way through the federal legislation presentation. Awesome librarian Linda Harmatta, Edmonton Librarian for Alberta Law Libraries didn’t miss a beat and carried on through the turmoil of technology change and the excellent group of students stayed engaged and positive.

Day 1 concludes with some hands on practice with legislation questions led by a group of law librarian facilitators. The buzz of communicating this valuable learning is very energizing.

Tomorrow we have a contingency plan in place for our electronic demos with screen capture backups for everything we plan to demo. Day 2 is all about secondary sources and case law so the goal is to make sure that technology does not disrupt the learning objectives.

I invite the Head Start 2010 students to comment about the program here at Slaw. I’d like to hear some buzz about whether the librarian perception on activating our contingency plans were successful.