| Education, Email, & E conferences A paper
published by the AAWJ IT also
offers the same opportunities Email collaboration is possible Judges and
magistrates need more than |
Australian Association of Women Judges Newsletter No. 3 July 1997 NEW DIRECTIONS FOR AAWJ MEMBERS This is an edited version of a paper
provided by When the Association was formed, the women who joined did not contemplate that they would be able to hold meetings. There are too few members. They are too widely separated. A newsletter and maybe some informal get togethers, piggybacked on other conferences, were all that we could hope for. Physical meetings may be impractical. But new developments in communications technology mean that meetings are not out of the question. Every one of us works in a court which has networked computers passing information from one site to another. Communication via a keyboard remains a core use of 'networked networks'. But there is already relatively inexpensive technology which means that people separated by thousands of miles can speak to each other for the cost of a local telephone call, using ordinary telephone lines. With a little extra hardware they can see each other at the same time, or they can orally discuss written work which is visible on the screens of the people speaking together. Not only meetings, but also national and international conferences are both possible and practicable; so are continuing collaborative research projects. It was not necessary to be in Beijing to know what was happening at the UN womens' conference. It was probably harder to know what was actually happening if you were there. Australian women, via Beijing and a large computer in Melbourne were at the forefront of the electronic field, broadcasting to the world what was happening as it happened. Some of the major papers, delivered orally, were on-line, for anyone to read, within hours. When the next international conference of women judges happens, we could all be there, whenever we could spare the time away from ordinary tasks. We would need at least one person on site with a modem, a personal computer and the software and hardware to transmit sound and pictures. At the bottom of the range, the SoundBlaster camera is no bigger than a hair dryer. We would need another computer sorting out the sound and pictures coming in, and the permission of the organisers to relay any documents or presentations which were the subject of copyright. Those of us at home could hear, watch and read, whenever we got the chance to switch on the computer and the modem. Better yet, we could organise our own international and national conferences, and transmit them to other judges and magistrates around the world. We could set up our own electronic publication site for publishing the papers about women and the law that are "too specialist" for ordinary commercial publishers to touch, as LawNet is doing, or we could use one of the existing electronic publication sites. We could set up judicial further education programmes which people could undertake in privacy. I would prefer to study any gender awareness course, about men, in privacy. Male judges and magistrates may feel the same way about gender awareness courses for them. Instead of having nowhere to go, now there are too many roads to go down. We shall have to choose between them. If we don't start looking at our choices, we will wither away as technology changes our everyday world. That would be a great pity. The reasons for having an Association like this have not, and will not, go away. Association members are no longer limited by distance. We are only limited by our own ability to acquire new skills and set new goals. |