Stillman’s Mission
… is to cultivate principled leaders through an educational experience that transforms concepts into business practice.
Welcome to Disruption, Technology & Law
Welcome to DT&L. This is the first part of our course syllabus. We will meet face-to-face weekly (MW, 3:30 p.m. – 4:45 p.m.) in SH111. All required materials for this semester are described here or linked from these pages. I will update the syllabus if I add material to the course or if an unexpected event intervenes, such as a hurricane, blizzard, or additional quarantine. Given the nature of the subject(s) we will engage, I will likely update the syllabus at some point this semester. I have not yet offered this course and have not yet addressed a development in our subject matter that warrants attention. You are responsible for remaining current with the course deliverables and schedule by regularly reviewing the entire syllabus for updates. This course is an elective for students pursuing a Minor in Legal Studies and a certificate in Information Technology Management.
This semester, we will use several digital platforms to create our learning environment, disrupting what we expect to be a “normal” course experience. We will integrate digital tools and platforms into our work. We will primarily work on the digital platforms supporting the DT&L team, including Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom (for video meetings), and Canvas. I will use Canvas for shared functions, e.g., grade book, but our use of that platform will be limited.
On this site, you should carefully review the entire syllabus, i.e., deliverables, schedule, calendar, and other materials. You will find answers to most of your questions by examining the additional information on this site. If you have any questions after you’ve reviewed the area and this syllabus, you can message me on Slack.
One last thought for now … the nature of this experience will, of necessity, require you to think differently about where you have been, where you are going, and how you experience learning. We must get our arms around the subject matter and develop strategies for addressing an unprecedented era of rapid and remarkable change. We will create a significantly different, more collaborative environment that anticipates our active engagement with all its opportunities.
Before We Meet
We will meet for the first time on Wednesday, January 14th, at 3:30 p.m. in SH111. We will meet F2F unless notified otherwise. Before we meet, please visit Before We Begin to complete some housekeeping items, including introducing yourself to your classmates, agreeing to the learning contract, and finishing your Slack (not Teams) account creation.
You will join the DT&L Slack workspace, which includes all students and their work products who have completed DT&L since 2015. After you join the workspace, take a look around. Be sure to visit the #1-why-dtl channel and post your answers to the questions in the channel’s purpose statement at the top.
You can access Slack in any browser (mobile or desktop), but the browser version does not include all features of the desktop apps. Please download and install the Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom clients on your Mac, PC, and mobile devices (iOS and Android versions are available) before our first class. You’ll need to keep your Slack access live on all your devices so we can fully integrate the platform into our learning environment.
Please complete your Slack setup immediately, as all course communication will be via Slack; I will not use email for future course communication.
What Should You Expect?
This course is designed to help prepare you to introduce Gretzky’s perspective, i.e., skating to where the puck is going, not where it has been, into your personal and professional life. It examines a range of issues and challenges propelled by technology-driven and other forms of disruption. More broadly, it begins from the premise that the established order in business, law, and society is undergoing unprecedented change. These shifts are not occurring in isolation. They are unfolding alongside significant generational transitions that shape how different cohorts understand work, authority, risk, technology, and the future itself. Understanding disruption, therefore, requires not only technological literacy but also generational awareness.
To frame this moment of change, the course draws in part on the Fourth Turning framework, which views history as moving through recurring cycles of stability, disruption, crisis, and renewal. From this perspective, we are living through a period marked by institutional strain, declining trust, and heightened conflict over values, governance, and the social contract. Technology accelerates these dynamics, but it does not create them in isolation. By situating emerging technologies within a generational change context, we can better understand why legal systems are stressed, why regulatory responses often lag, and why ethical questions feel so urgent and contested. This framework is not about predicting a single future, but about recognizing patterns, pressures, and possibilities as societies navigate periods of profound transformation.
Because the legal and regulatory environment, broadly defined, often plays a decisive role in shaping outcomes during periods of disruption, we will examine how law both responds to and constrains technological change. As new technologies collide with legacy institutions, the pace and significance of change raise profound ethical questions about power, accountability, equity, and responsibility. These questions will be central to many of our discussions. To help you engage with them productively, the course emphasizes the FAIR Framework: Flexibility, Adaptability, Imagination, and Resilience. These are not abstract virtues, but practical capacities that individuals and institutions must cultivate to navigate uncertainty, respond to disruption, and make thoughtful decisions in rapidly evolving environments.
This course also seeks to help you address the second part of Winston Churchill’s observation about change: while the future cannot be controlled, it can be understood well enough to prepare for. The development and integration of digital tools are reshaping society, often invisibly, unless one is attuned to the underlying trends. The combinatorial effects of these technologies are remarkable, overwhelming, and likely unstoppable. Rather than trying to predict specific outcomes, we will learn to identify emerging technologies and the trends they enable, allowing us to anticipate plausible future scenarios and assess their legal, ethical, and societal implications.
The challenges presented here are independent of your ability to memorize facts or reproduce them on an exam, or to write a conventional term paper, skills in which you have already demonstrated success. Instead, this course is designed to push you beyond established comfort zones, immerse you in largely unfamiliar subject matter, and challenge you to think differently about disruption, generational responsibility, and your own role in shaping the future.
We will explore evolving subject matter using technology platforms that may themselves be unfamiliar. The topics we examine are timely, stimulating, and consequential. We will investigate several emerging and disruptive technologies alongside their legal and regulatory challenges, using a variety of digital platforms to interact with one another and with the course materials. I will actively engage you using the Socratic Method, both in class and in our discussions outside of it. Over time, you will come to see how the Fourth Turning lens and the FAIR Framework offer a coherent foundation for understanding complexity, uncertainty, and change—and why developing these perspectives now is essential for thoughtful leadership in a disrupted world. You will better understand my class sessions after you read my perspective on Teaching and Learning.
Communications | Slack, Teams & Zoom
We’ll use Slack as our communication and collaboration platform; please use it when you’re interested in addressing DT&L issues. We have used the DT&L Slack workspace since the course’s initial launch in the fall 2015 semester. You have access to all content created since 2015 by the more than 180 students who have completed the course since our initial launch. Your content creation may continue after you complete the course. You will notice that many new posts have been attributed to DT&L alums throughout the year. It would be best if you poked around our Slack workspace. You will find materials related to all of the previous DT&L projects. They will give you background information that will interest you and help you when working on your DT&L project this semester.
I will not have scheduled office hours, but you can DM me in Slack to schedule a meeting.
To integrate the three platforms, you must also connect your Outlook, Teams, and Zoom accounts to our Slack workspace. This integration will facilitate communication (Slack), scheduling (Outlook Calendar and Teams), and video meetings (Slack, Teams, and Zoom). In the Apps folder in the sidebar of our Slack workspace, click the Outlook Calendar, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams Calls apps, and complete the process to connect to and integrate with your accounts.
If you have completed the deliverables described above and found them here, you are already part of our Slack workspace.
If you have questions, please post them in the appropriate Slack channel. Someone on the team will point you to the answer.
Learning Objectives
The course will examine the commercial, legal, ethical, public policy, cultural, and social implications of disruptive technologies and digital transformation, with particular attention to how these forces interact with generational change and periods of institutional transition.
By the end of the course, you will be able to:
- Explain the role of the futurist in periods of generational transition, including how futurists identify, interpret, and contextualize technological, social, and institutional trends within a Fourth Turning framework.
- Apply strategic foresight and forecasting processes to distinguish among possible, plausible, probable, and preferred futures, particularly in environments characterized by generational shifts and systemic disruption.
- Develop and articulate a vision of preferred futures that incorporates the FAIR Framework—Flexibility, Adaptability, Imagination, and Resilience—as an actionable guide for decision-making in uncertain personal and professional contexts.
- Use scenario planning techniques to evaluate opportunities, risks, and tradeoffs across multiple futures, including scenarios shaped by technological disruption, changing generational expectations, and institutional stress.
- Distinguish between disruptive innovation and digital transformation, and assess how each affects organizations, industries, and societies differently during periods of Fourth Turning-style realignment.
- Identify and evaluate how future-oriented thinking, generational change, and technological disruption reshape the legal and regulatory environments, including the challenges posed by legitimacy, accountability, and ethical governance.
- Evaluate the implications of disruptive innovation and digital transformation for the future of work, with particular emphasis on intergenerational dynamics, evolving skill expectations, and the need for FAIR-aligned capacities in an AI-mediated economy.
Required Texts
Please purchase these books as soon as possible.
- The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream, Amy Webb, Hachette Book Group, 2016, ASIN: B01IMZ5CGG
- Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, David Epstein, Riverhead Books, 2019, ASIN: B07H1ZYWTM
- The Fourth Turning is Here, Neil Howe, Simon & Schuster, 2023, ASIN: B0BHTNV8HN
I decided to add these books to the course after the bookstore ordering deadlines, so, unfortunately, you will not find them in the SHU bookstore. They are available from Amazon (click the links) and will be delivered immediately for the Kindle version or within 2 days for the print version if you have an Amazon Prime account.
Additional Materials
The subject matter of this course is regularly evolving. I will undoubtedly add materials as we progress through the semester. I will post links to those materials before the course schedule is finalized. Please check the syllabus regularly for updates.
Technology
You are already familiar with my expectations about the use of technology in my courses. Participating in this course will require you to engage with several digital platforms. Our primary communication platforms will be Slack and, if necessary, others. You will prepare your writing assignments using digital platforms that will allow you to incorporate multimedia to enhance your text-based content. You will use resources as varied as a search engine (Perplexity, Google, DuckDuckGo, or Bing), generative AI, and the resources available from our Walsh Library.
You are responsible for “figuring it out” regarding a project’s “how-to” aspects. If you don’t know how to do something … use one of the search engines above to “figure it out!”
Many students have told me that “figuring it out” was an unexpected and beneficial experience and a critical learning outcome.
Remote Learning
If circumstances (hurricane, COVID-19 surge, end of the world as we know it) require it, we will be prepared to adapt and transition to a remote, synchronous learning environment.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced us to adopt a fundamentally different set of delivery modalities, e.g., HyFlex, hybrid, remote, synchronous, or asynchronous, or some combination of approaches to teaching and learning. We are increasingly working remotely to accomplish our work. That remote modality requires us to adjust our understanding of acceptable protocols for attendance, engagement, and participation, whether in meetings or courses.
When working together via a digital platform (e.g., Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Slack), you must join the session with a live camera and a muted microphone. A live camera helps create a sense of community and enables all of us to engage effectively during our discussions. If you only unmute your mic when speaking, we can avoid feedback, unsolicited input from family, pets, and others, and random noise. If your classmates can see or hear you, it will be easier to engage actively in course meetings. That will have negative implications for your grade results. Please review the Protocols for Online Meetings and Classes for more information.
Course Policies
You are responsible for familiarizing yourself with my Course Policies, including in-class performance, attendance, preparation and participation, assignments, course communication, assessment, use of generative AI, and plagiarism. Please review them carefully.
As in the law … ignorance (of the Course Policies) is not an excuse.
Contact Me
Professor John H. Shannon
- Office: 651 Jubilee Hall
- Communications: Slack DM (preferred)
- Office Hours: by appointment only, all meetings will be held via Slack
We can schedule an alternative meeting time if you are unavailable during my office hours. As you know, our course communications platform is Teams. Please message me in Slack with some days/times when you are available, and we can schedule a video conference.
I can be reached via Slack (preferred), email, voice, or video. As a general rule, I am available if I am online. You can message me on Slack or post a question in the #1 Course Questions channel in our Slack workspace if you are already enrolled in one of my courses. I will try to respond to any communications as soon as possible, but certainly within 24 hours of receipt. If you prefer a video conference (and who doesn’t?), please DM me with some convenient days/times, and we’ll set it up.
My office hours are subject to change each semester; please check your course syllabus for the current schedule (see above). In the past, I have generally scheduled at least one hour per week on Teams video to accommodate those who conflict with my scheduled office hours. Since we are holding all office hours and other meetings via Teams, if you are unavailable to meet during my office hours, you can schedule a video conference appointment via Teams. I prefer video conferences because they give me more options when answering your questions.
That said, I carve out space for thoughtful consideration of life. The practical impact of that desire is to keep evenings and weekends free for family, friends, and other social engagements. If you are going to ping me late on a Friday, then I will get back to you on Monday unless it is an emergency … a REAL emergency.
When you contact me, please include the following information: your name, the question or issue to be resolved, your course/section, and any other necessary details.
meets for the first time. Teams is part of the Microsoft Office 365 Suite. If you are unfamiliar with Teams, it is an online platform that allows for text-based discussion, video conferencing and/or audio calls. Teams is associated with your SHU-issued account and authenticates via your SHU network credentials.
cursing, texting – style acronyms are inappropriate in any interactions in our course. Proper grammar and spelling must be used at all times. Please also use appropriate grammar in all communications and always specify the course and subject matter in the subject line, e.g., “BLAW2301 / Discussion Board #2” or “Smith vs. Jones”, not “yo!” or “hey prof”. For further information on Seton Hall University’s code of conduct, please refer to the Student Handbook.