Ok, as someone who majored in philosophy and has a love affair with Plato/Socrates I feel necessary to add my two cents.
The dialogues of Plato through which Plato primarily uses Socrates as his spokesman, are all vehicles through which he expresses ideas. They are clearly not meant as accurate encounters that Socrates has. There is a GREAT deal of scholarship on this issue and it would take volumes for me to express all the content that is there.
Things that are very likely true (Accepting we cannot know these things with complete confidence):
Socrates was Platos teacher
Plato had tremendous respect and admiration for Socrates.
Socrates pays homage to his teacher through expressing not only Socrates ideas, but his own through the mouth of Socrates.
Socrates was tried and by a narrow margin convicted by the Athenian jury of heresy (disbelief in the gods) and (corrupting the youth), but a lot of popular accounts attest Socrates conviction as a convenient scapegoat for Athens loss in the Peloponnesian war (as mentioned above), but theres a lot of background to this. I recommend Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War (a great read even if just for the history). He is reported to as willingly accepted the verdict and drank hemlock poison to kill himself.
The Socratic method gets its name out of the methodology popular used in Platos dialogues where Socrates is the main character. Socrates is seeking wisdom (a Philosopher is from the greek Philo = love and sophism = wisdom, hence lover of wisdom). He reportedly seeks out people who supposedly have it. At the time there were teachers in Greece who referred to themselves as Sophists (or essentially wisemen). But what we find in Platos dialogs is that they are mostly rhetoricians. They are great at sounding wise and important, but really, when pressed are unable to answer Socrates' fundamental questions.
Socrates is often seen in a dialog looking at particular questions such as "what is virtue" as in the "Meno". The person he asks proposes to know the answer and supplies one. Socrates finds this answer unsatisfactory so he asks follow up questions. It is through these follow up questions that the person is forced to acknowledge, through his own answers, that his original answer is unsatisfactory.
I think the primary thing one ought to get out of the Socratic method (which also is a term used in law, but of a slightly different meaning) is that it is intended to demonstrate a point to a person by having that person answer questions where they are led to show that a particuar position is flawed in some way. The value lies in that it is not antagonistic. One is not merely accusing someone as wrong, nor trying to beat someone over the head with dogmatic reasoning because they are being led by reasoning they acknowledge to the desired conclusion.
As to the second point: Logic, I think is good in every situation, in context and properly understood. But logic is largely misunderstood outside of philosophy. Logic is concerned with what follows NOT truth. Logic and truth are very separate ideas. Logic is a means that if you have x premises, y must necessarily follow. Those premises could be flawed in which case yo have a logically sound argument but one that is invalid. The conclusion follows from the premises but one or more of the premises are flawed.
Of course logic is one of the major subdivisions of philosophy and there is a lot to it. Some of it when you start getting into logical modality and what not are very sophisticated and difficult for laypersons to understand.
Sorry, but when you jump on a hot issue of mine I can get long winded.
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