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In this monthly column, law professors comment on the many academic opportunities and challenges presented by Web technology.
As with all JURIST columns, you're invited to Talkback. This month...
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The Rewards and Risks of Authoring a Web Site
Barbara Glesner-Fines, University of Missouri at Kansas City School of Law
As the lists of faculty home pages and course-resource pages here on JURIST expand daily, we can conclude that, within a very short time, faculty web sites will have become the rule rather than the exception. For over two years now, I have maintained a web site for each one of my classes and a resource page on teaching and learning law, primarily targeted toward academic support programs. Each one of these web sites contains materials I have written and distributed to my students in hard copy in the past as well as links to other web sites with relevant information. With some benefit of experience then, I would like to reflect on the risks and rewards of developing a web site.
Rewards of Web Authoring
What is it that attracts more and more faculty to author their own web sites? Creating and maintaining a web site is by no means a cost-free task. Even for those faculty using TWEN or
LEXIS Virtual Classroom course packaging, faculty must invest no small amount of time to learn the system, prepare the pages and maintain the site. For we who have a "do-it-yourself" approach to web sites, the time invested is even greater. I imagine that I spent as much time learning HTML and creating my web site as it would take to write a short law review article. I still spend a few hours a month keeping the site updated. Short of sheer folly, why would one make that choice?
Fame and Fortune?
Law faculty will be ill-advised to author a web site to gain the rewards of career advancement or professional prestige. Historically, the legal academy has moved slowly to recognize new forms of scholarship and new forms of teaching. Web authoring is unlikely to find a place in the institutional reward structure any more quickly than have clinical teaching or narrative scholarship. Few promotion and tenure policies (to the extent law faculties have well-developed promotion and tenure policies) address the weight to be given to electronic authoring or teaching.
After all, what is involved in authoring a web site? Is this scholarship? No, it can't be. (Well not yet anyway). There are no footnotes and it's not published by law students. Is it teaching? How can it be? The university cannot recover fee-for-credit for each "hit" on the site and there are no end-of-the-semester evaluation forms from the students to evaluate its quality. Besides, if it is teaching, it may be venturing into the ABA's forbidden territory of distance education. No, fame and fortune are not the reasons to web-author.
Fun!
I imagine that the rewards I receive from my web projects are similar to those that motivate other faculty. I create and maintain web sites partly because it's fun. There's a certain amount of artistry involved in designing a web site. (Not that I've avoided some of the worst design elements, but I've learned.) I enjoy the challenge of learning html markup language much as I dabble in acquiring foreign languages from time to time.
My web sites are also partly motivated by pride. I work very hard on preparing materials to assist my students in learning: graphics that clarify concepts or systems, detailed syllabi and study guides that make learning more efficient, articles that supplement their learning. I've even tried to create some interactive computer assisted instruction, though I'm most hopeful that the development of CALI's Webolis will provide a better resource for this material. I'm very proud of this work and so, just as my little boy insists that each day's picture be displayed on the fridge, I display my artwork on the web.
Of course, partly I also use web sites for my teaching because I hope that it helps student learning, both in my own school and elsewhere. I don't use my web pages in terribly sophisticated or ground-breaking ways. The majority of my students are not yet well-equipped enough (technologically or educationally) for me to feel comfortable conducting an entire class over the web, for example. Like most faculty, I use my web pages primarily to deliver content that I had delivered in the past through paper or in class.
Computers are flexible devices for delivering course content: asynchronous learning provides flexibility of time and location for learning. Hypertext text formats and interactive programs allow flexibility in structuring learning and place greater control in the hands of students. The web offers greater accessability, lower cost, and easier updating of materials. Moreover, having a web page also gives my teaching some added measure of credibility. Students are arriving in law schools with an increasingly sophisticated understanding of computerized information access and management. They will be accustomed to having control of their learning to a greater degree than ever before. Law schools that do not reflect that understanding will lack credibility.
But
I suspect that the single greatest educational benefit I advance through course web pages is not their content or credibility, but the message that their very existence sends to students. The new world of information technology has profound implications for society and for lawyering. More information, more noise, faster communications, world wide communications, asynchronous communications -- the picture of the future could be quite dramatic, or quite bleak. We risk moving to an age in which society is dramatically stratified along lines based on access to information and where social relations are stretched by technology. The lawyer's role in shaping that society and in serving his or her clients in that society will depend on what our students learn about how to use technology while they study law. They will learn this both from our explicit teaching and from our implicit modeling of the ways we use technology to teach.
I try to use my web pages to model an approach to law and lawyering that values the free accessibility of information. I've had students come and introduce themselves to me in the first weeks of classes, thanking me for the web sites and indicating that they hoped they would be in my class. Why? Not because they got such superior information on civil procedure, but because the fact that I put my course materials on the web tells students that I want to reach them and assist their learning. My web pages, accessible to any and all, send a message of openness and flexibility. To me, that message -- more than the advantages of web resources or asynchronous communication -- is the reward of creating and maintaining web pages.
The Risks
For every reward offered by using the web for delivery of legal education, there is a parallel risk. Yes, course materials delivered through the web can be made more relevant and timely; more self-paced and flexible to meet a variety of learning preferences; more interactive, with opportunities for immediate feedback; and better structured to reveal connections among ideas.
The risk is that one can be fooled into believing that automated is improved: putting "old wine into new bottles." Not only may we simply repackage old teaching (and thereby risk, at a minimum, no improvement), web authoring tempts adding more teaching to the package. The risk is student overload. Students are already swamped with demands of classroom, textbook and analysis. I'm not sure that the resources available through the Internet are worth the "world wide wait" at this point. It's extremely tempting to increase the preparation demands of our students by having them not only read the assigned materials but then also run a CALI lesson, respond to a discussion-list hypothetical, and explore web links on related topics. Sure, if they do all this, the level of class discussion will skyrocket. But can they realistically absorb more demands?
To balance the reward of increased credibility from web-based teaching, comes the increased , more subtle, risk that maintaining a web site sends a message that "the answer" is out there somewhere. With a few exceptions, the message of the web is still one of passive learning (or even unethical shortcuts). With little to guide students in distinguishing authoritative sources from information of questionable value students need careful guidance in distinguishing the wealth of resources available to them. There is a delicate balance to be struck between providing student with the opportunity to control their own learning (giving up some of our "sage on the stage" role) and leaving them lost in cyberspace.
Finally, while the World Wide Web -- with its wealth of resources and flexibility to adapt to different learners -- promises a greater democratization of legal education, there is an equal risk of magnified inequality of learning opportunities. Students come to law school with varying levels of technological literacy
-- if we do not add that factor into our academic programs, providing students with the support and training to access and use our technological teaching, we will further widen the gaps among our students that have little to do with their aptitude for great lawyering.
We assume that students have access to and ability to use a variety of computer technologies. However, my own recent survey of 105 students (approximately 20% of the student body at my law school), indicates that students may not be equipped to meet our expectations. 103 of the 105 students owned computers (the two students who did not own computers were a first-year and a third-year student) and 94 (or 89%) owned modems. However, fewer owned CD-ROM drives 68 (64%), which may be a rough indication of the age or power of the student computers.
Indeed, the uses students make of computers may lead us to begin much more simply that an interactive web site. For example, students overwhelmingly use the computers for word processing functions. The largest use is for preparing papers & course outlines (over 88% responded that they "often" use computers for this purpose). Nearly 60% of the students responded that they also use computers to take or transcribe their classroom notes. Recognizing that word processing is a critical use of technology, I have now begun to distribute all my course materials on disks as well as over the WWW and have put in electronic format many of my "outline templates"
I use as learning tools in the classroom. In supervising research & writing papers, I have the students bring in the disk with their article and we do some basic editing together on the paper so they can spend their time on more editing when they leave, rather than on simply transcribing the editing suggestions I have made.
Just as students do not access the Internet as often as teachers developing web materials might desire; so too student use of e-mail is extremely limited given the resources faculty have been devoting to discussion lists. Perhaps my experience is not uncommon. When discussion lists first became available to faculty here at the law school, I set up an e-mail discussion list with my professional responsibility class. I found students to be extremely reluctant to participate and was not pleased with the products of compulsory participation. Many students felt as though I was simply "holding over class" by requiring participation -- a response I would be inclined to ignore if
I felt an important educational purpose existed for my experiment. But I was unable to conclude that required e-mail discussions were educationally superior to the old-fashioned "think it over, talk it over, write me a memo" versions of out-of- class assignments I had given in the past.
I now use e-mail the same way I use voice mail. Call me (or e-mail me) any time anywhere and I'll get back to you. Some students use this very effectively (a few through the phone, a few through the computer) but most students appear to prefer stopping by after class for face-to-face communication.
Thus, as much as I am tempted by the rewards of web-based education, I fear that the student responses to my survey indicate that we should indeed keep in mind the risks of turning too swiftly to computer technology in legal education. In the end, this fear may be one of the most compelling reasons for me to continue my ventures into technology and education. If the only educators working with web-based education are those with blind optimism for its success, little attention may be given to finding ways to eliminate the downsides until the risks have become reality. (Besides, it's fun.)
© 1998 by Barbara Glesner-Fines. All rights reserved.
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The views expressed in this column are solely those of its author, and do not reflect those of JURIST, its Advisory Board, its staff or its host institutions.
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