LESSONS FROM THE WEB

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The Indispensable Web

Laura Gasaway, University of North Carolina School of Law

After five years of using a course website, I do not think I could teach without the web! I use the web and materials I have placed on the course websites every single day in class, and I think it has improved my teaching. Students always comment how useful it is to be able to refer back to the materials at their leisure. Further, students today are a video generation, and they appreciate the visual support of the teaching content. A threaded discussion list permits exploration of issues outside of the class time plus gives students who do not feel comfort talking in class a chance to raise questions and discuss issues for which there is insufficient class time available.

Both of the courses that I teach particularly lend themselves to support from the web – Intellectual Property and Cyberspace Law. The use I make of the web differs in the two courses but there are similarities. Both course webpages contain the syllabus and reading assignments, each course uses a threaded discussion list as well as an email listserv for announcements and other information, plus additional material is posted for students.

Using a course website in Intellectual Property is extremely helpful since there is so much IP material available on the web, and the ability to illustrate the cases and principles with trademarks on the web, music, photographs, publicity sites for actors, and patents is particularly useful. I teach IP as a survey course, and for years I have made a detailed syllabus available to students in the form of an outline. It contains an overview of what will happen that day in class, citations to relevant statutes and cases, summaries, and the like. By adding materials from the web, relevant photographs, trademarks, music, etc., to an online version of the outline, I can display it in class and provide visual support to what is being taught. I have adopted the Dreyfus and Kwall casebook that uses a problem approach. When discussing a trademark and trade dress case involving Coach ® bags and the hang tag labels, showing the handbags and tags to the class from a website makes a world of difference in students' understanding of the facts in the case. When the focus is on the right of publicity, playing an Elvis song from the web as the class comes into the room sets the stage for considering cases dealing with the survivability of the right of publicity. Incorporating photographs of some of the famous Elvis impersonators and showing their websites (such as the Flying Elvi) helps illustrate the extent of the right of publicity. There are outstanding websites that contain examples of music infringement cases with sound files that I play for the class to help them understand the infringement issues involved in the cases.

Cyberspace Law is a seminar that consists of a few introductory lectures by me plus a variety of guest speakers. The lectures I deliver have web support as used in the Intellectual Property course. Guest speakers use the web to varying degrees for their presentations. Readings for the course are almost always on the web, so the reading assignments page consist of links to these materials. Students have two major assignments. The first is to work in teams of 6-7 students to draft an Internet policy for an organization or agency. The policy must be done as a webpage which is available on the course website. The second is to work with an assigned partner from the class to create a website on an assigned topic such as gambling on the Internet, jurisdiction in cyberspace, trademark protection on the web, telemedicine, etc. These are also placed on the course webpage and serve as valuable resources for other researching the topic. The student pairs present their topic to the class and demonstrate their websites. So, for this seminar, each student learns to work in groups, to create a webpage and how to structure it for the best presentation of legal information and policy. For students who do not know how to create a webpage, there are resources both in the law library and the university to assist students. This course absolutely could not be taught without web access and use in class.

My foray into teaching on the web after 25 years of teaching was really pushed by West Publishing Company and Professor Steve Nichols who was joining the Wake Forest Law Faculty in 1995. Steve came to UNC and delivered a presentation about TWEN which was then being beta tested, and UNC signed on to be a test site. Several of the faculty used TWEN that fall, including me for Intellectual Property. This was the first LotusNotes version of TWEN, and the following fall there was another new version which I used. By the spring of 1997, when I first taught Cyberspace Law, the web version of TWEN was available, and I used it.

I very much appreciate all of the help that West Publishing gave me in learning to use an electronic teaching tool and develop student interaction outside of the classroom. TWEN increased my confidence, and made it possible for me to move onto the web on my own. Further, UNC had begun a program jointly sponsored by the School of Information and Library Science and Information Technology called Simple Start designed to teach and assist faculty in creating course webpages and using discussion lists and listservs. I experimented in the summer of 1997 and created my own course webpages beginning that fall. I found that the flexibility and control this gave me preferable to that provided by TWEN. I now cannot imagine returning to teaching without using the web. As I always tell my students, if I can learn to create webpages, anyone can!

© 1999 by Laura Gasaway. 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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Previous columns in this series:

• The Web-Based Class
  Robert J. Goldstein, Pace University School of Law
• Preaching to the Not-Yet-HTML-Converted
  Donna Arzt, Syracuse University College of Law
• Teaching a Virtual Law Class
  Susan Brenner, University of Dayton School of Law
• What Happens When a Glacier Starts to Melt?
  Ethan Katsh, Department of Legal Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst
• Developing a Law School Web Culture Through Online Law
  Michael Geist, University of Ottawa Faculty of Law, Ottawa, CANADA
• The Web in Legal Education: What Kind of an Innovation is It?
  James Elkins, West Virginia University College of Law
• Web Publication of Early Case Law: Decisions from the Courts of New South Wales, Australia
  Bruce Kercher, Macquarie University School of Law, Sydney, AUSTRALIA
• The Creation of the E-Book on International Finance and Development: A Journey into Cyberspace
  Enrique Carrasco, University of Iowa College of Law
• The Virtual Teacher
  Patrick Wiseman, Georgia State University College of Law
• Build It, and They Will Come: Using a Web Page as an Effective Extension of Your Classroom and Faculty Office
  Pedro Malavet, University of Florida School of Law
• The Rewards and Risks of Authoring a Web Site
  Barbara Glesner-Fines, University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law
• Teaching With the Web
  Jerry Kang, UCLA School of Law
• Re-thinking Electronic Casebooks
  Gary Neustadter, Santa Clara University School of Law
• Planning a Law School Web Site
  Mark Gould, Faculty of Law, University of Bristol, UK
• Takeovers that Overtake the Traditional Classroom: Web-based Simulations as a Law School Learning Environment
  Robert Lawless, University of Missouri-Columbia School of Law
• Copyright, Academia and the New Scholarship
  Kim Dayton, University of Kansas School of Law
• The Four Corners of the Academic Website World
  William Slomanson, Thomas Jefferson School of Law