LESSONS FROM THE WEB

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In this monthly column, law professors comment on the many academic opportunities and challenges presented by Web technology.

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Teaching to the Not Yet HTML-Converted

Donna E. Arzt, Syracuse University College of Law[1]

Like many of the previous contributors to this JURIST "Lessons from the Web" column, I too have wrestled with such matters as how much time and resources[2] to devote to developing course web pages; how to craft them so as to avoid both spoon-feeding and student overload; whether the technology would interfere with or distract from course content; can I channel my own enthusiasm for the web into an exemplar of intellectual curiosity or, inversely, if I fumble with the technology, will that undermine my authority as a teacher of my substantive area, public international law; and, perhaps most pointedly, how can I myself avoid becoming a web-aholic?

It may be too early to tell to what extent my adventures in webbing have improved either the quality of my teaching or the quality of my students' learning. All I can say so far is that I have personally enjoyed one of the rare opportunities I have these days to exercise my right brain design functions, and do appreciate the occasions which the web has furnished for students to become my teacher. Indeed, I would not have been able to create the weblinks in this column were it not for students in my International Law course who showed me how.


The top of the homepage for my International Law course.

In the paragraphs that follow I will explore the issue of motivation -- both my students' and my own, do a little "show and tell" of my webpages' components, and then give a quick and dirty appraisal of one particular component, the use of a conferencing platform.

Webagogy[3] in Search of a Mission

As with any new pedagogical tool or methodology, one must examine the educational objectives of introducing web-based learning into the law school curriculum. I believe I have identified three such intentions for my own teaching. Without consciously planning it, they are more or less the same as my institution's stated educational mission, and like the web itself, they are mutually integrated with each other: applied learning, globalization, and educational diversity.

Applied Learning

Inspired by the ABA's 1992 MacCrate Report, Syracuse Law has adopted "applied learning," that is, the integration of theory and practice, as a unifying theme for the curriculum. Our catalogue and, naturally, our webpage, explain that our mission is "guided by the philosophy that the best way to train lawyers to practice in today's world is to teach them to apply what they learn in the classroom to real legal issues, problems and clients." In my own courses, students get to flex their practical muscles and are graded on research and drafting assignments such as simulated asylum petitions in Refugee Law, complaints and discovery documents in Consumer Protection, and in International Law, through group negotiation in a semester-long simulation called the Multilateral Treaty Drafting Project. This latter simulation is facilitated through web-based distribution of reports written by class members serving as "special rapporteurs," links to the webpages of real-world organizations and negotiating models such as the procedural rules prepared for the Rome Conference to adopt the International Criminal Court Statute, as well as a collaborative group discussion platform (see more on this, below), all located on the International Law coursepage.

Globalization

As an international law prof, I am instinctively committed to increasing the global awareness of all lawyers and law students, no matter what their area of specialization. Globalization is infiltrating every legal domain, whether in the commercial, nonprofit or governmental sectors, even fields as seemingly "local" as family law. The internet and globalization are nearly parallel developments. To quote internet guru Esther Dyson, cyberspace "extends across and transcends national borders and obliterates distance." Likewise, it is now easier for anyone, almost anywhere, to conduct research in International and Comparative Law, with the appearance on the web of the UN Treaty Database and the World Constitutions collection from Germany, to name only two. I am thus professionally obligated to integrate the internet into my teaching and to demand that my students learn to integrate it into both their theory and their practice.

Educational Diversity

Educational diversity can mean many things, from the admission of students of myriad racial, social and economic backgrounds, to the conscious effort to recognize and support a range of learning styles. International Law courses tend to naturally attract students of diverse backgrounds; indeed, in my International Human Rights course this semester, white American, native English-speaking students are a distinct minority. But there is another kind of diversity that I have struggled with since my very first years as a law teacher: call it motivational diversity, the broad continuum spanning those students who are only in your course to fulfill a graduation requirement (or because it conveniently happens to meet at the time they are free), and those who have known since they were six years old that they wanted to practice in your particular subject area. Put another way, it's the age-old pedagogical question: "Do I teach to the top of the class, the middle of the class, or the bottom of the class?"

Webagogy may offer part of the answer. Like an actual spider web, a coursepage can snare a wide assortment of passersby. Assuming that school resources can transcend the economic disparities in student computer equipment access[4], the web provides a platform for, literally, linking the more motivated students to additional reading material and to forums to interact outside of class with each other, with the professor, and even with non-academics. (Last semester, a student in one of the treaty drafting groups found and joined a listserve on the topic of her treaty, which put her in contact with people around the world, while another sought information from officials in the country he represented through its "virtual embassy" website.) For those who have less time or interest to devote, these optional links are dangled as potential enticements. Because they are all there at the click of a mouse, students can access these links whenever they feel the urge, even after the course ends. Indeed, in pre-web years I often despaired that the law review citations I regularly wrote on the board and the books I placed on reserve were forever lost to the oblivion of an inert crowd. Now, I often hear from former students who have undertaken "virtual reunions" to these course pages while on-the-job.

The key to designing pages that are pitched to an array of motivational levels is to make them visually attractive for the sake of substantive context and optic depth (but not so crowded with graphics as to cause long download times); to organize them so that particularly sought items are easily retrieved; to include only the most relevant and qualitatively selective material, to prevent information overload; and to refer to online developments often enough during class to provoke the curious but not so often as to lose the attention of the aloof or the not yet converted.

"Show and Tell"

Each of my three course pages consists of most of the following components, each accompanied on the respective homepage by a two or three line description of the linked element:

  • Introductory information about the course structure and requirements. Because these documents usually do not contain weblinks, we have posted them in PDF format, which is more convenient for our web technicians to upload and easily downloaded by students with the free Adobe Acrobat Reader plug-in.
  • A syllabus of scheduled reading assignments. The additional links contained within these documents vary from International Human Rights (IHR), for which only about 10% of the readings are online; to International Law (IL), referencing both assigned and optional readings, about half from the casebook and half online (the latter falling mainly in the second half of the semester after the fundamental principles such as Sources of Law and the International Court of Justice are introduced); and International Criminal Law (ICL), which is such a new subject that 90% of the readings are materials I located online, supplemented only by an assigned paperback book and an optional casebook. In ICL, which I'm teaching for the first time this semester, I was able to make last-minute syllabus changes as the Pinochet and Lockerbie cases broke, illustrating how the web is an ideal delivery system for such a "late breaking" course subject.
  • An interactive feedback form which replaces the paper "Student Questionnaire" that I used to distribute at the beginning of each term. Automatically emailed to me and to my secretary, its electronic format would -- if either of us had the time -- facilitate data compilation about course enrollees.
  • A variety of research links to relevant databases and organizations, as well as current world news sources, both intended to encourage further exploration of related topics and facilitate student research assignments. Both of these are cross-linked to the school's Global Law and Practice Links page for the use of others who are not enrolled in the three courses.
  • Additional aids and guides for conducting legal research in international and comparative law and writing a research paper. The former contains some material specially created by Wendy E. Scott, our school's Associate Librarian for Public Services, while the latter is a document I wrote which contains additional links, some external and some local.
  • And finally, a web-based, asynchronous, password-protected, threaded discussion group (or "conferencing platform") which is utilized by students and by me to, inter alia, make announcements; continue discussions that flow over from class; post overhead transparencies and class handouts (which can then be cut and pasted by students into their study outlines, rather than merely hole-punched into a notebook); discuss optional reading material; post full-text or hyperlinks to media articles, photos, maps etc. that are relevant to topics we are studying; provide past exams and exam tips and answers; facilitate student work groups in collaborative drafting and research projects; post to the perennial favorite, "fun stuff," for jokes, trivia, animated graphics, movie recommendations and "cool web links;" and otherwise generate extra-class learning and debate. At the beginning of the term, I explain to students that portions of the discussion group are required (and factored into their class participation grade) while other portions are optional, for those who are motivated to expand on the required syllabus.
For the past three years we have used a UNIX-based shareware application called "Conferencing on the Web," created at San Francisco State University in 1996[5], in my 40 to 50-student International Law course and this semester in my 15-student International Criminal Law. (The acronym "COW" has provided grist for numerous dairy-industry metaphors and plenty of in-class laughs.) Because "COW" is open only to course-registrants, I've pasted a few "screen dumps" into this column[6] to demonstrate some of its features:

This is part of the main conference page for International Criminal Law this semester. Each topic is listed in the order created by the "conference manager." Notice the search engine near the bottom and the column listing the number of new messages under each topic. (These are all "zero" because I keep up with all postings! Students who have not logged on recently would want to read new messages under each topic in descending order, based on the priority ranking I have explained in advance.)

Clicking on the third listed topic on the main page brings you to a similar listing of conversations within that topic. Again, there is a search engine and a listing of new messages, along with the total number of messages posted to each conversation. This process of "threading" makes the entire conference easy to navigate. While only the "conference manager" can create topics, any user can create a new conversation, so long as they give it a title.

This final screen shows what a typical posting looks like. This one is the second in a conversation already created. Graphics can easily be posted by telling the conference program to read the message as html and including the proper code. "Mistakes" (or inappropriate messages) can be hidden by the user or the "conference manager" (though I only use that privilege to correct formatting problems). Each user can create her own profile which is accessed by others by clicking on their user id ("dearzt," in my case).

Conference or Listserve: A Comparative Appraisal

Anyone who has ever joined a listserve knows that they can be both a source of inspiration and a hazard to one's email inbox. Their messages must either be printed and manually filed or electronically indexed and catalogued to ever again be easily retrieved. It often takes a vexing struggle to determine which earlier posting a later one is responding to, especially if they pop into your inbox in reverse chronological order. They can also suffer from technological inequality if some list members post messages with more advanced attributes than others' email programs can read. And they can only be read from computers that can access your own email account.

Conference or discussion platforms, by contrast, are accessible through any internet browser; contain, with equal readability, graphics and hyperlinks, which can be entered and exited with a mere mouse click; and are organized by topic and subtopic in chronological order so that individual postings can easily be retrieved and responses traced. Perhaps even more importantly, because a conference platform has a physical coherence, it allows users to feel part of a "virtual community," while offering each of its netizens a piece of cyberspace with which to create an individualized profile.

In the three years I've used COW in my International Law course, the total number of postings has tripled each year, probably indicating increased enthusiasm. While around 70% of the messages tend to be contributed by the same dozen users, I learned that 90% of the class was at least "lurking" when I posted a question about the format of the final exam and quickly received that many responses. Only one or two students out of the 150 who have now been exposed to it have expressed either utter indifference or actual resentment. But every course has those few who believe that learning is only supposed to occur during the appointed class hour.

Probably the most valuable appraisals will come from the conferencing consumers themselves, the students. Last semester I appended a question about the use of COW and the web to our standardized course evaluation forms. We received the completed forms back from the administration this past week -- but so far I've been too busy surfing the web to find the time to peruse them! Maybe I should search for a browser program which can read them electronically!

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 Notes

1. Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Global Law and Practice. Websites for my International Law, International Human Rights and International Criminal Law courses can be accessed through my Syracuse University College of Law faculty bio page.

2. The Syracuse Law School Information Technology Services department has been very supportive of my attempts to navigate cyberspace. For the past three years, I've also been blessed with graduate research assistants, Eric D. Johnson '98 and Joshua A. Zielinski '99, who have eagerly learned HTML and been extraordinarily patient in coping with my perfectionist demand for perpetual tinkering with the course pages. But the trade-off is that they have fewer hours to devote to assistance with my scholarship. As for the time factor, I have to confess that I have whittled away many an evening and weekend surfing the net for "cool links" to give my students, so that now all I can say to them is that my name is Prof. Arzt and I'm a web-aholic.

3. Shorthand for "Web-Based Pedagogy." See "Webagogy" pages created at the University of Washington and by the Quebec English Schools Network.

4. The Syracuse law school building offers students two computer clusters supporting a range of software, supplemented by campus-wide clusters and numerous other electronic services.

5. I am not necessarily endorsing this particular platform. I adopted it initially because I had already developed online syllabi and other course materials, which made use of TWEN or Lexis Virtual Classroom mostly superfluous. By now, I've grown accustomed to its user interface. COW has one major defect, however: plain text does not automatically wrap, so users must remember to insert hard returns. One alternative I have considered using as a replacement for COW is O'Reilly WebBoard.

6. Demonstrating the maxim that professional opportunities are the mother of skills-acquisition, it was in order to prepare this JURIST column that I asked the Syracuse law school web-maven, Michael Jensen-Summers, to teach me how to import webscreens into Word 7.0. In a nutshell: while your cursor is planted in the middle of the webpage you want, simultaneously hold down your "alt" and "print screen" keys. Then open your Word document and paste it through the editing menu.

© 1999 by Donna Arzt. 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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