LESSONS FROM THE WEB

Our classroom's Socrates is a Bot. Even before students enter the classroom for one of several cyberspace law courses, they have begun to discuss the subjects -- in cyberspace, of course. Urged on by "the Bot," the electronic agent animating a web- and email-based exchange of questions and answers, students come to the classroom prepared to continue conversations begun online.

The Bot is a central component in an ongoing courseware development project of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. From its founding, the Berkman Center has been a proponent of "active research" -- studying the law of technology by building into the Internet and interacting with the network we are researching. Thus when Jonathan Zittrain was preparing to teach another round of his popular Internet & Society seminar (1998 and current), he wanted to use the Internet for more than a vanilla course website and hyperlinked syllabus. Could we use the technologies we were studying to enhance the teaching and learning experience?

Zittrain, now an assistant professor and faculty co-director at the Berkman Center, enlisted two law students, Alex Macgillivray and me, to develop "the Rotisserie." If, as Lawrence Lessig would tell us, cyberspace's architecture of code constrains our activity, our challenge was to reshape those constraints. With a database and the Perl programming language as our bricks and mortar, Alex and I set out to build a new online discussion framework. (Moving between regular expressions and res judicata left few dull moments.) At some point along the way, as we were writing the code to send questions via email, the sender needed a return address. "The Bot" was born.

In its simplest mode, the Bot automates a process of collecting student responses to questions or brief writing assignments. It might email students a question or two for consideration as they begin a week's reading, inviting them to enter responses online shortly before class meets. Student responses are collected in a web archive, where the professor can preview class sentiments, likely questions, and potential launching points for classroom discussion. One might ask questions with short answers to generate a straw poll, or give students more space for brief analyses or reactions to a subject.

The Bot demonstrates its true power, however, when set to "rotisserie" mode. It starts by sending a first question at the beginning of the week, perhaps an invitation to students to advise Microsoft Corporation or the litigating states on the strongest arguments for their (still) pending antitrust suit. After the classroom discussion of network economics and antitrust, the Bot re-routes each student's initial answer to a classmate, asking him or her to play law clerk and evaluate those arguments in a bench memo to Judge Kollar-Kotelly. After the second turn of the rotisserie, each student has given and gotten individualized feedback from a classmate. The collection of threads in the web archive may start an independent conversation online or in person, in or outside of class.

Like any good tool, the rotisserie suggested new uses as the Bot's basics became familiar. Later in the semester, for example, it collected abstracts to students' planned research papers, and distributed those, to ask second- round recipients for suggestions and possible references. Other times, it engaged students in debate: You are chief of Internet policy for a Boston mayoral candidate, draft a position towards filtering Internet access in the public library -- to be sent to your candidate's opponent for response. It could continue debates through multiple rounds. It could turn the tables, too, letting students ask questions of one another or the professor. (The Bot also served as a scapegoat for the professor's deadlines. If you hadn't answered by the time answers were to be redistributed, the rotisserie would leave without you: Architecture is policy.)

As a student and then as an adjunct professor at St. John's University School of Law teaching my own law of cyberspace class last semester, I found the rotisserie added a continuity between classes. Topics didn't end when their classroom time was up. Instead, the follow-up response round gave students a further chance to reflect on the lecture and participate in its discussion, and the online exchanges might prompt offline conversations between students the Bot had paired. As a student, I appreciated the variety of perspectives the Bot sent my way. As a teacher, I used this diversity of responses to highlight what I found so exciting about the field, the number of open, hotly debated questions of law and policy.

Moreover, when teaching my own class, I found the Bot was a valuable assistant. On the other side of the Socratic questioning for the first time, I could start by sending hypotheticals via the Bot to tease out areas of contention and find students with opposing views. I could draw out reluctant speakers who had well-reasoned online responses, or challenge those whose online answers were too glib. I could use the advance questions to probe for areas of confusion, then review the second-round responses submitted after class to evaluate how well my discussion had addressed the confusion.

The Berkman Center continues to refine the Bot's courseware, now part of a larger project, H2O. Among our goals is to expand the learning community by connecting people and classes through the question rotisserie. The rotisserie will be one tool in a modular framework, which we hope will engage classes across the country and across disciplines. Thus classes in different states might jointly explore the application of "community standards" online; law students and computer science students might exchange proposals to address the techno-legal challenges of online privacy. We hope that technology can foster these and similar dialogues, to spread the excitement of teaching and learning. Working papers on the H2O project are available online.

JURIST's Lessons from the Web series is edited by Professor Patrick Wiseman, Georgia State University College of Law.

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