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This collection of pages was prepared for the Conference on Deconstructing the Law School Classroom, sponsored by Chicago-Kent College of Law and CALI, held at Chicago-Kent on June 24-25, 1999. I hope to have a narrative version of the presentation available in some format within the relatively near future. If so, a link or other means to obtain a copy will appear here. I would be happy to keep adding links to websites within legal education that exemplify the techniques outlined in the pages linkedvia navigation frame to the left. E-mail me with URLs and suggestions of where they might fit, and I'll add the link.
I start from the premise that, like all technologies, web-delivered courseware is a mixed bag. It does some things less well than live class instruction, some things better, it cannot do some things at all that classrooms do with ease, and it makes possible some kinds of teaching that are simply impossible or prohibitively labor intensive without it. The trick, of course, is to figure out which is which, and to utilize the medium's strengths while avoiding its weaknesses.
In this presentation I seek to focus on the potential strengths of web-based instruction in legal education. I divide these into three categories: Materials (the delivery of content), Discussion (the facilitation and management of student interaction), and Pedagogy (the ways in which web-based instruction helps foreground and facilitate not just teaching but thinking about teaching).
The first two, in particular, are quite distinct modalities in web-based instruction. While most websites and authoring environments involve both Materials and Discussion, and while both involve database applications behind the scenes, they have significantly dynamics. It is, I think, helpful to think separately about each: What content do I want the website to convey? What interaction do I want it to foster? What tool is best suited for each of these tasks?
In response to the last of these questions, I have provided links to examples of the two law-specific authoring tools (West's TWEN and Lexis' Virtual Classroom) and to the two non-law authoring systems that seem to me to exemplify more richly-featured (though still not fully satisfying) authoring environments (Blackboard provides greater ease of use and perhaps somewhat more extensive features for discussion-driven courses, while WebCT seems superior for materials-driven courses, has an internal e-mail system, and uses more standard formats for multimedia files). Finally, I have listed an incomplete inventory of 'modules' or narrowly tailored tools that I, for one, would like to have as I develop my websites (all authoring tools provide some mix of these tools, but none has them all, some are not in any, and for any one proprietary system implementation of the varioyus modules is far from consistent across the product--there are inevitably peaks and valleys).
This, like all websites, is potentially a work-in-progress (and like all websites it is subject to the risk that what seems pressing today will be less urgent tomorrow). In particular, I will seek to add three categories of links: additions to the list of modules or tools that would be useful in website development, links to providers of such tools, and links to other websites that helpfully explore the pedagogical implications of web-based instruction.
The pages linked via the side navigation frame contain an outline of the presentation and further links, primarily to pages from web-delivered course supplements that I have developed for the courses I teach at CUNY Law School but also occasionally to examples from other law school websites, are examples of things that I believe can be done better as a result of access to web-based teaching tools. In those cases where a username and password are required, generally 'guest' will work for each. There may be instances where entry will be denied (because the link is to a TWEN-based forum or because it is to a restricted forum; e-mail me if you have questions about any of these links). As noted above, I'll add links to others' websites if people send me e-mail with URLs that suggest that a particular site demonstrates the sort of pedagogy outlined on one of these pages.
John Farago, last updated June 25, 1999.