"Teaching about Law through Technologies:

Freedom of Expression at the NEA"

by Julie Van Camp

Focus on Law Studies

Volume XIII, Number 1 (Fall 1997), pp. 4, 12

Published by the Division for Public Education

of the American Bar Association

Copyright 1997 Julie C. Van Camp


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/p. 4 Warning: Teaching with the Internet can be highly addictive. With only modest familiarity with the technology, the Internet opens exciting possibilities for greater interaction with students, interdisciplinary presentation of traditional texts with multi-media material, and introduction to the vast resources now available on-line to anyone with a modem. The virtual community of college faculty already using the Internet makes it easy for newcomers to see what colleagues around the country are trying, thus making it easier to develop their own projects.

An on-line classroom can never replace the important role of in-person dialogue and debate, nor do the resources on the World Wide Web eliminate the need for libraries, books, and papers. But, used well, the Internet can be a valuable complement to traditional teaching that engages students and eases them into the on-line world many will enter in their own careers.

My first experience with the World Wide Web was the development of an interdisciplinary curriculum project, "Freedom of Expression at the National Endowment for the Arts" (http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/intro.html). On-line since March 8, 1996, the project was supported with a Mini-Grant from the Commission on College and University Legal Studies of the American Bar Association through the Fund for Justice and Education.

It is indicative of the rapid development of the Internet that my original proposal in March 1995 proposed to disseminate the curriculum materials via my campus' Gopher site. Over the next year, Gopher was overtaken by the World Wide Web, giving me the incentive to experiment with this new technology.

Freedom of expression at the National Endowment for the Arts is a public policy issue of enormous interest to those of us who care about free speech as well as the health of the arts in this country. I have taught these issues for many years in my undergraduate courses on philosophy of law and philosophy of art. Invariably, these issues are of enormous interest to students, even if they are muddled in their understanding of what precisely is at stake.

Political science students are familiar with the First Amendment, but not the philosophical or artistic context. Philosophy students (many of whom are also pre-law) are familiar with the work of J.S. Mill and Joel Feinberg on free speech, but not the constitutional issues. Art majors are confused about technical issues of free speech in the context of government funding of the arts, even though they care deeply about general principles of freedom of expression.

My goal in teaching this issue and in developing the Web site was to provide an interdisciplinary approach to the topic, using law, philosophy, and art to introduce issues and encourage thoughtful dialogue. I presume very little background in any of those fields. Rather, I try to provide an overview of the several issues involved and point to resources for further study. I also try not to promote any one particular viewpoint. I am interested in well-informed dialogue, not propaganda.

The site includes several elements. "Course materials" include four sections on topics central to understanding the free speech issues in government funding: (a) Freedom of expression: How is freedom of expression protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, especially for artists? (b) Government support for cultural activities: Is funding of the arts an appropriate government activity? (c) Government funding and the First Amendment: How does freedom of expression apply in the context of federally funded activities? (d) Governmental determinations of aesthetic value: How is aesthetic value determined by the executive and judiciary branches of government?

The course materials include extensive hyperlinks to other material so students can pursue topics in more depth and take advantage of the resources on the Web. Suggested discussion questions are also included. Especially if students are reading independently, they need to be encouraged to interact with a text, not read it as mere "fact" to be absorbed. The questions are also useful for creating assignments and focusing on-line discussion groups.

The site also includes a print bibliography, not only for additional references, but also to encourage students to go to the library. Despite the riches of the Internet, it is worth remembering that extensive material is not available on-line and probably will not be for the foreseeable future. To keep the bibliography manageable, it is limited to books and articles which expressly address free speech issues at NEA.

Another feature of the site is the inclusion of several court decisions involving NEA which are not on-line elsewhere on the Web. Although these decisions are available on Lexis, undergraduates typically do not have access to this resource. Many smaller schools do not even have court reporters available. The decisions on my site are edited, so undergraduates can focus on the substantive issues and not get bogged down in technical matters.

For most of these decisions, I used word-processing files from previous hand-outs in my courses. The rest required typing and editing, an onerous chore, but one worth doing for essential material. Scanning is another way of moving material on-line, although it still requires manual checking for accuracy and editing so the material is appropriate for undergraduate classrooms.

Although U.S. Supreme Court decisions, including older decisions, are increasingly available on the Web, free access to lower court decisions remains a problem. As more and more college faculty put such class materials on-line, primary resources available to students through hyperlinks will continually improve.

My NEA site also includes "On-line Resources," with suggested links and class projects in art, philosophy, law, censorship, and on-line discussion groups. The goal here is to encourage both faculty and students to think about the issues by using resources on the Web.

Who uses the site? The counter on the first page has registered over 3,300 visitors after fifteen months on-line, about seven people a day. But it is impossible to know /p. 12 what people look at, how long they stay, or who they are. I sent messages to many related sites to suggest that they consider adding a hyperlink to mine, and I assume many people come from one of those sites. I also sent notices to all the major search engines, to be sure I was in their data bases. After the site was recommended in an article in Slate (the Microsoft on-line 'webzine' edited by Michael Kinsley), I noticed a dramatic increase in visitors for several weeks.

But actual usage is difficult to assess on the Web. I set up an e-mail link on every page to make it as easy as possible to send me a message. I hear regularly from faculty and students from all over the country, mainly in political science, philosophy, and art, who are working on individual or class projects. The site has become a "virtual classroom" for me. Most tell me that the site helped them sort out a complex and often confusing set of issues. Both students and faculty also send questions asking for additional material to consider or for clarification on an issue.

And the Internet knows no national boundaries. A law student in Malta wrote (via e-mail) to tell me about his project comparing free speech in his small Mediterranean country and the United States. Several correspondents in Britain report finding the site useful for comparing free speech issues in our respective countries.

The only way to learn how to teach on the Internet is to try it. Easy first steps are an on-line discussion group, e-mail, and a course syllabus on the Web. Later additions to the course could include on-line research assignments and on-line readings with hyperlinks to other resources. The Internet is no panacea and it will never entirely replace the in-person classroom, but it can be an enormously valuable supplement to the traditional "sage on the stage." The Internet also has great potential for courses entirely-on-line to fill certain niches, such as specialized courses that cannot be offered regularly on every campus and courses targeted at older students completing certificates and advanced programs, who find it difficult to get to campus for regular classes.

What can you do on-line that you cannot do in traditional formats using print readings and classroom lecture-discussions? Learning at the undergraduate level should include (1) learning how to learn, (2) learning about the interconnectedness of knowledge -- the important of context in understanding, and (3) learning as critical thinking, dialogue, and debate, not merely static facts to be memorized. With on-line course materials, students can follow hyperlinks of interest to them and on topics with which they are unfamiliar. They learn how to learn, not just by accumulating facts, but by putting ideas and issues into context and in a medium in which they are already interested, the World Wide Web. On-line discussion groups give students a way to interact in dialogue without the time limits of the traditional in-person classroom.

Increasingly, students are being introduced to the Internet in high schools and expect to continue using these resources in their college classrooms. Many students have figured out -- often before the faculty who teach them -- that many employment opportunities expect Internet-literacy. They are eager to work with the medium in the relatively sheltered environment of an undergraduate classroom. They understand that this is a new world, for teachers as well as students.

I often look at other faculty Web sites to get ideas about issues, ways of approaching various materials, and on-line resources that I might use in my classes. Print dissemination of curriculum material remains useful, but it is not as fast, comprehensive, and up-to-date as class materials posted on-line. The culture of the on-line community makes it easy to send e-mail to strangers with questions about the materials they have on-line, and I have found this virtual community to be remarkably helpful and friendly. Pre-Internet, we could send a letter or make a phone call to a stranger to ask about their courses, but not with the ease, speed, and comfort of an e-mail message!

Teaching on the Internet also has its share of problems and limitations. I wonder to what extent I distort what I am teaching based on what is on-line elsewhere, so I can set up a hyperlink. I also worry about the temptation to distort reading assignments to favor materials in the public domain that I can safely put on-line. I worry that students might lose an ability to research print resources in the library, because the Internet is more fun and more accessible. Students also need enormous guidance in assessing the quality of what they find on-line; they must be taught to be their own librarians to screen the unfiltered masses of information on the Web.

Technical problems also must be factored into any teaching plans. Sites disappear without warning. Servers go off-line, sometimes for days, for no apparent reason. Access to adequate technology is a major issue on most campuses, as colleges scramble to provide up-to-date equipment in student labs to meet burgeoning demand. But refusing to teach on-line until all of these problems are solved is unfair to the students, for we are sending them into a world where these skills are increasingly expected. It is the obligation of faculty to determine how to work with existing resources, to solve problems, and to not use them as an excuse.

Overall, teaching on the Internet is both exciting and important. We are sending students into an on-line world, and we have an obligation to help them learn how to work substantively in that world. As teachers, we can complain about the new technologies -- or we can make them our own and insist on being the leaders in development of educationally sound on-line teaching resources and methods.

( June 22, 1997)


This page maintained by Julie Van Camp.

Questions and comments are welcome: jvancamp@csulb.edu

Last updated: November 22, 1997