The Virtual Seminar Room:
Using a World Wide Web Site
in
Teaching Ethics
Lawrence M. Hinman
Department of Philosophy
University of San Diego
5998 Alcalá Park
San Diego, CA 92110-2492
Voice: 619-260-4787
Fax: 619-260-4227
E-mail: hinman@sandiego.edu
Ethics Updates: http://ethics.sandiego.edu
Teaching Philosophy,
Volume 19, No. 4 (December, 1996), 319-29.
Imagine the ideal ethics seminar room. Along one wall would be the classics of moral philosophy--works by Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, and others--with extensive indexes to make it easier to research a particular topic. Along another wall would be journals in ethics--again, with extensive indexes. And perhaps there might even been a number of file folders containing xeroxes of interesting ethics-related articles that have appeared in the popular press, and even reference works that would be valuable in applied ethics. In addition to this, it would contain relevant documents, including court decisions, legislation, major statements such as papal encyclicals, and reports such as the Glass Ceiling Report. It would be even more helpful to have topic-based research guides for students interested in particular issues. If the room were large enough, there might be a corner where students could sit around and talk about what they had read. In another corner, there might be a table reserved for instructors which could include some helpful things such as sample syllabi for ethics courses. The coffee pot would be always on, and always fresh. There would be plenty of message boards around, so people could leave notes for one another. And, if there were any wall space left over after installing the bookshelves, there would be some good art on the walls. Of course, everything would be free.
The bad news is that there isn't any coffee on the web. Otherwise, anyone can easily create a virtual seminar room that has everything else mentioned in the previous paragraph. This is the vision of a World Wide Web site that has motivated me in developing my own site, Ethics Updates.1 It is not an idea that came all at once; rather, one piece gradually led to the next. Nor is it one that is complete--indeed, web sites seem particularly resistant to completion. Nevertheless, it is much more developed than I would have thought. What is striking in the process is how easy much of it is.
In the following remarks, I would like to talk a bit about developing a web site and how it fits into my teaching of ethics. At the same time, I would like to weave in some information about what is available on the web in ethics. I hope that this will encourage others both to utilize the existing ethics resources on the web and to develop their own sites.
I began by thinking of the web as a supplement, both to my teaching and to my writing. There are numerous materials I want my students to have, even if (for various reasons) I don't want them to go out and pay for them. My initial use of the web began as, in effect, an extension of my usual practice of putting materials on room reserve in our library.
When I teach logic, for example, I like students to be able to consult the answer key for their homework. Last year, instead of just duplicating that key and putting it on reserve in the library, I also put a copy of the answers up on the web. Setting up an account on my university's computer to store my web documents was amazingly easy, and basically consisted of setting up a subdirectory (called "public_html") in my existing account and declaring that that directory and its contents were open to the public to read. Getting access to the graphics capabilities of the web-which is what makes the web so enticing-was more difficult, since our university was unable to support the high speed connections necessary for that. In the end, I signed up for a commercial service that gave me fifty hours of high quality connection to the internet for $20 a month through a local phone number. I keep my site at my university, but I usually access it through my commercial account.
I quickly realized that other materials could be put up on the web site as well. The syllabus was next, and soon handouts, study guides, and the like were added. Moreover, the electronic syllabus-which initially had just seemed like a nicety to put up, but hardly essential since students had a printed copy-could be the jumping off point for all this material. A hyperlink at each listed homework assignment could take students to the relevant portion of the answer key. A hyperlink at a given reading assignment could take students to the relevant handout on that reading or to a study guide about it. In other words, when the syllabus was transferred to an electronic medium, its nature changed. Moreover, it became possible to update it continually. Although I believe a syllabus is like a contact with students and should not be substantially altered after the semester begins (by, for example, adding a couple of term papers), it can certainly be made more precise as the semester progresses. For example, in logic my homework assignments vary, depending on how difficult the students seem to find a particular section. I might assign more questions in one set of exercises and fewer in another than I originally anticipated. Having a syllabus posted on the web facilitates this process, and also makes it available to students who may have missed a particular class.
I also found that the web offered a resource for publishing. Initially, I simply thought of this in terms of keeping bibliography up-to-date. I had published a book on ethical theory in 19942 and wanted to update the bibliographical essays in those chapters. (Hence the name of my site: Ethics Updates.) I planned to do a similar thing with a book that was just coming out on contemporary moral problems.3
It was this bibliographical updating which gradually led me to understand what the web had to offer and the potential usefulness of a web site. Initially, I simply began by posting my bibliographical essays and making a few additions as more recent (and older, overlooked) material became available. Then I noticed something intriguing. I had references in these bibliographical guides to works such as Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, Hobbes' Leviathan, and Kant's Groundwork. I realized that I could also include hyperlinks (that is, highlighted text which, when a reader clicks on it, takes the reader to another location on the web) to the full texts of these works themselves. This was an important shift from providing information about the works to providing the works themselves. As it turns out, most of the major works in moral philosophy are available on the web in electronic versions.
This led me to begin to think about my web site in a different way. Instead of thinking of it primarily as providing information about relevant works in ethics, I began to think of it as capable-at least in some instances-of providing the works themselves. It was a short step from that to asking how this site could provide more relevant material, not just information about that material. That was the point at which I began to surf the net in earnest.
I discovered that there was a wealth of material available, virtually all of which I could make available on my site through hyperlinks. I had a chapter on rights theory, for example, and a bibliographical essay about works on human rights. I quickly discovered that I could post links to major documents, such as the Bill of Rights,4 the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen,5 and the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.6 Then I realized that there was no need to stop with historic documents. The State Department, for example, publishes individual reports on human rights in every country of the world, reports which by law it must send to Congress. These are now available on the web,7 and I found I could easily include a link to them. The Supreme Court has obviously passed a number of decisions relating to human rights,8 and I discovered that the School of Law at Cornell University maintains a server that catalogues all Supreme Court decisions since June, 1990. These can be searched for any topic, and a number of pre-established categories (including civil rights) are available with a click of the mouse. Moreover, these searches are always up-to-date-and kept up-to-date without my having to worry about updating my own list. Similarly, Congress maintains a server called Thomas, which tracks recent, current, and pending legislation by topic as well as offering key word searches; in addition, the House of Representatives maintains an Internet Law Library with extensive resources on civil rights as well as other topics. Gradually, I began to see the way in which a web site could offer more than just information about relevant material-it could offer the material itself.
If this could be done in regard to human rights, I realized it could be done for many of the issues I treated in my web site. The section on gender issues, for example, now includes the Glass Ceiling Report, reports from the Beijing '95 international conference on women, Supreme Court decisions on sexual harassment, papal encyclicals on women, and the like. There is also an excellent on-line collaborative bibliography of women in philosophy. The death penalty section not only includes the relevant Supreme Court decisions and Congressional legislation, but also provides a link to the site at Northern Illinois University where the Sociology Department maintains an excellent library of statistical data about the death penalty and prisons in general. It also includes a statement by Physicians for Human Rights and the Death Penalty on physician participation in this process, and a copy of the Hippocratic Oath as well. In addition to this, there is a link to the home page of Dean, an inmate on death row in San Quentin. I gradually developed corresponding materials for the pages on abortion, euthanasia, biotechnology, race, sexual orientation, poverty, animal rights, and environmental issues.
Two types of resources made this task easier. First, there are powerful search engines for the web. Yahoo, Lycos, WebCrawler, OpenText, and Alta Vista are among the most useful of these resources. There are also meta-search engines, such as the superb MetaCrawler, which take your search terms, submit them to several different search engines, and then compile and sift the results. Second, many organizations and individuals maintain web sites that are extremely useful, for they contain links to other resources on the web as well as maintaining their own material. Thus there are important sites on human rights maintained at the University of Minnesota and at the University of Cincinnati, to mention only two of the most useful sites. There is a human rights gopher that simply catalogues relevant sites. Organizations such as Amnesty International maintain sites with extensive resources and links. Usually, if one finds two or three major sites, one can find most of the rest of the sites simply through links listed on those pages.
Once again, my concept of my own web page had changed. It had clearly shifted from providing information about relevant materials to providing-through hyperlinks-the materials themselves. Once that occurred, I began to think of the individual pages of my site as mini-anthologies that provide supplementary material for my students (and anyone else) on the topic in question.
My understanding of the possibilities of the web for publishing now came back to influence my views on the web as a teaching tool. I began to see my web site as a repository of material for my courses as well as for my books. I had already realized that I could place course materials on my site for students to read. The principle was easy, the application a bit more difficult. The greatest difficulty has been copyright. Some materials are no longer copyrighted, and I could post them without difficulty. John Stuart Mill's "Speech on Capital Punishment," for example, is now available on my site because it is not under copyright. Rawls' "Two Concepts of Rules" is now in the public domain because the copyright has run out, and is now available on my site. Ideally, I would like to make a reader for each moral issue of selections of non-copyrighted philosophical material relating to that topic. A topic such as punishment and the death penalty would be an obvious and easy choice.
(The most significant barrier to placing additional materials on the web at this point is copyright. These materials are already often available electronically, but only through comparatively expensive services such as Nexis and only with copyright restrictions. My hope is that we will soon see a system that is fair to authors and publishers but permits easier and cheaper access to these materials for everyone. Some publishers have gone to great lengths to make material available. The Atlantic Monthly, for example, is now available on the web, including many back articles. I have included links to the full text articles where relevant to a particular topic on my site. Tikkun is making its journal available on-line, and I have included similar links to that publication. The Los Angeles Times is now available on-line and offers excellent links, which I now regularly include on my site.)
The next step, in regard to teaching, is to assign internet research projects to students. I tried such an assignment last semester, requiring that students have to do a short research project in which they explore and evaluate the resources available on the net (beyond what I've listed on my site) in regard to a specific issue. Since some students are still quite uncomfortable with the net, I supplemented this with two sessions in the computer lab, teaching each class how to search the net, save material, send it as e-mail, etc. The results were quite positive, both from the students' perspectives and form mine. Students like web assignments, and many of them did an excellent job of finding interesting and relevant material. It was interesting to note that students then began including references to web sites in their regular term papers.
None of this begins to touch the possibilities of the web for interactive communication. Some of these have already been partially realized, others are still largely unexplored.
I began to use e-mail communication with my students two years ago, and the results have been very interesting. Our university is primarily a teaching institution, and I like to be available for my students as much as possible. However, with a four year old daughter and a fairly active research program and an office that is too small to hold a working library, it's difficult to be in my office as much as I would like. E-mail, I found, offered a very helpful supplement to office hours without the intrusion of having students call me at home. (It's also more comfortable for students, most of whom don't really like to call professors at home.) I check my mail a couple of times a day when I am working at home, and I am able to get back to students very quickly when they have questions. Students feel as though they have more help from me and that I am generally more available to them, and I feel that my privacy is preserved and my work and family routines are intact.
The next step in this process was establishing discussion groups at my site, so that students could talk with one another about these issues. There is already a precedent for this is usenet groups, which are a kind of e-mail electronic conversation in which all messages are sent to all recipients on the list. During the past semester, I established a list server for one of my classes. Basically, this is a type of enhanced e-mail which is set up in such a way that, when anyone sends a message to the list, that message goes out to everyone on the list (in this case, everyone in the class). The advantage of this structure is that it allows students to send out queries to everyone in the class, not just me; often other students answer a question before I do. Moreover, I can send out hints and tips on a particular issue, and then the students can work with one another on figuring it out. All of this allows the instructor to recede somewhat into the background and the students to create a more independent community of learning.
List servers work very well with established groups such as classes, but they are less accessible to late comers on the scene. Previous contributions to the list must be accessed through a newsgroup reader and are not easily viewable on a web site. Moreover, signing up to the list can bring a lot of unwanted e-mail. Threaded discussion groups offer an alternative to list servers, and I am currently in the process of introducing these for each of the topics on my site. When students click on a threaded discussion group, they see contributions to the topic at hand by previous visitors. They can read a one-line header or click on the posting to see the entire message. Moreover, they can choose to post a message of their own, either in reply to a previous message (in which case it is added to an existing thread of the discussion) or as a new issue (in which case it is added as a new thread). Ideally, when someone posts a reply to a student's message, that student will be notified by e-mail that a reply has now been posted. These discussion groups should be available for students (and anyone else) at my site before this article appears in print. (This is one area where the technology is a bit more complicated than simply posting web pages.) Once something like threaded discussion groups have been established, there is a possibility of developing virtual electronic communities around particular topics.
The web also offers the possibility of developing cooperative projects in which the students at one institution work together on a project with students are another place. This may sound a bit artificial (as though the rest of this is natural!), but it offers some interesting possibilities. The artificiality of it may well be confined to the beginning stages. Whereas students may become involved in a chat group through their own initiative, an inter-institutional cooperative project would probably not spring up on its own. However, my hunch is that, once begun, the artificiality of the arrangement would quickly recede and an interesting kind of cooperative electronic community might develop.
My own plan is to develop a course on contemporary moral issues that would be coordinated with a similar course in several other countries around the world. One of the requirements would be that students correspond regularly with each other via e-mail on the specific topics of the course. This would give students an interesting international and multicultural dimension to their course. The logistics of such a course are daunting-finding the other professors, agreeing on at least some common issues and readings, insuring a common language, etc. However, the technical side of it would be surprisingly easy. All that would be necessary would be access to e-mail.
As I've developed my own site, I have had two groups in mind: students and faculty. Most of what I have discussed so far is relevant primarily to students, but in some cases may be helpful to faculty as well. Let me now discuss some things that relate more specifically to instructors in ethics.
Syllabi. It's always interesting to see how other people teach the courses you teach, and I've developed a section on my site containing syllabi for ethics courses. For me, it's a nice way of sharing ideas and approaches. Also, since these syllabi are on-line, they are more likely to incorporate internet-specific features that are of interest.
Discussion and Paper Topics. Another thing that is useful for instructors, I realized, is a set of good, up-to-date topics for class discussions and to serve as paper topics. I've begun posting these on my site, whenever possible with references to recent newspaper articles, etc. The next step in this, which I hope will be in place by the time this article appears in print, is for other instructors (and perhaps students) to leave interesting topics of their own.
Close Reading Groups. For ethics instructors and scholars interested in particular moral philosophers, it is possible to institute close reading/discussion groups that center around a particular text. The Philosophy Department at the University of Chicago has already been doing this with certain texts (not confined to ethics). This offers the possibility of a virtual community centering around the close reading of a particular work in moral philosophy, such as the Nichomachean Ethics or the Groundwork. Typically, close reading groups are have a much longer life than the comparatively short discussions that may occur in classes that cover a number of different topics in one semester.
It is easy to imagine, as well, making this a cooperative effort. In our philosophy department, we typically offer at least one course per semester that is a close reading of a selected text. This is the kind of project that could be coordinated with several other seminars around that country that were reading the same text. The difficult part would be finding out who is also teaching that same material, but once that hurdle is overcome, it would be comparatively easy to set up cooperative efforts among students in different institutions.
Finally, I would like my site to be able to offer more information. (This is obviously relevant to students as well as instructors.) In particular, it seems that there are two types of information that would be most helpful to instructors and to students. The first is full-text articles (or even books). The more full text articles we have available on-line, the easier our lives will be. My hope is that journals will begin to offer some electronic options for current issues. For example, individuals might subscribe to an electronic version of the journal for, say, $10 a year instead of the regular $30 for a hard-copy version-in fact, this may be a way of attracting many new subscribers who were unwilling to pay the price for hard copies. Or journals might maintain their own site and allow downloading of articles in electronic format for a minimal fee of, for example, a dollar or so per article. Or, and I hope this will occur soon, journal editors might be willing to put back issues of their articles on-line. This would presumably not cut into their current subscription revenue, and would certainly increase readership. Finally, university library subscriptions to journals might also include free electronic access to the journal for all students and faculty at that university.
Abstracts and short reviews constitute the second type of helpful information is. When I get my copy of Ethics in the mail, one of the first things I do is go through the short reviews. To have something like that available on-line and searchable by topic or key word would be extremely valuable. One of the most impressive steps toward something like this is BEARS, Moral and Political Philosophy Reviews at Brown University. It contains original reviews of current journal articles in ethics, and now has begun to publish some author's responses to the reviews. My assumption is that this will gradually evolve into an broad range of on-going conversations on a number of different topics in ethics.
The ideal format for journal material is clear. For each journal article, there would be an entry that included the standard bibliographical information. Click on the author's name, and that would take the reader to a biography of the author plus a hypertext link for sending the author e-mail. Click on the article's title, and that would take the user to an abstract of the article; click again and go to the full text of the article. Click on the journal's name to go to the full tables of contents for that journal plus additional information such as submission guidelines. Click on an icon next to the article title (perhaps a picture of two people talking), and go directly to a threaded discussion group for people who want to discuss that particular article. Authors would be able to get immediate and perhaps even extensive feedback on their articles in a way that rarely take place now. Click on a different icon to go to on-line reviews of that articles, such as the ones published by BEARS. Finally, if a person is reading a full text of an article, footnote references would be changed to hypertext links whenever possible. In those cases, the reader merely clicks on the footnote and is taken immediately to the document referred to in the footnote.
The resources of the world wide web are no substitute for careful philosophical analysis, and any attempt to conflate the two will probably lead to disaster. However, the web offers unprecedented opportunities in terms of support for research and teaching, and it also presents interesting opportunities for developing virtual communities. The type of site that I have been developing could be developed in any area of philosophy. Nor need it be an extensive as what I have described. It is easy to develop a virtual seminar room for one particular course that would begin with the kinds of materials we typically place on room reserve in the library. Search the web and find the links that would be most helpful to the students in your course, and place them on your page. Add a list server or a discussion group, and the seminar room is on-line.
The only thing missing is the coffee.
1 http://www.sandiego.edu/ethics.
All references to web sites will be given in footnotes in this
text. An electronic version of this article will be available on Ethics
Updates and all references will be replaced with hyperlinks,
so that the reader simply has to click on the highlighted text in
order to go to that location.
2 Lawrence M. Hinman, Ethics: A Pluralistic Approach to Moral
Theory (Fort Worth: Harcourt, Brace, 1994).
3 Lawrence M. Hinman, Contemporary Moral Issues (Upper
Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1996).
4 gopher://UACSC2.ALBANY.EDU:70/00/newman/crjun/uscons/usbill.text
5 gopher://ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu:3001/0ftp:nptn.org@pub/e.texts/freedom.shrine/french
6 http://www.traveller.com/~hrweb/legal/udhr.html
7 gopher://cyfer.esusda.gov/11/ace/state/hrcr
8 http://www.law.cornell.edu/syllabi?civil+and+rights
9 http://thomas.loc.gov/
10 http://www.pls.com:8001/his/93.htm
11 http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/library/e_archive/GlassCeiling/
12 http://www.worldwatch.org/womensnet/beijing/beijing.html
13 http://www.law.cornell.edu/syllabi?harassment
14 http://listserv.american.edu:70/0/catholic/church/papal/jp.ii/jp2wom95.txt
15 http://billyboy.ius.indiana.edu/WomeninPhilosophy/Resources.html
16 http://www.law.cornell.edu/syllabi?capital+or+death+and+penalty
17
http://sun.soci.niu.edu/~critcrim/prisons/prisons.html
18 gopher://gopher.igc.apc.org:5000/11/int/phr/capital
19 gopher://ftp.std.com/00/obi/book/Hippocrates/Hippocratic.Oath
20 http://www.hooked.net/monkey/m/hut/deadman/deadman.html
21 http://www.yahoo.com/
22 http://www.lycos.com/
23 http://webcrawler.com/
24 http://opentext.uunet.ca:8080/
25 http://www.altavista.digital.com/
26 http://metacrawler.cs.washington.edu:8080/index.html
27 http://www.umn.edu/humanrts/
28
http://www.law.uc.edu:80/Diana/
29 gopher://gopher.humanrights.org:5000/
30 http://organic.com/Non.profits/Amnesty
31 For an interesting example of this
in political science, see Larry Martinez’s site at http://www.csulb.edu/~martinez/syllabi.html
32 http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/bears/homepage.html