The University of Iowa law professor Lea VanderVelde has no problem with her students using Wikipedia. In fact, she hopes others use the information her students have posted in their own research.

Law professors across the country have struggled with how they can use technology in their classes and teaching to their advantage.

Some professors have banned laptops in their classes, saying they can just be a distraction. In California, one group began teaching law courses in virtual reality using Second Life.

When Ms. VanderVelde was preparing to teach a class on employment law last semester, she was trying to think of a new way to teach the complex differences among states’ laws. She decided to divide the states up and give a few to each student to research extensively, and to post their work on a wiki site, using Wikipedia software.

To ensure quality work, Ms. VanderVelde monitored and approved all posts. Students’ grades were based on how much time they had spent on the site working and on the quality of their work. The class created its own search engine in Westlaw to find important law decisions and information that they should include in their work.

“It just struck me that that would be a better way for the information to be organized,” she said. “There is no textbook which does as good of job. I’ve taught every textbook in the market.”

By the end of the semester, her class had created a 1,300 page wiki, the largest of any wiki created for use by the university. “You couldn’t expect students to read a 1,300 page book, but you could encourage them to produce one collectively,” she said. “I have no doubt that it was more work.”

Ms. VanderVelde said that in recent years, many of her students brought laptops to class to take notes, and she knew that many of them were online and perhaps perusing Web sites or playing solitaire.

“There’s a huge debate in the university community on whether we should block Internet in classrooms,” she said. “In this classroom, the laptop had a purpose. I gave the laptop a job.”

But she admits that this model for teaching and presenting research wouldn’t work in all courses. In a property-law class she teaches, she still uses a textbook that she wrote.

Although other lawyers and professors have expressed interest in gaining access to the site, it is only available to Ms. VanderVelde’s students.

“You can imagine why lawyers are interested in accessing this,” she said. “The 25 pages about the state of Minnesota is going to give them better information and more current information than anything else that exists.”

Ms. VanderVelde plans to have her students use the wiki model in the future, adding to what her last class has already created, and recreating some of the information that she thinks they should research and present on their own.

“I have to admit that out of the whole class, I did have one person complain,” she said. “They had dial-up Internet access at home.” —Marc Beja