20-4

T. LABUZA, Department of Food Science, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN 55108

When developing a new course or revising an old one, it becomes imperative that instructors include the use of the Internet as a means to not only save time and money, but also to hone computer skills in the students. Any student or professor now has available a myriad of quick sources of information for any project that they undertake. This talk will focus on four examples of Internet use in education: (1) the use of the Internet for documentation in a food law course; (2) the use of a WWW page listserve for course materials, communications, and assignments; (3) finding resources on the Internet for a research topic, and (4) inappropriate use of the Internet. With respect to food law, it becomes obvious that legal resources and legal documentation are an important part of the material students need to be familiar with. The development of the Internet has now solved much of this problem of availability for the student and practitioner in that most of the documents as well as other material are now available instantly. A few examples of finding documentation through the IFT Food Law Division WWW page will be given. Key problems include lack of knowledge of the student in logging on despite all the efforts given to help them; lack of a computer or hardware to download material; no knowledge of the capabilities of the student to download the material; proper search of the Internet for researching information. The last issue, which is a major problem, is the inappropriate use of the net to get homework assignments.