Re: internet and education

[forinas@indiana.edu (kyle forinash)]

Seems to me there are currently 3  main ways to use the internet for
educational purposes (but see below for a 4th suggestion):

1) source of reference/resource material (your own stuff, specific to your
classes or other, more general reference sites like JPL and NASA)

2) listserv/email discussions (like the one we are on now) which are
relatively unfocussed but very useful for timely information exchange and
question answering

3) collaborative projects which involves using the collective wisdom of
many people to create some thing new (peer review writ large so to speak).

The internet can provide the possibility for large collaborative projects
at  the teacher level (a large group collaborating on the construction of a
comprehensive archive of teaching material or a bibliography or a data base
of useful teaching statistics, problems, demonstrations, textbook reviews
etc.- the key is that many people contribute rather than just one or two)
or smaller collaborations at the student level.

Maurice Barnhill gives us what I think is a good prototype for this last
kind of process where he has his students create something collaboratively
via the web:

 [snip]
> I give out sheets of particle data -- spins,
> charges, masses, lifetimes, and primary decay modes -- and have groups
> of students in the class search for simplifying patterns in the data.
> When they find a pattern they write up an "article" for an EMail journal
> of which I am the editor.  The paper is "refereed" and when ready for
> "publication" goes into a collection which is EMailed to the entire
> class.  I use "editorials" in the "journals" and private conversations
> to make suggestions as necessary for things to look at, but I never give
> an answer or even say that a submitted paper is headed in the wrong
> direction. The primary point is not to teach particle physics but to
> teach how science works.
> Maurice Barnhill, mvb@udel.edu
> http://www.physics.udel.edu/~barnhill/
> Physics Dept., University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716

I can envision a possible 4th way to use the internet for education but
this seems to only being thought about by a few people:

4) access and manipulaton of equipment which is too expensive or remote for
direct student use. Scientists already share large telescopes via
electronic links so why not students?

cheers
kyle

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