Tuesday, March 7, 2000

Mount Holyoke Finds That Web Publishing Improves Class Instruction By FLORENCE OLSEN South Hadley, Mass. Using the World Wide Web in a classroom course won't make a boring class interesting, but it can make a good course even better, especially when the Web can be used for sharing lab results with classmates, says Katie Sandretto, a junior at Mount Holyoke College. "It allows us to see how biology is a creative process, and not something where you put in a given number of things, and you always get the same result." Ms. Sandretto was one of several students and faculty members who spoke at a recent conference here on information technology. Mount Holyoke faculty members and their students said that students learn more when they use Web technology to publish their class research on the campus computer network, where others besides the professor can see their work. Rachel Fink, an associate professor of biological sciences at Mount Holyoke, said cellular biologists have developed new insights by watching living cells in time-lapse movies produced with a video camera attached to a microscope. Last fall, she started making her cell videos available to her students, via Mount Holyoke's internal computer network. "I wanted the students to be able to sit in their PJ's in the dorm room with their cocoa and watch the movies -- again and again -- that we had shown in class," Ms. Fink said. "I knew they would be as fascinated by them as I was." The next logical step was to have the students make their own time-lapse movies as they were learning "how a cell crawls," she said. Although she still draws on a blackboard, and her students still read a textbook, the time-lapse videos are now part of the mix. When students are able to make such movies, the line between research and learning becomes less distinct, which is how it should be, she said. Indeed, the possibility of using new information technology -- such as modeling programs -- has led to a complete overhaul of the way some science courses are taught. "It's very frightening and exciting," said Marcia C. Linn, a professor of education at the University of California at Berkeley, at the Mount Holyoke conference. Even such general-purpose devices as the Palm Pilot electronic organizer have affected how some biology instructors teach subjects like water quality. "When you can go out in the field and leave your Palm Pilot for 24 hours to gather data, that's a very different situation from having a field trip once a year," she said. Several humanities professors at Mount Holyoke also spoke about exploring teaching uses for the Web. The act of creating hyperlinks in a text document seems to enhance students' ability to think about connections, "one of the perhaps unforeseen but certainly positive benefits of this kind of technology," said Robert Shwartz, a professor of history. Vincent Ferraro, a professor of international relations at the college, said the Internet had increased the diversity of resources available to students. For his courses, he now supplements government publications with information that was never available before. "All sorts of people have their voices on the Net that were never heard," he said. Mr. Ferraro publishes all of his foreign-policy course readings on the Web, and students create Web pages that he critiques as he would written papers. To improve their understanding of what they read, he encourages students to copy and paste important passages from their readings into a word processor, and then to annotate the text. "It's extraordinary what happens when the students do the readings this way," Mr. Ferraro said. "They are conducting a dialogue with the author, which is what you want," rather than skimming and highlighting passages to remind themselves to read later, he said. Gabriele Wittig Davis, a professor and chairman of the German-studies department at Mount Holyoke, said she uses the Web extensively for teaching and research, but she said many people are still skeptical of its benefits for teaching and learning. "We try to find ways for using the media correctly for the kind of project we're doing," she said. However, the time to learn about the new media is not when starting out in a college-teaching career, she said. "I wouldn't dare tell any of my junior faculty to invest much time in it before tenure." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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