This is the set of questions we will be exploring during the year in Inquiry, Interaction, and Technology. They are, of course, as yet unanswered questions, so the expectation is that students and faculty will work together, sharing perspectives, experiences, and ambitions, to collectively generate a set of tentative answers, ones which we will all explore further in our subsequent efforts and careers. An inquiry-based, interactive, and constructivist approach to these questions is particularly appropriate since the information technology revolution is so new and so clearly has such great potential impact on the educational enterprise, for better or for worse.
Inquiry-based interactive constructivism is fundamental to the enterprises of science and mathematics, whatever one's experiences with them may have been in courses. And many of the current experiments in making use of information technology in education have roots in these enterprises. Among the earliest and most consistently developed of such experiments is the Math Forum at Swarthmore College, which uses the web to, among other things, encourage and support a mentoring relationship between students and teachers. We will explore the Math Forum to get a first taste of the kinds of educational opportunities which information technology makes available, participating in the mentoring relationship in mathematics and imagining ways in which similar arrangements might be developed in other areas.
Serendip, at Bryn Mawr College, is another long-standing and continually developing exploration of ways to make use of the web to advance inquiry-based, interactive education, with a broader treatment of science and the science/culture interface. Serendip makes available a number of interactive web "experiences", connecting science and mathematics to issues of more general human concern. We will explore the materials on Serendip, with students being encouraged to focus on one or another and generate a critique of it, together with a consideration of how the general approach exemplified might be made use of in some other area of particular individual interest.
Connecting Communities of Learners (CCL), at the University of Pennsylvania, provides a supportive general environment for web-based curricula and education. We will explore and learn to use this site, with students creating their own web-based materials reflecting their experiences and thoughts from the Math Forum and Serendip. CCL will also serve as a site for interactive discussion as the course proceeds. Your own education will of course be most effectively advanced by actively engaging with the course, including making your thoughts available to others as the course proceeds. In this way, you will also be contributing to the ongoing development of the existing sites with which you will be working.
SOME RELEVANT LINKS