Dept of Physics and Astronomy, Arizona State University,
Tempe, Arizona, and CPES, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK.
This file contains a list of web-based resources for use
in connection with my graduate courses, book, web-based articles and talks. If
you have items you would like me to add, please email me. However, I am
aiming to be exemplary rather than comprehensive, so please don't be
offended if I leave material out. Latest version of this document
25th October 2005.
E-mail contact with and between students is essential, but what are
the real virtues of conferencing, chat rooms, etc? Are they worth it, and if so in what
circumstances?
Examples of online classes using FirstClass®
conferencing software in a graduate education context can be found at
Marina McIsaac's
ASU course pages for
EMC 703 on
Research in Educational Telecommunications. Professor McIsaacs is now listed as "Emerita",
but she was in there very early.
This scene is changing very fast:
WebNotesTM was used originally in freshman Engineering at ASU, but is now dead,
and this was replaced briefly by Allaire Forums. Then a few
people started using WebBoard produced by
O'Reilly and Associates. The current ASU favorite for
managing courses is
Blackboard: very powerful, but not a
trivial exercise for the newcomer, and maybe more than is needed in many cases; it is used regularly
by ASUonline.
Further experimentation at ASU is taking place within a cross-college center now called
Cresmet, which has been a long-time
partner in a nationwide consortium known as the
Foundation Coalition.
The UK's Open University has the pre-eminent
worldwide position in distance learning. They have really had to face the problems of scaling-up
and are using the
Smalltalk environment
for the course (M878) on
object oriented software development.
b: What about the fancy stuff?
How necessary is VRML, movies, real-audio, etc. and who should do all this stuff?
All of us?? And what about on-line books, such as the recent, beautifully
presented Basics of NMR
or Basics of MRI
by Joseph Hornak, where I found myself pressing buttons instead of
reading the text? My own approach is to add this topic to my
colloquium offerings and see what interest
faculty have in getting involved.
c: What is really out there?
If you don't find what you want, try a search. A few years ago, I gave some
tips on how to do this in my talks, e.g. as in
Other graduate resources. But now, just forget all that and use
Google; it's brilliant, how do they do it?
Who says machines can't think? Is thinking the same as reading your mind or not?