by Dean Savage Sociology, Queens College
Editor's note:
One of the things that is most attractive about the World Wide Web for faculty members and students is the increasing range and depth of materials which may be used in teaching. If the amount of useless or uninteresting material often appears at first to swamp the occasional useful finds, new users gradually come to discover truly useful resources. I would like to offer three examples here as evidence of what the Web can provide.
The Internet Poetry Archive at the University of North Carolina:
http://sunsite.unc.edu/dykki/poetry/home.html
This site features contemporary poets, with only two presented so far (Seamus Heaney, recent winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and Czeslaw Milosz), but it gives an idea of what is possible. In addition to the text of selected poems, there are photos and biographical and bibliographical material. What makes the site, however, is the audio version of each poem, read by the poet. There are a number of archives of this type, and they will clearly enrich instruction in many courses. Online archives of other performances of works of art will serve the same function in many other fields.
University of California at San Diego data gateway:
http://ssdc.ucsd.edu
The staff at this site have assembled an excellent collection of information on social science data currently available on the Web, including census, economic time series, and public opinion poll data, as well as information on what the datasets contain. At some of the sites listed, you can select and run tables online; at others, you can download the datasets and examine them locally. Datasets which once required specialized mainframe access and skills are now becoming easily accessible over the Web.
The final example is the World Lecture Hall at the University of Texas:
http://www.utexas.edu/world/instruction
This is a collection of course materials posted by faculty members on a wide range of disciplines. Although the collection is uneven, in that some fields are heavily represented while others are virtually absent, it is an extremely interesting exercise to scan the contents. Many of the courses are simply syllabi, interesting to see for what and how much is assigned, but there is more. Some of the most interesting applications are interactive. Students in immunology are invited to run repeated interactive simulations to get enough data points to determine the likelihood that a process will work. At another site, students can do a simulation of the evolution of the universe. Students can log onto various sites and hear correct pronunciations of simple phrases in Japanese, Old English, Serbian, and Hindi, among others. Since one of my interests is data visualization, I was delighted to discover a course module online at Montana State University, complete with graphics examples; some of my students will be taking this module later this term.
How do these materials work in class? I am currently teaching a course called Social Science Research Using the Internet, and in one early session, I gave a summary of some of the things we would be doing in the course: examine census data by zipcode or assembly district; log onto the geographic information server at the University of Virginia to create and then download and print a map of any country in Virginia with rivers, streets, hospitals, schools, according to what the viewer wanted; and do data extracts on the fly from the American National Election Study at the University of Michigan. Enough for at least a couple of lab sessions, I thought.
Later on that afternoon, I went into the computer lab, and some of my students were still there. Four of them were logged onto various census servers, and another was printing maps of counties in Virginia. No one had found the ANES server, so luckily there was still something left for me to do. Not all students respond with such initiative, but reactions to the Web as a learning tool have been so favorable that the departmental computer lab has become crowded for much of the day.
As more networked "labs" become available, and as content and quality of interaction continue to improve, it seems likely that many of our traditional courses will be significantly enriched.