Engines of Inquiry
A Video Tour of Applications for Teaching American Culture
How and When Do Students Learn Best?
Distributive Learning
New technologies give students direct access to the growing distribution of cultural knowledge across diverse resources, and they allow students to take active responsibility for knowledge production in the classroom, thereby giving students media through which to construct and share their ideas about these materials in a whole range of public learning contexts.
Authentic Inquiry
Archives of electronic primary source materials (on both the World Wide Web and CD-ROM) enable novice learners to engage in authentic research tasks and complex inquiry assignments that would either be impractical or impossible without the vast storage and retrieval capabilities of information technologies.
Dialogic Learning
Interactive technologies--email, electronic discussion lists, teleconferencing--provide powerful cross-disciplinary spaces for student dialogue. They also encourage participation at the student's own pace and perhaps in smaller, less threatening communities than the entire class meeting face-to-face. Finally, they offer supplemental spaces for students to engage in challenging cultural issues, or to converse with students (at a distance) who represent a wider diversity of viewpoints than they have in their class or on their own campus.
Constructive Learning
Hypertext authoring programs and the World Wide Web help students engage in constructive learning as they build projects over the semester. Through electronic linking, students make interdisciplinary and intellectual connections concrete--they can actually trace paths from one writing space to another.
Public Accountability
Students who think of their work and ideas as public tend to take their assignmenst more seriously and engage in issues more thoroughly. Whether students are asked to write their ideas to a class electronic discussion list, or asked to mount their constructive projects on the World Wide Web, information technologies highlight the public nature of participation.
Critical Thinking
Multimedia and hypertext packages present information and pose questions to students through multiple kinds of literacies and evocative juxtapositions, thus promoting an environment for reflective reading and critical thinking. These technologies offer students multiple paths which require strategic choices in light of methodological issues. They also facilitate group process and revision, providing flexible writing spaces for both reproducing knowledge and reflecting on it.
Faculty Development and Collaboration
The challenge to change our practices presented by the spread of information technologies--while full of possibilities--can be overwhelming for many faculty. Whether it is the significant investment of time it takes for learning and integrating technology or the dramatic shift in pedagogy that can ensue, the use of information technologies in teaching is, ultimately, reconstructive of the entire ecological context of a particular course and perhaps curriculum.