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Even the most gifted teacher is but one individual, with human limitations on
his or her perspectives and experiences. Ideally, students should be able to
work with more than one teacher or expert as they study a subject. In the past,
the physical reality of distance has made that impossible.
The increasing use of the World Wide Web, chat rooms and electronic discussion
forums has made it easier for people separated by great distances to
communicate.
When Ruel Tyson, a religious studies professor and director of the Institute
for the Arts and Humanities, taught his first-year seminar "Ethics and the
Spirit of the New Capitalism" for the first time last year, he knew that he
could give his students an exemplary grounding in abstract principles and the
specifics of past case studies. But he wanted to add another dimension to the
class.
"I wanted the students to re-emphasize the points they learn in class in
discussion with people who confront these realities daily," he said.
Fortunately, he had some acquaintances who could help.
For the previous four years, Tyson had been meeting frequently with Carolina
alumni who are now business people in New York City. He would help them discuss
ethical or philosophical issues that concerned them.
He realized that this group, as well as alumni in general, constituted "a
largely untapped resource" of experience and expertise.
He asked them if they would each be willing to give an hour of their time every
week in e-mail exchanges with a seminar student.
They agreed.
"Alumni love to be asked for something besides money," Tyson laughed. More
seriously, he added: "They were really pleased to be asked to contribute from
their experience."
Tyson's students would initiate contact via e-mail with the alumni, or
"external advisers." Correspondence followed in which students regularly
summarized key issues discussed in class. The advisers would respond, framing
the issue in terms of their day-to-day experience.
The advisers added something else to the seminar.
"They represent the whole range of work in the new economy," Tyson said. "These
people run the gamut."
Elizabeth Scanlon, a religious studies and history major in Tyson's seminar
last fall, said her correspondence with author Kay Goldstein "definitely
challenged me to bring the concepts to a practical level, not just to know and
understand them in theoretical terms."
In addition to bringing the outside world into the seminar, the exchanges
between students and advisers took a bit of the seminar into the outside
world.
One of the external advisers is active in the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church,
a historically progressive and politically active New York congregation.
Tyson said that the church hosted a discussion of recent economic trends and
used a textbook they learned about through the first-year seminar.
Romance Languages Professor Julia Cordona Mack wanted to help her students past
the limitations of studying Spanish in an Anglophone society.
In an ideal world, students would learn Spanish in Spain or Latin America.
Obviously, that isn't going to happen for most of them.
She realized that when trying to engage students in another language and
culture, the possibilities for tailoring the material to individual interests
far exceeds what's in your average textbook.
That's what led her to the web.
"What it does is it allows you to tailor the material you produce to what has
happened in class or in the outside world that very day," she said.
"(For example) if we're studying Mexico, you can send the student to a news web
site, and (they can) hear the new president's speeches and read what Mexican
newspapers are saying," she said.
The web isn't the best medium for all of her students, she noted. Some of them
prefer reading hard copies of foreign newspapers in Davis Library.
"But those newspapers are off limits to other students while they are using
them."
The same goes for books and journals.
"What has often happened in the past is that a handful of books or journal
articles are used by the same students; and when one student is using them they
are unavailable to the others for a couple of days," Mack said.
But any number of students can access a good web site simultaneously.
Among the relevant resources for Mack's students are interviews with and
articles by Richard Rodriguez, a prominent Latino author.
Internet discussion forums offered Mack a teacher's dream: The authors of
readings she has assigned could, conceivably, lead a class discussion.
When she taught Honors Sociolinguistics, she contacted the authors of some the
assigned works.
She told them her students would be discussing their work electronically, and
asked them if they would participate.
Rodriguez was one of the authors she contacted. The Internet was perhaps an
especially appealing medium for him.
Since Rodriguez is a controversial figure, with unpopular views on affirmative
action, "he doesn't like to visit other campuses," Mack said.
But he did respond to comments on the listserv, "visiting the class in a
virtual way," as Mack put it.
Mack was pleased with the results.
"With this forum I could expand the classroom teaching space enormously, guest
teachers who could never have come to class physically came to class in a
virtual sense," she said.
Her students recognize the benefits as well.
"We'd misinterpreted some of the things [Rodriguez had] written," said
Anna-Lisa Munson of Chapel Hill. "He was able to clarify them for us and
further the depth of our discussion."
"It was also neat to get some responses from people in the community at large
who'd stumbled across our web site and were intrigued by our discussion,"
Munson added.
"That kept the class from being too insular and the discussions from being too
abstract."
The positive nature of the discussion forum experience has led Mack to wonder
if the discussion forum environment "isn't a sort of protected space; because
we share a space with other people, a community is formed that is conducive to
sharing ideas."
Sponsored by the Technology in Context Consortium
http://www.unc.edu/faculty/tic
Writer: Kevin O'Kelly
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