It is beyond the scope and purpose of this website to offer a broad range of disciplinary categories and exemplars. At the same time, I hope you will find that the sites below, and others reviewed in Craft, will suggest ideas and visions that transcend disciplinary and age-level boundaries. The Jump Stations below are rich sites for further exploration, where there is certain to be something for everyone.As teachers it is tempting to think of the web as a means by which we can access esoteric, multi-media, difficult to find, or otherwise highly novel material. However, sites such as the Online Writing Lab at Purdue demonstrate that the web is also useful as a means to gather together in one place materials that have become common tools of a trade, tools that need not be reproduced hundreds of times over in various locations. One of the main features of the site is an extensive library of brief guides to common writing problems and issues, covering topics as broad as comma splices, dangling modifiers, avoiding wordiness, and writing research papers. The guides are often accompanied by exercises, which eventually could be computer-corrected online. From my perspective as a writing teacher and former writing lab consultant, the available guides and the problems they address look very familiar and highly useful. One view of OWL is that it provides an excellent “file drawer” for instructors of writing (in any discipline) such that they can spend their (highly taxed) time on work other than recreating common tools that address common problems. For the student working in an online writing environment, OWL could readily become an essential part of the writer’s “desktop” of resources, as site that captures the value of many shelves of books that one might find within a writing lab. Finally, for both student and teacher the site helps to situate writing well beyond issues of technique through its pointers to a wealthy range of locations, including indexes, professional journals and associations, and search tools and directories.
Exploring Ancient World Cultures
http://eawc.evansville.edu/index.htm
Exploring Ancient World Cultures, under the direction of Anthony F. Beavers at the University of Evansville, Indiana, considers itself to be an “introductory, on-line, college-level 'textbook’ of ancient world cultures.” The project is in its early stages of development, but it already has some valuable resources, and further, it prompts us to imagine the possibilities for the transformation of textbooks within the environment of the World Wide Web. The projected work will contain chapters on eight distinct ancient world cultures. Currently available is a highly accessible Chronology of the Ancient World, based upon a search engine (“Argos”) also under development at Evansville. As a hypertextual timeline, the chronology permits one to consider a point in time within a culture, situate this point within a broader spectrum of history, or cross multiple cultures for any given period. The interface between the EAWC site and Argos as a Limited Area Search Engine is worth further note. While many web-based resource direct scholars and students off into the sea of resources on the web through links, Argos is being constructed through selection and quality control. Thus, in reading chapters and essays, or using the array of maps and other resources, students and scholars alike will be able to access a pre-selected library of materials to pursue their inquiries. The pre-selection of materials is something, of course, that educators do all of the time, and tools to aid in this work, created themselves by scholars rather than by commercial services, are highly valuable. Web-based resources such as EAWC locate and construct themselves within a productive tension of resource openness and closure, and as such hold promise to represent scholarly dialogue much more actively than do traditional printed textbooks.
San Francisco Exploratorium
Cow’s Eye Dissection
“Yeah, it’s a real cow’s eye . . . no bull.” (Exploratorium “Explainer”/Dissector)
There are a vast number of resources on the web for science education, which is not too surprising given the history of the web and web authoring as embedded in scientific and technical communities. The Cow’s Eye Dissection site, created by the Exploratorium through its participation in the Science Learning Network, showcases the web as a multi-media environment. Through text and images, and especially sound files, the stepwise group experience of the dissection is brought to life, complete with the “ooh’s” and “aah’s” of the students and even the “crunch” of the splitting cornea, which the instructor compares to the sound of “Rice Krispies.” From a pedagogical perspective, the site provides multiple representations of the material through multi-media, through a linked glossary of technical terms, through “Hints and Tips” from Exploratorium “Explainers,” and through links to other “Eye Sites.” One of these links is especially notable: Walton Primary School in New Zealand, which has terrific photos and gives a better sense of the students’ hands-on experiences with the dissection. Also within the Cow’s Eye Dissection site is a small downloadable application, a Cow’s Eye Primer, which is a simple vocabulary-image matching game that could function well to both scaffold the learning, guide the dissection, and review important concepts. In the end, what I find most impressive about this site is it’s valuing of experience in the learning of science. Rather than pretending to replace hands-on science with web-based representations, the site is a model of motivating and guiding learners--teachers and students alike--in their explorations of the natural world.