by Allison Miller
"The purpose of this assignment is for you to begin
to create your home page. Everyone gets full credit
for 'just showing up' in cyberspace by the due date of
this exploration."
Does this sound like any undergraduate assignment you remember? Maybe not, but it does ring a bell with the students who enrolled in the spring semester of Astronomy 100, Section 2. This assignment was given as part of a Web Explorations project to the approximately 200 students of Michael Norman, NCSA senior research scientist and UIUC professor in astronomy.
'The motivation [for using the Web] comes from two directions," says Norman. "One is that it is almost a mandate from the administration to use Web-based learning in education. I also realize that in astronomy there is an enormous amount of material on the Web, probably more than in any other field. That is because astronomy has been a digital science for at least a decade. So I knew that there was a lot out there, and I wanted to expose the students to those resources."
"Curriculum drives the use of technology in classrooms. If the Web can enhance student learning or classroom instruction, then its use should be explored," says Thakkar. "Much astronomy information is available on the Web, so it was a natural for this approach."
"The first assignment was to create a Web page, and the students did that sort of kicking and screaming," says Norman. "But once they learned how to do it, the majority of them felt empowered by the experience. They had heard about the Web. In fact more than half of them had used the Web, but they had no idea how to create their own Web pages. This gave them an excuse to learn."
"The Web's popularity is growing," adds Thakkar. "We are moving ahead from just browsing to interactivity on the Web for student-directed learning. Of course it is usually easy for engineering and science students. They generally have a computing background. There needs to be an effort to provide opportunities to nonscience majors in the use and practice of the World Wide Web to prepare them for the future."
A recent lecture/demonstration of Hands-On Universe (HOU), an educational project for high school students learning astronomy, was sponsored by NCSA's Resource for Science Education (RSE) program with guidance from NCSA senior research scientist Michael Norman.
Via the World Wide Web, HOU links classrooms to automated telescopes at professional observatories. Students are able to download images or request new observations. They use HOU-IP--a Windows- and Macintosh-based image-processing software program developed specifically for high school students--to manipulate and analyze images. HOU follows standards set down by national agencies for implementation and teacher support.
Jodi Asbell-Clarke introduced the HOU project to about 20 local teachers and spoke to Norman's Astronomy 100 class. Asbell-Clarke develops HOU curriculum units working through TERC, a private, nonprofit education organization in Cambridge, MA. (TERC is a research and development organization that has a commitment to improve mathematics and science learning and teaching.)
HOU is funded by Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories, Berkeley, CA. Carl Pennypacker, a Lawrence Berkeley cosmologist, developed the program out of his research to help reform science education. NSF and the Department of Energy also support the program.
Currently used in approximately 30 high schools around the nation, the goal is to expand to as many as 700 sites in middle schools and informal education centers, such as museums. This year it is anticipated that 120 new sites will use HOU.
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NCSA: The National Center for Supercomputing
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access / Summer 1996
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