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September 17, 2004
Learning Ecologies : Cafe Physics
MIT's TEAL Project aims "to merge lecture, recitations, and hands-on laboratory experience into a technologically and collaboratively rich experience for incoming freshmen. Students will gather in groups of nine, with twelve or so such groups in a common area, for five hours per week. The students will be exposed to a mixture of instruction, laboratory work with desktop experiments, and collaborative work in smaller groups of three, in a computer rich environment (one networked laptop per three students, with data acquisition links between laptop and experiments)."
This project builds on 1993 RPI's Studio Calculus Project. "In the Fall of 1993, Joe Ecker and 45 students participated in RPI's firstStudio Calculus course. Each day in Calculus students were involvedin 5 basic activities: short discussions(to introduce new material or tomotivate an upcoming activity and by students telling about theirapproach and experiences in one of the following four activities);paperand pencil activities where students work problems immediately afterJoe introduces new material;take time to think activities usually basedon worksheets with students working in small groups to discover conceptsand problem solving techniques on their own;Maple activities by small groups that allow students to discover fundamental concepts, and help studentsunderstand important ideas in calculus; and peer teaching activitieswhereby students in one group that have mastered one of the preceding threeactivities help other small groups to get the point." [The Rensselaer Studio Course Model].
It also resembles the Virginia Tech Math Emporium Project (QuickTimeVR required). Here the introductory classroom is presented as an element of a community of learning model ... campus life communities, instruction/research communities, collaborative learning environments, outreach communities (such as the Blackburg Electronic Village).
Posted by sjc at September 17, 2004 11:59 AM
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