Project Jigsaw:
Learning using the Web
- The Web presents excellent opportunities for scholarly, detailed
and satisfying presentations of materials to numbers of students
large or small, on one campus or across the world;
- The disadvantages of the Web - boilerplating without
understanding; assimilating poor-quality materials; frustration
- can also be found in library use; for the same skills are
required to manage either - namely discrimination, care
and scepticism;
- For "visual" subjects such as Art History, where the
Gesamtkunstwerk is important, a full suite of images
together with VRML modelling is a learning boon, especially
for those students who have not visited the monuments in\question;
- How does video compare? Video is occasionally an improvement on
still photography, because it offers more appreciation of the
third dimension; but it is difficult to handle over the web,
and especially difficult to stop, retrace, or zoom with any good
effect;
- VRML, on the other hand, givesd the user much better control
over the manipulation of the model: as well as automatic tours, we
can offer tours where the user does the guiding. The tour can be
stopped to examine a relief in close up or at a distance; and the
tour around the monument restarted, at whatever distance from the
reliefs the user wishes.
-
Notes on the Australian National University's
Strategies for using the Web
- Part of the mission of the Faculty of Arts at the
Australian National University is ...to develop ways of using the latest
technology as an aid in teaching and learning ... range of methods for
interactive learning (Strategic Plan II, 125-7). The same document
notes the same requirement for the ANU as a whole (ibid., 273), and emphasizes
(274) the role of electronic publishing. Again, The ArtServe W3 server
has won international acclaim for making thousands of images available
across the Internet and for pioneering the delivery of visual learning
material to students (ibid., 122). In addition, we aim to produce a
virtual tour of the ANU campus to aid ANU's current Web publicity drive,
in order to attract new students.
- This direction is confirmed by the ANU's
Strategic
Plan 1998-2004, underlined by the
Information
Technology section of this Plan, and elaborated upon in the
Strategic Issues Discussion Paper of 12 June 1998 where, under IT, we read that
The ANU has been a leader in utilising and adapting IT to enhance its
research, teaching and administrative functions. The University was an
early adopter of the WWW as an electronic publishing platform and a number
of groups within the University have achieved an international reputation
based on the quality of their web publishing. The ANU will enhance its
national role by building on its achievements as an essential node in
this new academic network.
- In learning specifically, this will
include targetting learning: Among the highest priority academic
objectives for information technology developments is to create on-campus
student learning environments as part of the foundations for
future flexible delivery of courses. Such environments will facilitate
students' access to course materials and the international information
sources to further extend their intellectual horizons.
- Project Jigsaw, with its inventive explorations of high-quality
web-based VRML modelling in disciplines from Botany and Forestry to
Art History, should make a significant contribution to the ANU's
strategy.