6.2.3 Impact of Educational Contexts on Advanced Courseware
[Refer to Educational Goals column in Table 6.1.]
There was a prevalent theme of change attributed to the use of computers in
the projects studied. Educators in both spoken and written form described
how computers precipitated their rethinking of their role as instructor and
how they taught the content of the course, and even the relationships among
disciplines though facilitating interdisciplinary learning and teaching.
This is reflected in the sentiments of Bucciarelli
in the following passage:
We have raised some questions, prompted by my attempts to make
use of Athena in 2.01. My questions are as much about traditional modes in
undergraduate engineering education as they are about computers. But that
is the value of this new machinery. Like an ethnography of a recently
discovered culture in some far off land, the computer prompts reflection
on one's own way of doing things, one's own assumptions, objectives and values.
(Bucciarelli & LaVin, 1992)
The similarity of the wide spread reports from educators who used advanced
computing technology, and then reconsidered their more traditional practices
afterwards, suggested an element of contemplation involved in the computers
use that tended to lead educator's to reconsider both their learner and
discipline oriented educational structures. Educator's contemplation about
appropriate goals for using computers to improve education lead to conclusions
about ways to use them to improve discipline representation and levels of learner
involvement in the educational process. It appeared that these processes could
be of an incidental or deliberate nature.