Using the Internet

for the

Dissemination of Instructional Materials to a Classroom and Beyond ©

Wolfgang Christian

Gregor Novak

Evelyn Patterson

The advent of World Wide Web technology provides a new medium for the delivery of instructional material. In addition to providing easy access to large amounts of information the HTML language and HTTP protocol can actually serve as a lesson authoring environment. HTML documents can deliver multimedia information in an almost platform independent fashion. This talk will illustrate the rich pedagogical potential of World Wide Web technology. Additional examples can be found on the Davidson Physics Department server and the Davidson WebPhysics curriculum server.

Although I will attempt to present this talk "live on the net", some files are backed up on the local drive in case of technical difficulty.

Communication

• Course Material
• Student Testing
• • Honor Code (local)
  • Hestenes Test (local)
  • Test Result
• Student Tutoring
• • Astronomy Tutor(local)
  • Question(local)
  • Answer(local)
• Faculty-Student Interaction
• • Forms Example (local)
• UpLoad Files
• Student-Student Interaction
• • Student Home Pages (local)
• Database
• • Input Screen (local)
  • Results (local)
  • Document (local)

Dissemination

• Freshman/Sophmore Year
• • PY 200 (local)
• Junior Year
• • Beth Denius (local)
  • Doug Neuman (local)
• Senior Year
• • BA6: Paul Traps (local)
  • Paul Trap Thesis
  • BA11: Cavity QED(local)
  • Cavity QED Thesis
• Finding It
• • Lycos Search
  • Lycos Results for Paul Trap
  • Trap Simulation
  • Web Crawler Result for Black Holes
  • Black Holes
  • How does it work? Web Spiders

  The Future

The following examples require a HotJava enabled browser such as Netscape ver 2.0.

Scripting
JavaScript allows interactive html documents with a minimum of programming.

Java
Java alows you to write complete platform independent programs in a C++ like language. HotJava is the browser technology that allows you to run these programs. A good place to look for sample java applets is the Gamelan site.

Plug-In
Special data types can be imbedded in the browser eliminating the need for separate helper apps.

• MS Word
• Prelab exercise or video test page.
• Macromedia

VRML
Virtual Reality Markup Language (similar to HTML or SGML) will enable the user to interact with artificial worlds. A trip to a black hole anyone?

WebPhysics

What is WebPhysics?

• Web Physics is a flexible low budget outlet for small volume, high quality, html based curricular materia.
• Web Physics provides a forum for physics educators to exchange curriculum ideas and resources that make use og the Web technology (public domain material only.)
• WebPhysics provides a medium for the dissemination of student work.
• WebPhysics is democratic. Let the democracy of the net do the weeding.
• Web Physics has low initial investment.
• Web Physics is not a vendor's forum.

What resources do we want on WebPhysics servers?

• Software
• Multimedia lessons in HTML multimedia format
• Distributed learning Web courses
• Multimedia databases
• Student Projects

Server Statistics

We are testing various server statisticcs packages for WebPhysics. These statistics give an overview of what might be useful to others in the community.

• Web Trend. Statistics for the last month by WebTrend software.