When 18-year-old University of Colorado at Boulder student Amanda Lockard was hospitalized last September for a heart problem, she was able to complete her geography assignments with the help of a laptop computer and the Internet.
Lockard and her classmates in World Regional Geography this fall participated in "The Boulder Creek Virtual Field Study," in which students examine the risks posed by potential flooding in downtown Boulder.
Students first completed an activity on the World Wide Web designed to orient them to the field problem. Teams of students then visited 12 observation points along a two-mile stretch of the Boulder Creek corridor and studied the effects of development on the local environment.
The project was created by geography instructor Michael Solem and Professor David Hill and was adapted from an earlier lesson by Professor Spenser Havlick in the College of Architecture and Planning.
"I assign this project in my world regional geography course so that students understand that global issues -- in this case, natural hazards -- can be found in their local community," Solem explained.
For a variety of reasons, however, some students are unable to do the local fieldwork. So Solem and Hill designed another version of the Boulder Creek project that allowed students to complete the assignment entirely on the Internet. In the Internet version, students make their observations "virtually" through the use of a digital map that contains links to photographs and text descriptions of the 12 observation points.
"Because Amanda was physically unable to do the walk, we found another way to deliver that learning experience," Solem said.
Lockard completed the assignment from a Denver hospital. She was hospitalized for eight weeks just two weeks into the fall semester.
"I was pretty darn stubborn," said Lockard, a freshman who will be able to complete three of her four ¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉä classes this semester. She said it was very helpful that materials for the geography course were available on the Internet.
Because the World Wide Web is accessible from anywhere in the world, students from as far away as Australia have completed the virtual Boulder Creek project, Solem said.
The Boulder Creek Virtual Field Study is one of several geography lessons created through ¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉä's Geography-Web project. Other projects include "The University Hill Virtual Field Study," which examines an area west of the ¶¶ÒõÂÃÐÐÉä-Boulder campus, and "Mt. Rainier -- An Interactive Learning Module." The Geography-Web curriculum initiative can be reached on the Web at . colorado.edu/geography.COGA/geogweb/.
Solem notes that good educational principles of teaching and learning are still primary when it comes to using the Internet, however.
"Effective instruction with the Internet requires a commitment to good educational practice on the part of students and instructors," he said. "There's a lot of excitement in higher education about the potential of the Internet as a teaching tool. But technology alone cannot do the job. It takes people."