| |
Teaching Experience with
Hyperscripts
|
|
General Remarks
|
 |
First of all, at present (2001) there
is not too much experience with the evolving Hyperscripts of AMAT - a few
points, however, can be found in the
link. In what follows
we give a few first impressions: |
|
Don't expect miracles! Students, like
everybody else, are not too anxious to change their time-honored ways of doing
things. |
|
 |
Most of them want to pass the exam with a minimum
of effort. |
|
|
Only some want to know more details or more about
the subject matter while the course is taught. |
|
|
Many, however, appreciate the reference system
for several study subjects implicitly contained in Hyperscripts. |
|
Providing much more information than
absolutely needed for the exam thus is not always greeted with enthusiasm. And
not everybody is hooked up to the Net all the time or has a notebook at his or
her disposal. |
|
|
Throwing a Hyperscript at the students, telling
them that they now can learn the stuff by themselves, or flashing Internet
pages at the wall, won't do much good. |
|
|
A better way is to get the students involved in
generating pages for the hyperscript, or to include good term papers - see
below. |
|
Be patient. Having Hyperscripts,
writing Hyperscripts and using Hyperscripts is an intertwined process that
needs time to evolve to an optimal system. |
|
|
| |
|
|
There are several good reasons to
involve students and teaching assistants in the production of
Hyperscripts: |
|
|
They may be fluent in HTML, JAVA and the like -
you probably always will have a few in any course who are far better at this
than you. |
|
|
They get used to the medium. For example, if they
write their term paper in HTML they use automatically the Internet for
researching the topic. |
|
|
They demonstrate by their results what seems to
be important to them and where they have problems. |
|
|
Teaching assistants usually know much better than
the professor which topics are "difficult" and what needs to be
practiced. |
|
Student participation at present
(June 2000) takes place at several levels: |
|
|
Students taking the HTML course have to produce a
non-trivial homepage and at least one involved page on a scientific topic. This
can also be an assignment from another course. |
|
|
Interested students participating in a lecture
may work on a particularly challenging subject and get their results (if
correct) recognized as a part of their exercise assignments. |
|
|
Students (even particularly interested high
school students) work in a small group on defined topics. |
|
|
Students with special interests or skills are
paid ("HiWi" contracts) for certain work. |
|
|
Teaching assistants, usually Ph.D. students, are
encouraged to get involved or are paid for specific jobs on occasion. |
|
The
"Guided Tour" will
provide links to some of the student work. |
|
|