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Convergent Computer Research at the Undergraduate Level: The
World Wide Web as Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning Tool
Elizabeth Sommers, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Department of English
San Francisco State University, USA
esommers@sfsu.edu
In this article I discuss a course I have developed at San Francisco State University (SFSU), a
seminar for undergraduates entitled "Convergent Computer Research." The philosophical underpinnings
of "Convergent Computer Research" are rooted in NEXA, a convergent program at SFSU that transcends
the traditional boundaries between and among disciplines and scholars in the sciences and humanities.
The NEXA Program reaches out to the sciences as the carriers of a mutually shared culture--what Alfred
North Whitehead has termed the general form of the forms of thought--that underlies and informs the
cognitive activities of apparently diverse disciplines within a common historical tradition. Many students
and faculty members want to move beyond the conventional definitions and limitations of their disciplines
to explore the nature of scientific innovations, ethical issues and emergent fields. The result is that NEXA
continues to thrive at SFSU.
NEXA courses are deliberately convergent rather than interdisciplinary in the usual sense. That
is, while some courses occasionally reveal remarkable similarities in ways of thought in the disciplines,
just as often they reveal contrasts, dissensus, radically different ways of knowing, thinking, and
communicating. Simply put, in these courses we attempt to stop fragmenting our ways of knowing, to
melt down our classification systems. Students and faculty often remark on the satisfaction they feel
having professors who represent both the sciences and the humanities, who may or may not agree, whose
fields at least on first and second glance perhaps seem very different--but whose ways of thinking can
sometimes be traced to similar historical, cultural or intellectual origins. We try, in other words, to
identify and communicate the general form of the forms of thought.
The particular course discussed here had two related objectives: to teach undergraduate students
how to use the World Wide Web (as well as other Internet resources) and to help them to conduct research
that transcended the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines while they learned computer-mediated
research methods and critiqued ways of knowing. In "Convergent Computer Research," in short, we
studied both disciplines and methods, including learning methods, by using many resources. Four print
texts were included: a novel by a National Book Award winner that deals in part with the effects of
technology on contemporary civilization; an informational guide to using the Internet; a book-length
critical essay about computer uses and abuses in our educational system and wider society; and a
philosophical inquiry into the nature of symbolic thought in human beings. These texts were selected
because each is written in a different genre (fiction, informational, scientific and philosophical exposition)
while touching upon many common threads: the roles of technology in our lives; the differences between
signs and symbols; the connections between ideas and information; ways of thinking in the disciplines.
These print texts as well as a number of hypertextual and electronic texts were essential, leading
both students and teacher to explore the six guiding course topics: (1) What is the difference between
information and knowledge? (2) According to the authors we read and interpreted, what constitutes
"knowledge" in the sciences? In the humanities? (3) What is "convergent" knowledge? (4) How do
human beings think, know and feel? Does the computer affect human cognition and emotion? If so, in
what ways? (5) What role can, should, or might computers play in the making and dissemination of
knowledge? and (6) How can scholars in your field use computers most effectively for research?
As they worked with the intellectual substance of "Convergent Computer Research," students
were taught to use World Wide Web search engines, directories and indices to conduct both individual
and collaborative research. They worked in campus labs fully equipped with state-of-the-art web browsers
and Internet capabilities as well as with various hypertext programs and a number of writing and