Papers in PDF format

collaborative programs. At the same time students beta tested the prototype for a new SFSU conference
system, Conferencing on the Web (COW), a Web environment that provided them with a series of topics
(those outlined above), the choice of joining conversations or starting new ones, and the opportunity to
share their works-in-progress with one another while also critiquing and debugging COW, the invention
of SFSU's Computer Science Chair, Professor Gerald S. Eisman, and a cadre of dedicated graduate
students.
Encouraged to collaborate with one another as well as to experiment with various ways of
presenting their knowledge--by learning hypertext markup language (HTML), by developing home pages,
by integrating graphics, sound and text--students learned to see "knowledge" as a social construct that
cannot be restricted to individual disciplines. They began to understand that "knowledge" changes with
time, information, thought, synthetic and analytical expertise. Participants also learned the differences
between sign and symbol, between scholarly technique and scholarly purposes, between gathering
information and synthesizing such information into convergent knowledge bridging various disciplines.
Working collaboratively with peers, with expert student volunteers who had previously taken the course
and with the instructor, students began to distinguish new ways of knowing and new ways of making
meaning in their own and other disciplines. They also grappled with issues of censorship, new forms of
literacy, the purposes of education, the positive and negative effects of classifying knowledge by using
traditional disciplinary definitions.
Preserved on the COW, much of the participants' lively on-line discussion showed two
tendencies: first, a marked movement towards more expansive definitions of knowledge and wisdom; and
secondly, growing skill at making meaning through the use of computer-mediated tools as well as print
texts and collaboration. These transcripts of electronic talk demonstrated to me that NEXA students were
genuinely interested in discovering the assumptions beneath our everyday concepts. As they did so, they
learned to use new instructional technologies, the World Wide Web in particular, to find information, to
decide on the value of this information, to synthesize facts and data into knowledge and ideas. Most
students were not only eager to explore ideas and beliefs they had once taken for granted but delighted to
join a collaborative learning environment, one in which the process of discovery among peers was
considered as valuable (or even more valuable than) a teacher's lecture.
Participants' final projects took many shapes. Many constructed Web sites--exploring the
meaning of death from various perspectives; compiling holistic health resources, organizations and
definitions; contemplating the nature of consciousness; creating computer art projects that transcended the
boundaries of painting, drawing, film and writing. Others developed hypertext documents that combined
image, language and sometimes sound, focusing on areas as diverse as artificial life and the meaning of
artifacts and architectural finds at Knossos. Still others wrote essays, developed MOO sites, created
multimedia presentations. These final projects, which were presented to the class at the end of the
semester, were in one way the culmination of the course, showcasing as they did the product of many
months of thought, collaboration, reading, writing and learning. But as impressive as these final products
were, they marked the beginning rather than the end of scholarly quests for these young scholars. Many
have gone on to discover new ways to explore convergence using the World Wide Web, new methods to
alchemize research into powerful ideas, new paths which they now explore at the graduate level and
beyond the boundaries of school.
"Convergent Computer Research" has opened many new vistas for me as well as my students,
helping this English professor to understand not only how to provide my students with an authentic
education--one based in part on the principles of critical pedagogy, in part shaped by feminist scholars and
others--but also how to develop new forms of teaching and learning appropriate in the remarkable
medium of the World Wide Web. While new educational possibilities made possible by the Web are
transforming literacy, too often teachers are the stragglers instead of pioneers. A road map would have
been convenient but impossible to provide since this terrain has yet to be mapped. But we can and should
join our students to draw the map ourselves.