Too seldom do we undertake to gather and assess how novice learners are seeing the material we teach. New technologies can be used to enable students to develop a more direct and intense relationship to materials. For example, when students are working with a hypertext CD-ROM on American history, they are able to move through the material at their own pace and recursively. Students working with the electronic version of a primary text are able to exercise a form of control over that text that expert learners develop over many years. Similarly, students who are using an online archive of primary materials on the World Wide Web are able to work their way through the kind of scholarly resource that only experts in the field would previously had access to.
Every course has a number of locations.
That is, every course, even the most traditional, has an aggregate of several learning spaces, with certain learning activities characterizing each one. For every course that you teach, some portion of it takes place when you and all your students are in the same room. That's the plenary space, or the collective space. Every day of the semester, you make certain choices that certain kinds of activities are going to take place when you're all together. Every class has at least 2 or more spaces where learning takes place.