We are not out to promote bus riding or car cruising. The courageous professor has a pedagogic or curricular destination in mind and knows that the technology is just the vehicle for getting there. The professor plans what to do during class meetings and what students must do between them. The traditional strategy was for hour-long lectures to be interleaved with two hours of homework and individual projects. Advocates of active learning, inquiry-based strategies, collaborative teamwork and authentic projects make compelling arguments, but integrating these ideas with educational technology is a challenge.
Students can communicate with each other and their professor between class meetings.
They can ask for help from an individual or broadcast a message to everyone. They can seek input from appropriate sources anywhere on the planet and retrieve relevant information for their work from the vast resources on the Web. They can publish on the Web for everyone who is interested and get feedback to refine their work. Teamwork is facilitated by easy communications and expected by the workplaces that students are training for. Since collaborative educational strategies are a novelty for many professors, evolution from familiar strategies is likely to be more acceptable.