Collaborative learning is a far less efficient way to gain insight, but is far better than the lecture in providing the student with the necessary tools for exploration and discovery. They are projected on a large screen in the front class, and become another tool in the arsenal of means of building insight in the minds of my students. By interacting with them myself, I set the stage for the student doing likewise outside of class. Before the web, it was far more awkward to share visualizations with students. It usually required a special lab provisioned with not only the visualizations, but also some special, usually expensive, proprietary software to run it.
Students can then explore and discover individually or in groups in the school or at home.
This combines the versatility of discovery using a computer with the traditional versatility of access offered by a textbook. In the discussion, above, of individual and group exploration, I implicitly assumed that this was being driven by student's internal motivation to gain insight. Aunt Selma L et's prove her wrong. The initial version of these pages, Web Visualization for Teachers, was posted to the Web in early September, 1999.