Fall 1999
Vol 8 Issue 1
IN THIS ISSUE...
Technology: Places for Student Voices
Assisting Student Learning with Technology
Technology and Computers- More than Just Classroom Learning
Laptops, Websites, and Angkor-Wat
Ten Years of Student Voices on the Electronic Forum
Electronic Forum Farewell
Learning, Programming and Moving On at MCLI
Learning that Provides a Direction for the Future
Are We Listening to International Students
Hands-On Experience, Service Learning Makes it Real at MCC's Network Academy
SEE ALSO...
The Forum
Assidere
Maricopa Center for Learning and Instruction
Electronic Forum Farewell
Karen Schwalm, GCC
The Electronic Forum, which just celebrated its 10th birthday last August, will close at Glendale this Fall. During the past decade, EF has provided students at all 10 colleges (and at Pima CC, ASU Main and ASU West) with opportunities for electronic mail and group communication in support of both formal and informal learning. Over 275,000 Maricopa students have had accounts and, at GCC alone, students have sent 4.4 million email messages. That's a lot of writing!
Many, many faculty throughout the district and across disciplines have used EF discussion groups in their classes, but I want to thank those first brave souls Eileen Shiff in Child and Family Studies, Jack Rose in Administration of Justice, and LynnAnn Wojciechowicz in English who started early and helped us find new ways of fostering student interaction electronically. What they learned helped us all and will continue to help us as we move to new systems for supporting student communication.
Kudos also go to Lee Kirkpatrick Sola and Marla Dinchak who displayed untold amounts of patience and wisdom in promoting and guiding open discussions at GCC. EF provided a "press" and an "audience" to people who had experienced access to neither, and that provided opportunities for learning both theirs and ours that none of us had anticipated. The support of GCC's English department and college administrators over the years has been important to us as well.
Several campuses will continue to use EF into its next decade (it has always been Y2K compliant), and we wish them well. Other colleges have moved to new email systems. We look forward to developing, once again, cross-college discussion groups that support learning and community, sharing strategies and experiences both electronically and face-to-face. We have a solid foundation upon which to build.
Finally, of course, thanks go to Chris Zagar, who took the skeleton of an idea and programmed it into reality. He has always asked me hard questions about teaching and learning that resulted in a far broader vision for EF than I had ever dreamed.
And we've had fun. It has indeed been worth the EF-fort. l
