Kathryn Johnston, Astronomy, is going in new directions with her courses Introductory Astronomy (ASTR 105) and Descriptive Astronomy (ASTR 155). She and fellow Astronomer John Salzer shared a WebTech student this past year, when they taught ASTR 105 in 2000 Fall semester. The student, Li-Wei Lin, graduated from the Natural Sciences and Mathematics WebTech Program, which trains undergraduates in instructional technology and matches them with faculty in their major department to work as technology-oriented Course Assistants.

"The Web site for [ASTR] 105 is far nicer than I would have had the energy to do myself. That's a good thing for 105, because glitz attracts students."

Johnston and Salzer, with the help of Lin, put their lectures on the Web, illustrating them with a variety of graphics. Lin also created a course Web site, which Johnston points out is far more developed than what she might have done on her own. "The Web site for [ASTR] 105 is far nicer than I would have had the energy to do myself. That's a good thing for 105, because glitz attracts students."

Images are an important pedagogical tool in Astronomy, and Johnston and Salzer have focused their use of technology to bring them into the classroom. They had Lin create a mini-archive of images for use on the ASTR 105 Web site and in the lectures. He was able to find materials from online sources, such as the public domain NASA archives, and he also digitized materials that the Astronomy faculty already had in 35mm slide format. Johnson points out that this "grunge level" work is something that faculty are less likely to do themselves, and thus the scanning and archiving represents another way in which Lin's WebTech contribution was invaluable.

Initially, in place of using PowerPoint, Johnston and Salzer experimented using HTML pages designed by Lin for displaying their lecture materials. Both Johnston and Salzer use UNIX as their primary computing platform, and they thought relying on a Windows/Mac product like PowerPoint would only complicate their work. However, they're now using PowerPoint, since it proved much more straightforward to edit. "With PowerPoint, it's much easier to take existing lectures and split, merge, or simply update them," says Johnston.

Johnston finds it difficult to imagine teaching without PowerPoint, since it's invaluable for organizing her lectures and the many images she uses. In fact, she uses more images using PowerPoint than she would if she had to resort to slides or overheads. Also, by not having to pause to write on the board, she's able to devote class time to discussion rather than spending so much of it writing with her back to the class. To encourage active listening by the students in ASTR 155, Johnston provided the students with "handout" versions of the lectures-printed copies of the presentation with three slides displayed per page. This way, the students had a hard copy of the basic lecture before them while in the classroom, and could write notes in the space provided on the handout. This technique gave them a chance to really listen to her lectures. A particular method that Johnston likes to use with PowerPoint is to display a question, engage the students in a short debate or discussion of the question, then proceed in PowerPoint to reveal the answer or more information that leads the students through the thought process.

Without the newer technology, Johnston points out that the course content would have been the same, just presented differently. However, computing technology has helped address some special conceptual problems. "One of the big things in any astronomy course is to get across how big the universe is," says Johnston. To help illustrate this very difficult concept, WebTech Lin put together an animation using Macromedia's Flash. Based on the educational movie "Powers of 10" by Charles and Ray Eames, Lin's animation starts with an overhead shot of the Van Vleck Observatory, home of the Wesleyan Astronomy department, taken from a weather balloon just 200 feet or so off the ground, and it then zooms out past an aerial photograph of Middletown, a satellite image of Connecticut, then North American, the Earth from space, and so on, culminating in a scientific rendition of the Universe seen from far outside our own galaxy. Displayed on the Web, the animation can be manipulated by the viewer, zooming in and out to examine each step of the trip. At each level, the animation lists other objects of similar scale to the image being viewed (e.g., the orbit of the moon is similar in size to the diameter of the Sun), and the viewer can click on the list to explore the other objects listed. Johnston now uses the animation in nearly all her introductory lectures, from ASTR 105 to ASTR 155 to guest lectures at high schools.

"If I had been here for ten years, and I had been teaching a successful course using a chalkboard, overheads, and slides, then the barriers would have been much greater," cautions Johnston. However, she reveals that by having a WebTech, she's done something she wouldn't necessarily do otherwise-"I've gone in new directions."