A Continuous Experiment

Email, archived email discussion lists, and chat rooms can be used to stimulate student responsibility for not only their own learning, but for the learning of others in the course, to reconceptualize for students what the learning process has been and could be, and to regenerate latent passion for learning that often seems to have been squeezed out of students by the time they even begin higher education. The sample course, "Introduction to Religion in the Modern World (World Religions)," portrays both the use of educational technologies and the role of collaborative writing in the course as a whole.

Intercultural contacts between my students and students elsewhere in the world (i.e., Japan, China, Taiwan, Sweden, Israel, Hawaii, etc.) via one-to-one email and group-to-group discussion lists and the inclusion on a course discussion list of scholars from Israel, Australia and various part of the United States have not only enlarged educational opportunities, but aided in changing student perspectives of the learning process, their roles and responsibilities in it. They have begun to experience that process not as some mechanical, habitual routine, but as an innate and enjoyable aspect of being human, both individually and communally, a sense of learning becoming as a mirror before one's soul.

Educational opportunities expanded as the students encountered learning resources in the form of individuals, such as a scholar on women & religion in Australia (along with some of her lecturers and students) who was able to give a different culture's perspective based upon individual experiences and reflections. And students' perspectives on the learning process itself were affected by using the technologies.

These technologies required them to begin to consider that learning was not primarily a continual accumulation of information, but a human event, one that required some degree of begin able to consider imaginatively the views of other people and cultures on their own terms, from the inside, while simultaneously experiencing their own, familiar ideas and perspectives from a new angle. For example, a Jewish professor of Judaism at a college in Israel helped to explain the Jewish interpretation of a "messiah" and of Jesus of Nazareth. To students who were Christians, his explanation offered a very different point of view to any they had ever considered.

The roles and responsibilities of students in the learning process have been more deeply etched by online dialogues and projects. In the fall, 2000, my world religions students engaged in a project with students at Kansai University in Osaka, Japan, that included individual email contact, discussion list dialogue on love, marriage, family, religion and culture, collaborative writing by groups composed of both the Kansai students and Marshall students, and the submission of original poems by students to the class list. The students discovered from experience that if they wanted to learn and to enjoy the learning, the responsibility of full participation lay with them. I was the guide, but could not and would not (even if I could) do it for them. They faced the recognition that passivity leads simply to the reinforcing of an old model of learning while being active gave greater play to the possibility of becoming a learner who is constantly developing ways of learning, and of learning how to learn.

The Virtual Vision Quest

The Recognition of Intrinsic Value