Extract from: TOMORROW'S PROFESSOR(SM) LISTSERV
Tomorrow's Teaching and Learning
IS TECHNOLOGY A FRIEND OR FOE OF LEARNING?
Richard M. Felder and Rebecca Brent North Carolina State University

Sharon boots up her computer, connects to her heat and mass transfer course web site, checks out the assignment schedule, sighs heavily, and gets to work. In the next hour and a quarter, she:

• quickly reviews last week's multimedia tutorial that presents material on convective heat transfer, asks questions and poses problems, and provides feedback on her responses and corrections if she misses;
• watches a video of her instructor lecturing on the same topic, advancing rapidly to his discussion of a particular homework problem that gave her a lot of trouble;
• begins working through this week's tutorial, which deals with a shell-and-tube heat exchanger preheating the feed stream to a distillation column, and clicks on a hot link in the process description that takes her to supplementary material on heat exchangers, including a cutaway schematic, photos of commercial exchangers and tube bundle assemblies, and outlines of exchanger operating principles and design procedures;
• returns to the tutorial and builds the steady-state energy balance and heat transfer equations, branching to a linked database to retrieve needed physical properties of the process fluids;
• uses linked numerical analysis software to solve the equations, size the exchanger, and generate plots of shell-side and tube-side temperatures vs. axial position along the tubes;
• brings up a heat exchanger simulation and first predicts and then explores the effects of system parameter changes on exchanger performance;
• closes the tutorial, checks her e-mail and finds a message from her instructor clearing up a point of confusion she had e-mailed him about late the previous night, sends a message to the other members of her class project group reminding them of their scheduled chat room conference at 7:30 that night, and logs off.
  

Scenario 2 Fred >>

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