Lee Spector

Professor of Computer Science

Computer Science

School of Cognitive Science

Hampshire College

893 West Street
Amherst, MA 01002

Phone:

413 582-5352

FAX:

413 582-5438

http://hampshire.edu/lspector

What are, to you, the key issues in creating learning resources that support your teaching style and your student's learning styles?

The most critical thing for me is that the materials support open-ended student inquiry and courses with non-traditional or dynamic topic groupings.

What is your vision for the "textbook" of the future and what impediments do you see to realizing that vision?

An ideal textbook for most of my teaching would consist of a large number of loosely connected modules that could be reconfigured for each course or even for each student. Program code, multimedia, and web resources would be integrated into the "text," which would be delivered in electronic form. Impediments include challenges in making such a collection coherent, in keeping it current, and in ensuring platform compatibility of multimedia and program code.

Describe briefly any research you have undertaken on teaching or learning.

I was a co-PI on a grant from the NSF Learning and Intelligent Systems Program, titled "Inquiry-Based Science Education: Cognitive Measures and Systems Support" (co-PIs: N. Stillings, L. Spector, S. Weisler, L. Winship, and B. Woolf). In this project we characterized and assessed college-level inquiry-based science curricula, and we also developed novel software to support inquiry-based teaching and learning. More information on this project is available from http://hampshire.edu/lspector/NSF-LIS/index.html.

I have also actively developed new courses, curricula, and instructional methods in computer science and cognitive science -- links to some of the results of this work are available from my home page.

Have you created publicly accessible learning resources?

Materials for a new approach to the instruction of introductory Artificial Intelligence, "Artificial Intelligence in 3D Virtual Worlds": http://hampshire.edu/lspector/cs263/cs263s04.html

SuperDuperWalker, a software-based framework for experiments on the evolution of locomotion: http://hampshire.edu/lspector/superduperwalker.html

The CHAT ("Computational Human Articulatory Theory") software environment for inquiry-based education in linguistics, intended for beginning undergraduate linguistics students: http://hampshire.edu/lspector/chat/

How would you like to contribute to the workshop?

I teach at a small liberal arts college with an emphasis on independent student inquiry and on the continuous development of novel courses and curricula. I believe that these emphases are healthy and that they should be employed in academia more broadly, but they also present many challenges, particularly in larger institutions with more traditional academic cultures. I hope to contribute insights into these challenges and ways that they may be overcome.

What would you like to take away from the workshop?

I am interested in finding more concrete ways in which I can contribute to the improvement of science education outside of my institution.