In Engines of Inquiry: Teaching, Technology, and Learner-Centered Approaches to Culture and History, Randy Bass identifies "six kinds of quality learning" that "information technologies can serve to enhance": distributive learning, authentic tasks and complex inquiry, dialogic learning, constructive learning, public accountability, and reflective and critical thinking. Providing all six of these experiences is a challenge for a state community college like mine, Tidewater Community College, Virginia Beach, Virginia.
Nonetheless, using the resources of the community as well as free and low-cost Internet applications, an online class can incorporate quality computer-mediated learning, as this poster presentation will demonstrate with several undergraduate projects from an open-admissions online humanities elective, Technology and the Liberal Arts: Man, Woman, Machine <http://www.tc.cc.va.us/faculty/tcreisd/techarts/>.
Students typically are drawn to this class not by the "arts" in the title but by the "technology." By the end of the term, students have used technology as one approach to understanding some of the fine arts, have reflected on the technologies used in creating and maintaining works of art, and have constructed their own works of art and electronic portfolios.