LEARNING CURVE
A compelling class seen through the eyes of professor and student

THE STUDENT:

Melissa Determan
Graduate student

y introduction to David Fetterman’s infectious enthusiasm for technology began last August, when my fiancé and I flew down from Washington State to visit the campus. Five minutes into the meeting and realizing that we would be living in separate states, Professor Fetterman, my program adviser for education policy and evaluation, gave us an article he had written on CU­SeeMe, a free Internet video conferencing program. Before long he was demonstrating how to use the camera and explaining to us that we could make our own home pages and communicate with each other.

I had never been very excited about computers. The whole process was too overwhelming ­ brain overload! I just stuck to my word processing and e-mail and I was content.

However, I soon realized Professor Fetterman’s goal for his students was to take us beyond our comfort zone. We spent our first session setting up e-mail accounts and learning how to access them from home. We spent the next few weeks “surfing the net.” He posted a variety of links to his home page, and we were able to look at pieces of art from the Louvre as well as find people’s addresses in a national directory. We also became comfortable using e-mail and listservs ­ a form of electronic discussion groups ­ as tools for our research projects.

Once the e-mail and Internet were mastered, Professor Fetterman introduced us to html codes, or hypertext markup language: We were ready to start our own home pages. I was not looking forward to it, but I hoped for the best.

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