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GenScope Breeds BioLogica™
Our successful GenScope project for teaching genetics to high school students is complete and we are now working on its successor - BioLogica™™, a manipulable model of BioLogica™l processes. GenScope provides teachers and learners with a tool that enables students to investigate scientific and mathematical concepts through direct manipulation and experimentation. Students and teachers can manipulate the processes of inheritance on six different, but related, levels: DNA, chromosome, cell, organism, pedigree, and population. This allows students not only to read about genetics, but actually observe and manipulate processes at one BioLogica™l level that affect life at another. You can download a free copy of GenScope from our web site.
BioLogica™ differs from GenScope in being scriptable, which enables us to set up a sequence of puzzles, and then interact with students as they attempt to solve them. BioLogica™ runs on Mac, PC, and Linux machines. For more information about BioLogica™, contact Paul Horwitz (paul@concord.org). Both projects are supported by the National Science Foundation.
Beacon Award Nomination
Concord Consortium's Teacher Learning Conference™ (TLC) course, which prepares high school teachers to offer netcourses through the Virtual High School, has been nominated for Lotus Development Corporation's Beacon Award, given in recognition of those Lotus Business Partners who have excelled in leading the Lotus industry by providing expert and quality products, solutions and services to customers. Year 2000 awards are given to services and solutions built around Lotus' key technologies. Judged by a combination of leading industry press and analysts worldwide and Lotus executives, the Beacon Award winners will be announced in January during Lotusphere 2000 in Orlando, Florida.
Handheld Design Awards Announcement
Winners of the Center for Innovative Learning Technologies (CILT) Handheld Design Award Competition will be announced on March 6. New, original educational applications of Palm technology will be judged using four criteria in six categories. The Exploratorium Science Center in San Francisco will host the awards ceremony through a live webcast.
MOOM Beams
Read indepth about "Moving Out of the Middle" (MOOM), Concord Consortium's popular class for online moderation of courses, in the December 7, 1999, issue of WebCT Newsletter -- look for "Industry Watch." The article explains the pitfals that online moderators can fall into as well as principles of good moderation. For anyone thinking of taking the MOOM class (see page 12 of this issue of @CONCORD), the WEBCT article includes many comments from MOOM participants . According to WebCT, their article on MOOM received the greatest number of hits within the first 24 hours of any article ever on their site.
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