4. Had the students had any previous experience using e-mail, or was that something you taught to them throughout the course?
For many students who were new in the class this really involved them learning how to use electronic mail. Generally learners when coming into this program have not had the opportunity to really sit in front of a computer and use it for any reason. And so the idea of electronic mail is a new and exciting option for them.
As an example, the Antarctic field trip has photographs taken in Antarctica during some of the historic explorations and expeditions. So during this electronic field trip, when investigating various things on the Internet, some were choosing to look at some of those photographs. It was more visual and then they wrote about what they found. And that was appropriate, say, for that level of information literacy.
There were other students in the class who understood a lot about the ozone hole and so a few of those students felt very comfortable with something that was a lot more dense in terms of text and containing more scientific vocabulary. They were spending time looking at that information and then writing about that.
