For the three of us, computer-assisted instruction has been, and continues to be, a process of continual experimentation. Each of us has spent the last five or six years trying to find innovative ways of making use of those blank screens that surround us in the computer classrooms where we've taught our composition and literature courses. And after countless failures, and a handful of wonderful successes, our relationship with computer-assisted education continues to be a labor of love. What we've tried to do with Connections, and what we are trying to do in this Instructors' Manual, is to provide a pedagogical framework on which other instructors can build and embellish, creatively experimenting with ways of integrating technology into their own classrooms.
The purpose of this manual is to supplement the materials presented in Connections by offering suggestions, strategies and warnings that come from our experience with computer-assisted instruction. We try to offer pointers about methods or techniques that have worked well for us in the past, as well as offer advice about how to avoid some of the pitfalls of teaching in this environment. We've also compiled some resources to supplement the ones provided in the textbook, including three sample syllabi and a selected bibliography of publications about various aspects of computer assisted education. We've split the manual into three sections: Introduction to Computer-Assisted Pedagogy, Using Connections in Your Class, and Chapter Outlines. In Section One we concentrate on general strategies for avoiding the most common problems associated with computer-assisted teaching. This section also offers suggestions about why class Web sites are so valuable and how you might organize and set up a class site of your own. Section Two outlines the philosophy and methodology that we used in writing Connections and makes a number of suggestions about the best ways of integrating the textbook with your particular pedagogical goals. Finally, Section Three is intended to be something of a guided tour through the book, looking briefly at each chapter in Connections. For each chapter we offer information about when the materials might be taught during the semester, suggestions about how best to explore the materials with your students, warnings about possible trouble-spots, and any additional information that we thought might be helpful. We annotate each of the exercises from the text as well as offer additional exercises to further explore the information being covered in the textbook.
We'd like to note, too, that this manual will be available on-line at the Connections Web site (http://www.abacon.com/connections) and we encourage you to make extensive use of the many resources and forums that will be available to you at this Web site. We discuss the Connections Web site at length in Section One, but we mention it here as well because we believe that it will be an important resource for instructors who are teaching with Connections.
We think you'll find the textbook useful, and we believe that once you've tried it, you'll find that the process of teaching in a computer-assisted environment will spark your imaginationwe know that it has sparked ours.