A note from the Instructor:

I am a teacher, ... and for the pedagogical theorist, let me emphasize that by “teaching”, I imply, whether stated explicitly or not, both the transfer of essential information and the cultivation of knowledge, or what some might call “critical reasoning”. Thus the general expectations I have when teaching Brown students are threefold:

a) To develop expertise in acquiring, analyzing and interpreting data;
b) To sharpen critical analysis skills;
c) To communicate effectively using a variety of graphic, computer, oral and written media.

However, one cannot critically assess a technical or scientific issue if they do not have an understanding of the underlying paradigm. Hence, a perennial quandary for instructors is “How can we get more of the essential material across in a time-effective (as well as relatively painless) way?” Or as a corollary, “How can we teach advanced concepts without the conventional prerequisites?” Many schools don't have this concern, because their students lock-step through their curriculum: Prerequisite A is taken before Prerequisite B, before their first advanced sophomore course. At places like Brown, we have a much less constrained (and, to most of the Faculty, much more exciting) student body that thrives on exploring a myriad of fields from Day 1 on campus, and who, by their very nature of being drawn to Brown, abhor the lock-step mentality of the afore-mentioned academies. I endorse the Brown tradition; recognizing that these creative and innovative students are the strongest assets that we, as a faculty, can leave as a legacy.

I submit that computer-aided instruction (CAI; see footnote below) can make teaching more effective. First, the proper implementation of CAI in advanced introductory courses (i.e. first courses in a field at the sophomore through senior level) should facilitate teaching a course in parallel tracks to both engineering/science students and humanist/policy students simultaneously. The pedagogy is based on first developing the respective concept on an intuitive level through computer-aided scientific visualization in lecture or labs, which is then reinforced by each student with personal, self-paced asynchronous CAI exercises.

This web page is an evolving element of my Environmental Geophysics/Hydrology program at Brown University. It attempts to illustrate the fundamental concepts of how water moves through a watershed, in particular emphasizing some of the underlying temporal and spatial relationships. For example, the time delay between a precipitation event and the increase in streamflow. Our long term objective is to illustrate these processes in a visual, intuitive way, that, while minimizing mathematics, presents material that is nevertheless well-grounded in theoretical underpinnings. If a student has an intuitive command of a physical process, then the theoretical or mathematical elements fall naturally into place. And as our understanding of the physical process evolves, we can then engage collectively in a didactic dialog of critical analysis.

footnote: CAI, often termed “electronic mediated instruction”, is used here to denote interactive multimedia, which we do not differentiate from hypertext or hypermedia.