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COVER STORY
Learning via CD-ROM
Digital media brings Brownfield Action Project alive

Students taking Peter Bower's introductory environmental science class learn not by moving from chapter to chapter in a textbook, but by delving into a real-world problem: analyzing a brownfield. All 125 students explore (with a twist) a contaminated site that a developer wants to turn into a shopping mall.

The students split up into teams and are given budgets to work with. Their mission is to discover just how and where the site, which covers nearly seven million square feet, is contaminated. On their first visit, they drive through the site and look it over, noting landmarks like the factory, its parking lot and a water tower. They drive past a residential community on the site and look at the local vegetation. "A lot of time is spent inspecting and walking over this site," says Bower, a senior lecturer in environmental science at Barnard whose course is open to College students as well.

Back in the classroom, Bower teaches the students mapping skills; then they go about generating a map of the site with data they have collected. After learning how public information can help, they go to the local municipality, request reports and interview officials. Among their destinations are the health department, the mayor's office and the buildings department. Eventually, they turn to advanced testing techniques: They use ground-penetrating radar, hire a company to drill into the ground and sample the water and soil. The most industrious students spend time digging deep into the old company's records, and - like Erin Brockovich - track down former employees and others with inside information, even when it means hanging out at a neighborhood watering hole to coax information out of the locals.

Sounds expensive, right? It is. So far it has cost about $60,000, and the tab is rising. Expenses for this trip are paid by Columbia's Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, with additional grant money from Barnard's Environmental Science department and the National Science Foundation.

The brownfield they visit is fictional, and the students get to it anytime by using a CD-ROM and the Internet.

Everything mentioned above happens - on the computer. The tour they take is a virtual one. The images they see are still photographs. Students meet the developer (played by Bower) on video. The information they request and the interviews they conduct are handled over e-mail. And when they pay for drilling services by an outside company, that company exists, and has helped develop this project. They can see photos and video demonstrations of the equipment on the company's Web site. Expenses are deducted from the team's budget, essentially Monopoly money managed on a spreadsheet.

In the process, students learn environmental science like they never would from a book and lab assignments. At home, rather than poring over textbooks, the students read A Civil Action and Silent Spring and refer to legal and medical dictionaries.

"They learn in context," says Bower. "In a way, it's a game."

The question is, does playing that game really help students learn, or is it just playtime?

According to Robert Highsmith, the full-time evaluator Columbia hired to figure that out, a project like the brownfield one really is more effective than traditional lecturing and textbooks alone.

Highsmith compared the final "consultant's reports" that students prepared in previous years, before the course was digitized, with ones that were submitted after using the virtual brownfield. "There is a dramatic difference," he says. In the new reports, "They sound more like they're environmental consultants. They have the assertiveness and conviction that what they know is so strong and so deep that they can take an advocacy stance."

Bower has used the brownfield project to teach environmental science for the past decade. The old way of doing the project was for information to be written on 3x5 index cards. Students requested information by coming up to a desk manned by Bower and his TAs, who looked up the appropriate card and wrote down the answer for them. Necessarily, the problem felt more like a school project than the real world.

"It was a lot of paper pushing and took a lot of time, so the problem had to be much simpler," Bower says.

Last year, Bower met with Frank Moretti, the ambitious director of the new CCNMTL. "It was a natural," Moretti says of turning the brownfield project digital. "Simulations have terrific possibilities in a new media environment." A team was assembled from CCNMTL and worked during the summer of '99 on programming the brownfield and its database.

Now, the brownfield is made up of over two million data points. Not only is the surface defined, but the data reaches up into the air and down into the ground - 37 layers that include information on the soil, bedrock and water table, as well as the contamination. But as in the real world, the data is hidden until students probe it using the right techniques and tests, which they learn about in the class's lecture and through tutorials on the computer.

Because the Brownfield Action CD-ROM could be used by other college and even high school classes to teach environmental science, Columbia may eventually license it through Columbia Media Enterprises, a new division of the University charged with turning new media projects into profit.

Last year the course was taught with the CD-ROM only; this year it has Web interactivity. The CCNMTL envisions that the project could be translated to different languages and used in science courses around the world. In addition to the packaged material, experts could give presentations by videoconference, and teams at different schools could work together or compete.

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