The Use Of Inquiry Based, Multi Media Curriculum: Its Impact On Students' Perceptions Of Learning

The use of technology is growing and simultaneously changing the learning process, the structure of knowledge, and the nature of instruction. In a 1995 survey of college campuses, Green and Gilbert noted that major gains have been made in the use of informational technology as an instructional resource and Duffy ad Jonassen indicate that new forms of teaching and learning are changing the way knowledge is constructed. One of areas most frequently cited as benefiting from this use of technology is student-centered, inquiry-based learning. From this point of view, instruction, and hence learning, is a process in which the student is building an “internal representation of knowledge, a personal interpretation of an experience”. This involves the sharing of multiple perspectives and the simultaneous changing of representations. Kerr notes that the use of technology as a support to inquiry-based learning should result in greater communication and connectivity, more opportunities to participate in “real world settings via access to better simulations or to actual data, and the opportunity to explore unusual representations of data, knowledge, and opinions.”