0) Have you submitted responses for weeks 5 through 13?

• I submitted assignments for weeks 1-13, except for the week 8 "Reflections" writing. I skipped this section because I felt that I had kept up with the previous work.

1) How has your view of yourself in relationship to mathematics changed over the course of the semester?

• I feel that I have expanded and integrated many of the abstract concepts that I learned in previous math courses. The focus on geometry in the course provided a very useful emphasis of concrete representations of mathematical concepts that complemented my prior abstract representations of formulas.

2) For you, what are the most positive and the most negative aspects of the course? Would you suggest any major changes in structure or emphasis?

• The most positive aspects selections of "B3D" that related math concepts to historical and sociological perspectives. I also greatly enjoyed designed HTML documents for both the weekly assignments and especially for the final project. I enjoyed the "Hypercube" video and visit to the "Higher Dimensional" art exhibit. I disliked the format of some of the in-class lectures. I felt that they moved too quickly over concepts that were perhaps beyond the scope of the course.

3) Comment at length on the concept of the paperless course. What are the advantages or disadvantages of this approach? In what ways could such an approach work in other courses?

• I very much appreciated and enjoyed the utilization of the internet for holding a paperless class. I liked that we were able to reduce the consumption and use of paper for ecological reasons. I enjoyed having the creative freedom to design the HTML documents with color and interesting formatting. Looking over other students' work and allowing them to peruse mine was satisfying as well. I thought that the only disadvantage to this technique was that people with little or no knowledge about computers and the internet did not receive enough of a background on how to design HTML and upload it to the servers. Another useful approach employs using e-mail "attachments" to send files of word processor documents. These are readable in both Macintosh and PC machines and allow students to use their familiar word processing software. My Environmental Studies 11 class used this method to send writing assignments to T.A.s and it worked quite well. These files could also be put on a server to be downloaded, via FTP protocol for example, by other students to read.

4) Comment on your experiences with the technology used in the course. What can be done to make things easier in the future?

• Provide more intensive and customized support for students who are not familiar with FTP, Fileserve, etc. A special individualized workshop at the beginning of the semester would have adequately provided this. It also would have been useful to some students if they had learned about various HTML editors available as shareware. This software greatly simplifies the complexity of doing HTML. An example is the built-in HTML editor in Netscape Navigator 2.01 Gold, or Hotdog Pro (both of which I used to design HTML pages).

5) Describe your experience with the weekly assignments and the "response from Prof. B." feature. Comment on the public nature of these interchanges, and the possibility of linkings among student work and communication with the other class members. To what extent did you read the submissions of other students (and/or the professor's responses)?

• I felt like my work was more integrated with the work of other students and that concepts were more freely shared among the class as a whole rather than individuals. I felt that the linkings did provide a fluid cohesiveness between both classmates and the class' subject matter and more detailed information avaibable elsewhere on the Internet. I tended to scan through most students' assigments and closely read sections that caught my interest. I found that Prof. Banchoff's comments were helpful in answering questions I had and providing greater depth into subjects of personal interest.

6) Describe in some detail your activities as part of your final project team.

• I designed the opening page of the project very early on. I browsed the web for interesting pictures and design concepts. I used Javascript which I took from another page and integrated it into our page. The layout of the opening page helped to organize the structure and division of work of the project. I focused somewhat on miscellaneous loose-ends of the paper. My main focus was to design a section of the expansion of the universe and the big bang. I created a page that connected the big bang to abstract ideas of relativity and related them to a theological question. I created a page that described several experiments that verified the accuracy of Einstein's relativity over Newtonian theory. I created a "sub-page" that utilized a graphical picture to illustrate one of these experiments (regarding a gravitational redshift).

7) In the old days, the final project was mostly an individual effort, on the order of a ten-page paper. How would you characterize the experience of working on a team, and how did that affect your effort in the final project?

• I very much liked working in a team and found the final results to be more satisfying as a result. I liked that each group member could specialize in his or her own areas of interest while simultaneously contributing to the strength of the project as a whole. Mark Cecil, for example, used his creative writing talents in his "Einstein at Bat" short story. I think each team member worked hard, especially because the product of his or her work was visible, and a lack of work would be noticeable in his or her respective section. In our project, the work of each member did seem to unify and cohere at the end.

If you would like to make your final project more accessible to people browsing or searching the web, consider adding the URL to your page to the Yahoo! search and reference server. To do so, simply go to the Yahoo! page (the URL is http://www.yahoo.com/), and click on the "Add URL" button at the top of the page. They will add the URL to your project to an appropriate section. You may also add your URLs to the Webcrawler (http://www.webcrawler.com) and the OpenText (http://www.opentext.com/omw/f-omw.html) search servers.

Prof. Banchoff's response