Gosh, it's too bad, but your reflections reached the server only at 12:25 a.m., just missing the deadline for successful completion of the course. And you would have gotten a "A" too. Oh, well, you can always take the course again.

Just kidding. Thanks for taking care of getting the file server up last night. I spoke with Elli this morning and she explained what she thinks went wrong. I'll bet we can do it much better the next time, especially since the developer of the system they were using at the STG has some improved version that should be available soon.

I agree that the class would have been different if more people had become involved at a deeper level. Among other things, if twice as many people had been handing in complex and thorough responses each week, I would probably not have been able to keep up with the immediate responses myself. On the other hand, perhaps the course would have run just as well with less response volume from the professor and more from other students. Also one can imagine having student assistants to help with the response activity.

Definitely in the future there will be a designated paid official technology assistant. If I had realized what would be involved in the facilitation of this course using the software we finally chose, I would have advertised for the services of such an assistant last January. It will be helpful to have a list of the responsibilities such an assistant might have?

Improved communication technology will probably make it easier for people to interact with one another's weekly submissions, and I concur that this aspect should be stressed more. It really is one of the most innovative parts of this experiment.

Of course there are other innovations that we will want to pursue, and I agree that the interactive illustrations in Java are some of the most exciting. The course will look quite different next time.

Herewith are appended the comments on the (excellent) group project:" By the way, Course Grade = A.

Comments on the Polyobjects Group

Your investigations were particularly successful in giving access to new tools for interacting with familiar geometric objects in three- and four-dimensional space. The Java applets will doubtless add quite a bit to future versions of this course, especially when they are extended to deal with filled-in objects in a reasonable amount of time. There should be algorithms for slicing general objects from arbitrary directions, of course, and some demonstrations showing how to move from an object to its dual. The ideas of truncating polyhedra or polytopes to produce semi-regular objects is also ripe for interactive illustrations. All in all your work has advanced the level of geometric interaction considerably, not just in the final project but throughout the semester, and it was effective to see how some of your earlier work was incorporated in your presentation.

The links to other sites are also very good to have, and it will be interesting in the future to explore the relationship between VRML, Java applets, and highly rendered individual objects. It would also be useful to link to some of the other projects, in particular those that deal with the axiomatic approach or the literary and artistic topics that use polytopes, duality, et cetera.

There is so much more to be done, taking off from the platform you have set up here. Good work in getting this effort off to such a strong start.