is a project being developed by MCLI
with Rod Freeman, English faculty at Estrella Mountain Community College. For the
student, it provides an environment to use various computer-based research tools,
including those on the Internet.
The program is a template in which instructors
of any discipline may create up to 13 lessons. From within each lesson, the
student has available:
- A resource menu of external applications selected by the instructor.
All of these are available at any time to the student, and the instructor can
indicate which of them are suggested for a given lesson. Any program available to
the students computer can be turned into an RM Resource.
- An electronic notebook, which is always available from within and
outside of the Research Mentor program.
- Pop-up help fields for functional areas.
- A means to provide anonymous feedback to the instructor. Depending on
the configuration, this may be sent as an electronic file to a "drop box"
directory, or sent to a printer.
Research Mentor comes with two "built-in" tools:
- The Invisible Writer is a place where students freely compose their
thoughts without seeing their text. In this way, they are not distracted by
spelling, punctuation, or format. After an instructor specified number of words
have been entered, the stduewnt can thatn see their work .They may continue to
write, transfer their work to a word processor program, or copy it to their
notebook.
- The Writing Pad is where a student can compose drafts, open and save
to text files, and transfer work to a word processor. The Writing Pad can also be
configured to serve as a means for students to anonymously peer- review each
others work. Students "submit" their draft electronically. They can call up a
randomly chosen classmate's draft to review. The writing pad has a specialized
writing editor to input standard reviewers comments as well as adding any others
that are needed. Finally, a student can check if their original drfat has been
read and commented and if so, they can bring it up on their screen.
Research Mentor can be set up with a student record database so that they log in
under their ID number. The program will record how many lessons they have done as
well as keep a log of time spent in the program and what applications were used.
Research Mentor comes with an external program to maintain student records and
another one to accumulate and tally the electronic feedback. Research Mentor has
its own "Authoring" environment for writing the assignments, designating external
resources, and setting other program attributes. Working in this environment
requires no programming knowledge.
Requirements
Research Mentor is HyperCard 2.x based and requires a color Macintosh with at
least a 13" monitor. The computer should have enough RAM to provide 2 MB to
HyperCard. The program requires a minimum of 1.2 MB of disk space.
"It sounds great, how do I..."
Unfortunately, this project has passed by and is no longer active. Watch a video of a walkthrough of screens.