A Multimedia Textbook for Physical Hydrology
Jeffrey Raffensperger, Environmental Science
1995 TTI Fellow
Email: jpr2y@virginia.edu
Project website: http://darwin.clas.Virginia.EDU/~jpr2y/eph.html
Mr. Jeffrey Raffensperger is collaborating with his colleagues George M. Hornberger and Patricia L. Wiberg to create a new electronic textbook for a Physical Hydrology class at the University of Virginia. As a core course in Environmental Sciences, this class presents the fundamental knowledge that undergraduate students are expected to acquire in that field. It also represents an obvious point of departure for more advanced courses, as well as a basic introduction to the scientific method. Yet this course, fundamental to the curriculum and required for the major, is without a textbook, and has been for years. Various commercial textbooks have been tried and discarded. In most textbooks the treatment is overly "applied," that is, it often fails to convey the basic relationship between physical principles and our observations, focusing instead on hydrological methodology. Since students in physical hydrology in the Environmental Sciences Department enter with highly diverse educational backgrounds and widely differing career goals, from hard sciences to law school, the application orientation of most physical hydrology texts can be a barrier to their comprehension of the material. Another flaw of all hydrology textbooks is that they are limited to text and two-dimensional graphical representations, and they fall far short of describing the dynamic nature of water, the true content of the course. It is in this context that Mr. Raffensperger has formulated the solution to his department's textbook woes. Using as their basis an excellent set of typewritten notes prepared over the past two decades by George Hornberger and John Fisher, Mr. Raffensperger and his colleagues plan to use the computer as the tool to weave a rich multimedia fabric illustrating the basic principles of physical hydrology. The textual notes will be combined with digital video, still images, simulations of hydrological processes, and demonstration problems using available data sets, all providing visualization of hydrological phenomena. The simulation tools will be prepared in MATLAB, a software package for mathematical problem solving and graphical presentation.The main vehicle for integration and delivery of the multimedia material will be the World Wide Web. Students will be able to view the material at workstations around Grounds or at home (from CD-ROM) and the instructor will have the option of working discrete components into his or her classroom presentation. Mr. Raffensperger expects that this highly dynamic and infinitely mutable authoring environment, with its rich hypertextual and multimedia capabilities, will allow the fullest expression and exploration of water as a powerful force of nature.