JOHN C. BUTLER – THE VIRTUAL GEOSCIENCE PROFESSOR

John Butler passed away in October, 2001. But for those of us who are exploring the many ways in which technology can be harmonized with pedagogy to improve the quality of education his legacy continues to serve as an inspiration. A visit to his virtual home at http://www.uh.edu/~jbutler/anon/anonfield.html provides some examples of how John saw the future of teaching with technology. There is a superb compilation of good practices examples of courses using Internet resources, a special page devoted to geophysics resources; ANON, his link to Computers & Geosciences for which he was an associate editor; a valuable directory of geoscience departments and organizations worldwide; and, his most recent addition, a listserv which he entitled the VirtualCoffeeRoom. His good practices site is based on 5 years of continuous data collection and, in his words, “As of March 21, 2001 there are approximately 4,750 geoscience course resources stored in a FileMakerPro database. The resources have been arranged according to broad categories with each category subdivided into content-based subcategories. You may search by category, subcategory and/or by words. The entire database can be searched for key words. The purpose of this page is to focus on those resources which illustrate good practices and might be adopted by, or prove suggestive, to others. Clearly, there is an element of personal judgment in producing such lists and the author bears full responsibility for the contents.” There are over 300 listed opportunities for independent travel and study, 450 examples of supplementary teaching materials, 200 Internet-based homework and laboratory exercises, and 200 geoscience images. One of John’s key concerns was that the pedagogical use of the Internet started as a highly individualized process, so he took great pleasure in the fact that his archival efforts were aiding in the formation of faculty technology resource centers in colleges and universities across the continent. He was ahead of his time.