This collection of activities illustrate how I have used various technological tools to support the acquisition and sharing of insight about students thoughts.

• Example 1: In a recent class, I had students develop personas on two consecutive design assignments as a means of helping them design in a more user-centered way. Each week, following the assignment, I used a webQ survey to elicit opinions from the students about the effectiveness of using personas. I had the students complete the surveys *in class*, and used the results to promote discussion about the conditions under which personas are helpful to designers.

• Example 2: When I teach in a computer lab space, I have frequently used E-post as a way to consolidate and display student respones to class activities. For example, as part of the persona activity alluded to above, I asked groups to work for 10 minutes to create a persona and then post their informaiton to the course e-post. Then, as a class, we discussed each of the personas posted. This permitted me to anchor my comments directly in student difficulties.

• Example 3: I have frequently used webQ as a means to gain anonymous feedback from students. Sometimes this is in the form of a supplement to the final course evaluation. Other times, however, I request this feedback during the course so that there is a chance to respond to the feedback and make mid quarter corrections.

• Example 4: One challenge in teaching is developing a sense of how students are organizing and structuring the various ideas being covered. Concept mapping is one technique to learn more about this, and pathfinder is a mathematical approach that generates concept map-like representations. As a part of a project during the 1996 academic year, I developed a web-based tool that made it possible for instructors to use the Pathfinder approach in class.