Breaking the Vicious Circle: Getting Faculty and Technology Together
Glenn S. Everett
Please excuse me if I seem at first to be repeating some commonplaces with which you are all familiar. My intent is to try to relate here the thinking which went into developing the Faculty Multimedia Center at the University of Tennessee at Martin, and the role we see it playing.
Consider what was faced by faculty members at UTM a few years ago who were studying whether to use computer-based technology as part of their courses: the computers in our offices were not powerful enough to experiment with this technology, and we had no other place to go except the student computer labs. If we did manage to develop something, only a few large classrooms had any projection equipment, and it was not intended to connect to computers. If we developed something for out-of-classroom use by students, there were problems there as well: our computer labs were crowded, and lacking computer classrooms, we were holding some classes in the labs, further reducing student access to them. And of course the labs are not upgraded as often as they should be. Finally, not only were incentives to faculty members developing instructional aids completely lacking, there were on the contrary powerful disincentives.
So: no computers on which to develop technology; no laboratory in which to house the computers; no way to transfer any teaching aids developed elsewhere to the faculty office computers; no way to use such aids in the classroom, and inadequate student access to them outside class; no incentive for faculty members to spend precious time developing the resources which would require upgrading computers university wide for both students and professors; and little money to attack any of these problems. It was a perfect vicious circle, which I believe that UTM is in the process of breaking, and in the most economical way.
Those of us gathered at this conference do not need to be sold on the potential importance of instructional technology, nor on the impact that it may have on teaching and learning in the future. During this last decade of the second millennium, computer technology has leapfrogged far ahead of itself. It has done that before; but finally we are approaching the point at which computer-based multimedia might be becoming a realistic possibility, both financially and practically, as something that "ordinary" (non-technologically-minded) faculty can develop, in a way that can make a real difference for in-and-out-of-the-classroom instruction.
We know also that students need to be educated in the ways that computers may change their lives; but at the moment, virtually all computing courses which address these technologies are "how to courses: training in particular methods, usually restricted to specific fields of study. There is almost no attempt to address the what or the why; that is, to discover which technologies work best with traditional educational goals, or to see if there are goals we can now reach with these technologies which were unreachable before. More important, neither the implications of the technology for education nor the larger issues of the social changes which may be wrought by it are being addressed.
Why not? Well, who is to teach them?
To use UTM as an example: we have never had the luxuries that huge endowments or lucrative research grants bring to expensive private colleges or big public research institutions, and our faculty teach more courses and more students than our colleagues at those schools. Neither do we have the research capabilities or administrative staff of a major research institution. We can not afford to commit time and money to experimentation with unproven teaching aids. Because we also teach a four-course per semester load, there is little time to experiment with new techniques unless they can be implemented with no increase in course preparation time. Rarely, then, will you see our faculty experimenting with technology just for experimentation's sake.
True, new faculty just coming out of graduate school have had available to them some of the newer technological resources and some opportunity to think through their pedagogic goals and methods of approach at the same time that they are experimenting with the technology; but think for a moment of the powerful disincentives for experienced faculty, especially at state-funded, primarily undergraduate institutions like UTM, to experiment with unproven teaching aids--even for the most inspired, creative faculty. The kind of teachers that I'm talking about have always sought ways to bring their subjects alive, and to motivate students to become learners. By definition, if they are experienced, they have long ago thought carefully about their educational goals and have, over the years, developed methods--again, by my definition, successful ones--to reach them. We all have a finite amount of time and energy, and there is an inverse relationship between the amount of time we must spend on the day-today business of teaching our courses and the degree of innovation we can bring into our interaction with students.
In the absence of reasonable incentives to change the way they teach, these most experienced teachers are entirely justified in avoiding the new technologies in favor of the methods they are already using successfully. Yet if we believe that computers and computer-aided technology have become centrally important to the college experience for every student, we cannot afford to have our best teachers ignore this resource, nor can we wait for them to retire before the new technology is put to use. Neither is it acceptable for students to encounter computer technology only in one or two computer science courses: that would send the message that computers may safely be ignored if your primary interests lie in a field that has not, traditionally, been technologically oriented.
It is entirely likely, then, that a college's administration may become convinced of the desirability of incorporating new technology in its curriculum before its faculty is prepared to make this change, and the administration at UTM is (mostly) convinced. Our chancellor, Margaret Perry, said in a recent interview when asked about her vision of UTM's future, "The vision now is based on where technology will take us. I can't quite visualize it, because we don't know where some of this is leading. In the midst of building a faculty that cares, in comes this rush of technology. Because it's there and because we all know it is the future, we have to find a way to tie the two together" (Kanavel).
An early recognition of the necessity of change came in a proposal by Dean Robert Smith of the School of Arts and Sciences for a new faculty laboratory. If our students are to remain competitive, he argued, "nothing less than a complete redesign of our approach to education is acceptable. First, our faculty must have access to the technology that shapes this revolution and have the time and support to learn how to use it. Second, our students must be oriented to technology and have experience that builds their confidence and leadership, expands their creativity, and develops their analytical skills....UT Martin proposes a complete redesign of teaching on the campus where teaching is our first priority. The transformation will be lead by the faculty and will build on their commitment and dedication to our students. This revolution will require providing three major components: (1) a multimedia technology laboratory where faculty can develop advanced state-of-the-art instructional methods; (2) high-tech classrooms where instruction can be enhanced using advanced technology to bring the latest information and instructional technology into the everyday lives of our students; and (3) a high-tech educational network to provide communities and businesses throughout West Tennessee access to research, seek innovative answers to problems, and stay in touch with the global marketplace (Smith).
So the administration had begun to recognize this necessity; in practical terms, the process began when an outside donor was found who would entirely fund what has become the Faculty Multimedia Center.
But it was clear that the hardware and the laboratory were only the first step. Who was . to staff the lab? Kendall Blanchard, Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, announced a competition for an Academic Affairs Faculty Fellow, who was to be responsible for the center on a half-time basis: the first Fellow turned out to be yours truly. Dean Smith had already developed certain specifications for the design of the room and some of the basic computer hardware, but for the first five months of my appointment, most of what I did was research computer capabilities, check prices, and vendors, and discuss what we wanted with the dean and faculty. The Center currently has the following equipment:
Then, in order to interest faculty in this initiative, Dr. Blanchard found the money to set up a couple of week-long summer workshops, which I would run.
I thought it fundamentally important, when we solicited proposals from the faculty, that we not ask them to describe how they could employ this technology, but rather to think about things they wanted to accomplish in the classroom, or skills and approaches that they wanted their students to master -- a much more difficult and abstract question. To quote from the actual announcement: "Our intent is not simply to inject a technological component into the course syllabi, but to provide an opportunity to faculty in all disciplines to re-think their teaching goals. Computer technology has advanced so far so quickly that many of the things you might once have wanted to try with your students , but which you rejected as too time-consuming, may now be possible. Also, once you see what others are doing, you may get some ideas about (1) new and better ways to deliver your course content, (2) new ways of interacting with students (or getting students to interact with each other), or (3) new ways for students to learn critical thinking skills relevant to your discipline. Perhaps you will find that you can relegate some less directly important tasks to the computer, thereby freeing up time for more face-to-face interaction with students. You don't need to be a computer expert -- quite the contrary: we are actively seeking faculty who have made made much use of this technology so far. We are less interested in how technologically sophisticated your proposal is, and more in how well it is thought out pedagogically. What we are hoping is that you can start with a clean slate, and ask how you would like to communicate the material and methods of your discipline to your student; perhaps an even better question to ask is, what is the best way for students to approach the material?
Happily, we got so many good responses, from every school and division on campus, that Dr. Blanchard authorized three workshops instead of the two that we had planned.
The proposals included
In short, we saw that, given the time and place in which to experiment, our faculty jumped at the chance.
At this point it was really up to me to demonstrate the usefulness and some of the capabilities of this technology. At a faculty forum I tried to do this by showing the familiar problems with the technology of the recent past--slide projectors, phonographs, and vcrs--and gave some indication of how much more flexible computer-based technology promises to be. I also tried to indicate some of the things which this technology makes possible which previously could not be done in the classroom.
Demonstrating the problems was easy. Those of us who have tried to use multiple media in the classroom know how difficult it is to haul in and set up slide projectors, record players, vcrs. And to use more than one medium per day is just about unthinkable, unless you have a lot more student assistants that we do.
Suppose I want to show my students what Keats, Browning, Ruskin--any of the writers inspired by works of art--were reacting to. If I lug in the books containing those art works, I can then either try to show them to the first few rows of students, or pass them around--neither option very satisfactory.
Suppose I'm teaching Browning's "Andrea del Sarto," in which the character makes frequent comparison between his skills and Raphael's; we ought to look at some of the paintings Browning is talking about, shouldn't we? But have you tried to carry around a good, large-format art book? I can, if I have enough time, use slides; that is, I have to get slides made, set up the slide tray, carry in the slide projector and the table, get them both set up, douse the lights for the slide show (and hope that the class doesn't go to sleep), and then at the end of the period I have to get it all taken apart before the next class shows up at the door.
If I want them to hear Yeats or Dylan Thomas reading from their works, it's almost as bad. I have to cart in the tape recorder and the record player, cue up the tapes and the records, and pay much more attention to the mechanics of playing the device than to the class I am supposedly teaching.
Videotape? fine--if and only if I "teach" to the convenience of the VCR. When I teach Shakespeare I would like to compare a couple of scenes in the Hamlets of Gielgud, Olivier, Barrymore, and Mel Gibson. The only way a teacher has been able to do this is to assemble all the videotapes, cue them up to the one scene that we want to show, and then switch them in and out of the VCR--for that one scene only, after which you have to set everything up again. Lord forbid that you have two sections of the same course back-to-back. Very clumsy, and very distracting.
All of the previous options are time-consuming and inconvenient, and can distract the students from the points I am trying to make about the works. Notice, however, that the objections to using these materials have NOTHING to do with the pedagogical usefulness of these materials; the limitations are strictly practical.
One great advantage of computers as multimedia devices is their flexibility, the way they can be made to do so many different things. Just to run through the different media available on the Web: There are already many artworks on the web--the Virtual Louvre and the Christusrex sites are probably the most famous. Given access to a scanner and a Web server, however, it is faster to put images on the web for students to look at in a computer lab than it is to get slides made. Somewhat fewer computers have sound capability, but as they become more available, students can hear poets like Seamus Heaney reading their poems (http://sunsite.unc.edu/dykki/poetry/home.html), and we can also make our own CDs--for example, one I have made of our UTM choral group.
People are also making available over the Web some multimedia resources which have been previously restricted to local use. Two cases in point are George P. Landow's Victorian Web at Brown University (http: llwww. stg . brown. edu/projects/hypertext/landow/victorian/victov . html), formerly on Storyspace, and a Macintosh Hypercard stack of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, put together by Stephen Marx at Cal Poly. An example of a multimedia project designed specifically for the Web is this one in which I have been involving my upperdivision students: a hypermedia edition of those dramatic monologues by Robert Browning in which he has painters like Fra Lippo Lippi and Andrea del Sarto discuss their works, rather specifically, in competition with those of other painters (see http: llwww . utm. edu/departments/english/everett/rb . shtml) .
One very exciting advance is in what the multimedia computer and the Web have made possible in terms of film commentary. Consider what the film critic used to have to do as recently as 2 years ago. When he wanted to talk about film technique, he had to attempt to describe what happens with the camerawork, and you had to use either your memory or your imagination to try to ascertain whether the technique in the films mentioned actually supports the argument made.
Now for the first time, the computer makes it possible to quote film-- and this is what Robert Kolker has done in an essay which could be published no other way (Kolker). Professor Kolker wants to talk about the way Alfred Hitchcock influenced the technique of directors like Martin Scorsese and Stephen Spielberg; and how could he show that? Now he can. His article includes still photographs from the different movies he is comparing; and when you click on any one of them, you bring up a clip from the movie, showing the way the camera moves and the sequence of shots the director has chosen. What he has done with these movies, we will be able to do with any performances that exist on film or videotape.
Perhaps even more pedagogically useful than multimedia presentations is the potential for interactive communication over the computer. I began this semester testing "Virtual Fridays," where we hold discussions on line rather than in the classroom (see http: / Iwww.utm. edu/cgibin/caldwell/bubba/aaff/bubl 1224 or http: //www.utm.edu/cgibin/caldwell/bubba/aaff/bub465). So far, I am extremely pleased with the results; this medium seems to encourage out-of-class thinking about ideas presented in class--and requires 100% student participation in the discussion.
What is new and different about this technology is that it is under the control of the user (that is, the teacher) and is a hands-on medium. Take, for example, video. In its current incarnation, videotape, a teacher's interaction with it must be primarily passive: you turn it on and let it run. At the end of the tape, you wake up the class and try to hold some discussion of what they saw. With video captured to a computer hard disk or DVD disk, the teacher can quickly select exactly those moments from a video which illustrate the points under discussion in class. The teacher retains control over the material rathe