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By Eric Sean Weld Four years ago, when she arrived at Smith to begin her college career, Sara Frank '00 was impressed with the amount of technology and computer-aided educational resources available to her and her fellow students. Hers was the first class to enter Smith with a campus-wide e-mail and Internet system, for example, she says. "That was such a new, big thing for us back then," she notes. Frank also recalls that most students moving in that year had computers they'd brought from home. But four years and three college e-mail servers later, Frank, a sociology major, says the technology on campus today makes what passed for high-tech advances at Smith a few short years ago seem laughably outdated. "I definitely think a lot has happened," she says. "I think there's a lot more use of computerized resources in classes now. It's all increased." Some 85 percent of Smith students have their own computers these days, either one brought from home or one purchased at a discount from the college's computer store. For the student who does not have her own computer, two 24-hour computer laboratories are available on campus, as well as resource centers and field-specific computer labs. Professors in many of Frank's courses this year have incorporated computer use into their class routine, she says, either by assigning readings from Internet journals, communicating with students via the Net and e-mail, or posting quizzes and exams on-line. And more information is available to Frank and her peers than ever before, thanks to the hundreds of millions of pages added to the Internet during the past four years, the advent of enhanced graphic images through digitization and sophisticated software, and ever-increasing processing speed. Frank says that from her perspective one of the most advantageous technological additions to the college's operation has been the introduction of BannerWeb, a component of the college Web site that allows students to register for courses and access curricular details on-line. "I remember standing out in the cold waiting to register for classes back then," says Frank of her first year. Now registration and grade checks can be carried out with the simple click of a mouse. It's no secret that technology, in its many forms throughout all levels and institutions of society, has advanced exponentially during the past four to five years, changing the way many Americans' lives are organized. Sweeping technological changes have deeply penetrated the country's educational network as well, transforming the way information is imparted to students. Telephone answering machines and voice mail are heavily relied on for making appointments and leaving messages. E-mail communication in numerous cases has usurped telephone and face-to-face contact.
Assistant Professor of Art Dana Leibsohn displays digitized images in her art history class, American Indian Art and Architecture. Woven into Smith's curriculum is a menu of classes that focus or depend on technology. Smith's art department broke new ground three years ago when, aided by a sizable Mellon Foundation grant, it embarked on a project to digitize tens of thousands of the most frequently used images in its collection of fine art and post it on-line for student use. Professor of Education and Child Study Alan Rudnitsky introduced a course titled "Information Technology and Learning" a few years ago to teach undergraduates in education how to responsibly impart computer and Internet technology to their future elementary and secondary students. In the sciences, myriad forms of technology have been in use for many years at Smith, and the college set a precedent in women's higher education when last fall it inaugurated the first engineering department at a women's liberal arts college. And the titles of courses throughout the college curriculum reflect a concentration on technology, such as "Music and Technology," "Dance and Technology," "Design With Computers" and "The Technology of Reading and Writing," taught by Professor of English Language and Literature Douglas Patey. But even professors who don't explicitly target technology in their courses often rely on it to aid the educational process, either by using e-mail to communicate with students, creating a class-specific Web page, or giving presentations using software like PowerPoint or Excel. More than a hundred classes on campus use a course-organizing program called CourseInfo to compile pertinent Internet links, data, class lists, and announcements and comments by students and the instructor, all within one easily navigable program. When one talks of technology in the classroom, it's usually the computer and its seemingly limitless range of uses that is meant, says Rudnitsky. "Arguably, the computer is the most powerful tool we have in our culture," he says. "But it's essential that we use it so that the tool fades into the background" and remains only as a means to support the higher purpose of education. Toward that end, Smith's institutional approach to the use of computers and other technologies in the classroom has been decidedly deliberate, says Associate Professor of Economics Charles Staelin, who will begin a three-year post as the college's dean for academic development on July 1. "Smith takes a conservative approach to using technology," says Staelin, "and wisely so. I think you really have to be careful to use technology only where it adds to the education-not where it detracts from it." Staelin says that technology can enhance the eduational process in remarkable new ways, such as providing wider access to resources for students, promoting interaction between classmates and their instructors, and viewing and manipulating information in ways not previously possible. "It allows students to visualize in ways they would otherwise not be able to visualize," he says. For example, economic models can be accessed on screen and viewed by students in several dimensions and permutations, while very quickly demonstrating various outcomes when different parameters are entered, says Staelin. "I think it dramatically changes the way a class runs," he says. Particularly in the teaching of languages, Staelin says, new innovations have affected how courses are managed. Now instead of spending valuable time on having students memorize verbs and tenses, language instructors can dedicate class time to speaking and conceptualizing in the language they're teaching. Because of the wide availability of computers and the Internet, those studying languages can use their own time on-line mastering the technical aspects of a language, watching on-line videos, taking practice quizzes, and interacting via computerized conversations. "What we see happening is a change in the pedagogy of teaching because we can do things that we haven't been able to do before," says Robert Davis, director of Educational Technology Services. Through multimedia applications, including on-line video, CD-ROMs filled with technical and research information, and interactive language software, students have more opportunities than ever to immerse themselves in a language and culture foreign to them. "Technology broadens class interaction," says Davis. "It all becomes more than just a dialogue" between instructor and student. CourseInfo, a class management program
produced by Blackboard Inc., a higher education software and
Internet company headquartered in Washington, D.C., has become
the most popular of the information technology tools being used
this year by Smith faculty members. The program, available to
instructors on a pilot basis, allows users to easily create and
maintain course Web sites without learning HTML or other Internet
programming languages. But perhaps more important, CourseInfo
enables faculty members to incorporate a range of Web resources
into their classes. They can set up class-wide Web chats, for
example, on topics pertinent to the course, send messages and
announcements to students, and tutor students on-line. In addition,
instructors can track students using CourseInfo's many assessment
tools. The introduction to CourseInfo has been so successful
that the college will likely renew its license next year and
publicly announce its availability for fall semester, says Project
Manager Linda Ahern.
As a student navigates her
way through the CourseInfo Web site in Bass Hall's Faculty Resource
Center, she is assisted by Director of Educational Software and
Technology Services Robert Davis and CourseInfo Manager Linda
Ahern. Still Tried and True, Human Interaction Despite all the enormous advantages that computers and other technologies offer in educating today's students, Staelin emphasizes that they will never effectively replace the most powerful medium of communication: face-to-face interaction. "Nothing has replaced sitting and talking one-on-one with a student in my office," he says. However, the availability of e-mail, Staelin guesses, has probably prompted more of his students to contact him individually than they might have using the telephone. Because of the seeming anonymity of e-mail, Staelin says students are more likely to come forth with questions via that medium. Students who study late into the night can e-mail a question without disturbing their instructors at unreasonable hours. More contact with his students means increased opportunities to get information across, Staelin says. Patey agrees that in-person contact, when available, will always outrank electronic communication. Despite all the impressive technological inventions of the past 50 years, when it comes to imparting information and teaching concepts to students, the tried and true methods are still most effective, he says. "It's amazing-you go in classrooms, what you see is desks and chairs," says Patey. "There's something about human contact that doesn't want to go away." Furthermore, Patey says, computers will probably never become the sole resource for reading materials that some technology pundits predict. "I really don't see computers replacing paper books anytime soon," he says. "People don't like to read long texts on screen." Patey points out that, like the computer, many important technological innovations have had their day-until something else came along. In 1870 the typewriter "was a wonderful thing," he says. Automated metal typesetters were considered the printing panacea of their day, until photographic printing came along in the 1940s. For that matter, says Patey, the ancient scroll was an exalted form of record-keeping and communication until the invention of the hand-produced book in the first century A.D. Today is the computer's day. And in the broad arena of education, its impact is undeniably altering the processing, memorizing and conceptualizing of an ever-growing palette of information. If in senior Sara Frank's first year the use of technology in the Smith classroom was a far cry from what it is today, what might a classroom at the college look like by the time Alanna Morris '03 graduates? 
Computer technology is useful in such creative arenas as music and dance composition. Associate Professor of Dance Rodger Blum (above) discusses with a dance student a performance choreography that has been initially designed on the computer. Several innovations seem just around the corner. Distance learning, the modern catchphrase that describes attending classes without ever having to leave your house, via computer monitors or interactive television, is getting a close assessment from a Five College committee that aims to install facilities for this in the area. There's a student initiative on campus to obtain a Web-accessible computer for every Smith undergraduate. By Morris' senior year the computer of choice may fit in one's palm or be mounted on a wristband and be mostly voice-operated. And, of course, the speed and efficiency of software will continue to develop while the size of hardware continues to shrink. Morris, a biology major, says that in her field activities like gene sequencing and modeling of organic molecules have been performed on computers for years. "Everything we do in biology is somehow computerized," she says. "It's great to walk into a computer lab at Smith and have tons of different kinds of programs to work with." But by the time she's a senior, Morris says, it's anybody's guess as to what kinds of technologies will be prevalent in education. Still, despite all the technologies of the present and those yet to come, within the walls of every classroom, as Patey says, we're likely to continue seeing desks, chairs and whiteboards. And there's one other ingredient in education that all the sophisticated technology in the world will never replace: students and instructors-people. |
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