Dr. Steven Schoenherr
Department of History
University of San Diego
San Diego, California, USA
ses@acusd.edu
Remember how it used to be? Writing with chalk on the blackboard to spell "Massachusetts" for that boring history class; holding up an old issue of National Geographic to show where Africa was located; writing your lecture notes on a pad of yellow legal paper; spilling coffee late at night on that pile of term papers scribbled full of illegible red ink, hanging a clock on a wall to keep track of time during a test -- what wonderful memories!
Well, times have changed and the classroom has changed. A whole new group of tools has been placed in the hands of teachers to build that grand edifice we call knowledge. Like all new tools, they can be ignored and abused, or we can learn how to make them work better than the old tools. At the University of San Diego, I have made an effort over the last two years to learn these tools. [Schoenherr, 1996] I am convinced they can be effective instruments to achieve what Thomas Jefferson sought 200 years ago, a "general diffusion of knowledge" [Malone, 1981].
The first tool is the computer. Instead of keeping my Macintosh 6100 on my desk in the office, I have moved it to a portable cart and routinely wheel it into the classroom (which is fortunately nearby; for more distant locations, I borrow one of the school's Powerbook laptops). Jefferson used a laptop portable desk to write the Declaration of Independence, and a polygraph copying device to extend his ability to write [Bedini, 1984]. We can do the same today with the computer. One plug goes into the ethernet jack; another plug goes into the RGB video input, and in less than a minute my class is looking at my computer images projected through the same ceiling-mounted video projector that shows videotapes. But there is a crucial difference: I do not turn my class over to the videotape and become a passive spectator. Instead, the computer is my tool to interact with the class in a far more dynamic way than with a videotape. It combines into one box what used to be the standard tools of the blackboard, overhead, slide projector, mapstand, textbook, and even that old yardstick used to point at things on the screen. I have found a very useful little package called the Electronic Marker ($30 in the mail-order catalogs) that lets you use the mouse to highlight, point, check-off, underline, or draw lines on top of any other program running. No more yardstick. Instead, I become John Madden drawing lines on the instant football replay. Using the topographic maps created by Andrew Birrell, I am able to demonstrate a map of key geographic features important in the early American period of discovery and colonization. Using historical maps from the University of Texas Perry-Castenada collection, I am able to show the changing boundaries of the U.S. as it grew from 13 mostly seaboard colonies to a continental empire.
With the computer of today comes a second group of multimedia tools. These add sound and image to the traditional text handling potential of the computer. The PowerPC Macs have built-in 16-bit sound capability, allowing you to play audio-CD quality digital sound directly from RAM or disk. One of my first multimedia projects was to play a song by U2 from their Joshua Tree CD called "Where the Streets Have No Name" with pictures from U.S. History and from the Joshua Tree National Park to illustrate the lyrics.[Schoenherr, 1994] To play Franklin Roosevelt's Fireside Chat of Feb. 23, 1942, I used Adobe Premier to capture the audio track from some old open reel tape recordings of his speeches that I made at the Laguna Niguel National Archives from government archival recordings. I used Premier's razor blade tool to cut out the section I wanted to play in class, saved it as a Quicktime movie, and played it from my hard disk through the classroom amp and speakers. The Apple Quicktake 150 digital camera lets me take 16 high-resolution full-screen 24-bit color photos and upload them to the computer without the cost and delay of film developing. It has proven useful in photographing historic sites and buildings in southern California for use in my classes on the Mission Era, the Mexican War, the characteristics of Victorian architecture, and the impact of the opening of the Panama Canal in 1915. The Quicktake has its limitations: slow shutter speed, non-threaded fixed-aperture lens, frequent artifacts in the image, only average sharpness and clarity. For those occasions when quality is more important than speed and convenience, I use a standard 35mm camera and film to make slides and negatives. Until this summer, I sent this film to Kodak to be transferred to PhotoCD. The images came back digitized in 5 resolutions on a CD-size disc. An example of one of these PhotoCD images digitized from a 35mm Kodachrome slide at the normal resolution of 72 dpi for a 640x480 computer screen is sunrise in Joshua Tree National Park I copied these images from the PhotoCD to a Bernoulli removable hard disk, edited each with Photoshop and saved them as jpeg files. But this method was expensive, averaging $.80 per image, and slow, with a 7-10 day turnaround. Given the fact that I had been making an average of 2000 images per year for use in 280 class lectures that I give each year, this was too expensive. So last summer I used some grant funds to purchase a Polaroid SprintScan slide scanner. Now I can digitize 35mm slides or negative strips at the rate of 90 seconds per image and get a higher resolution than with the Quicktake camera. For quality, the Polaroid is best, as can be seen in the image of the historic Machado-Stuart adobe in San Diego that I scanned from a 35mm Ektachrome slide. For speed and convenience, the Quicktake is more useful, as can be seen in color snapshots of students.
The software for these classroom presentations is a third important tool. Most consumers today never use anything more on their computer than the word processor or the spreadsheet ( and of course the games). It was Visicalc and WordStar that launched the personal computer revolution in 1979 [Polsson 1996]. I have observed that many faculty with computers in their offices today use none of the software that is installed in the computer labs on campus. Yet it is software such as Photoshop and Infini-D that students learn when they take graphic arts classes. The student newspaper this year began to use Pagemaker for pre-press layout. A growing number of classes in the sciences and the business college require a working knowledge of the GIS software packages ArcView and ArcInfo. The PC software of today is powerful yet rarely used in the classroom. When I teach the American Civil War, I project outline notes of the Battle of Fredericksburg that I typed into Macromedia Director. I am able to talk and lecture and answer questions as the computer screen moves through the outline, just as a salesman would give his pitch with Microsoft Powerpoint or Adobe Persuasion. I can add additional "cast members" to my computer "score" in Director, such as maps, photos, music, and even Quicktime movies. Director is a nonlinear program that makes it a favorite authoring platform for CD-ROMs. By clicking on a variety of screen buttons, you can jump to a map or photo during the presentation of your outline notes, talk about the images, then click back to the notes. With at least a rudimentary knowledge of these programs, I can help students work on their own multimedia projects. I have been using Photoshop to scan pictures into a database of images that students can use. Each image is indexed with its http address into Filemaker Pro, the same software that I use to keep a record of class grades. I have found that practice makes perfect. Unless I sit down and use the software myself, I cannot help students learn how to use it.
A fourth tool is CD-ROM. These little discs of gold-coated plastic can hold 650 megabytes of data or 74 minutes of music, and are a true gold mine for the history teacher [Herther 1995]. The textbook from McGraw Hill that I use in my introductory American History class is also included in a CD-ROM Encyclopedia of American History published by Comptons [Brinkley 1995]. My students have the option of buying either the hardcopy or computer version, and for the same money, they get a great deal more information on the CD-ROM than in the book. I can put the disc in my Mac 6100, press the command-return keys to switch on the DOS card to run the Windows version of the disc, and project documents, maps, songs, and movies related to the topic we happen to be studying at the time. On my home page I keep a list of recommended titles for purchase by students through the university bookstore or through catalog dealers such as Educorp [Schoenherr 1995]. CD-ROMs can be made as well as played. I use a Phillips CD-ROM recorder to make my own discs for backup and for presentations. Like the tape recorder and the VCR, the recordable CD-ROM is another extension of our multiple senses. I agree with Marshall McLuhan that it is a "make-happen" medium more than a "make-aware" medium, even at a slow double-speed 150 millisecond transfer rate [McLuhan 1964]. But its random-access character and enormous storage capability give the teacher great flexibility in arranging a class presentation. The CD-ROM on the history of Old Town San Diego that I am producing with Dr. Iris Engstrand will hold books, articles, photos, maps, and 3D models of the evolution of the town over 7 decades from 1800 to 1870 [Schoenherr and Engstrand 1995].
A fifth tool is e-mail. I require all students to open an account on the university SPARC computer known as PWA with their own username and password. This account is free and available to all registered full-time students. This gives them the ability to send and receive e-mail, read newsgroups and discussion lists, connect to the Internet with gopher or ftp or WWW browser, and publish to their own Web pages. Statistics still show that e-mail generates a large amount of traffic on the Internet and I have found this to be true with college students as well [Internet Domain Survey 1996]. Only 10% of a class will have the courage or energy to tackle Web pages, but 75% will make frequent and regular use of e-mail. These statistics are based on 468 students enrolled in my 14 classes taught in 1994 and 1995. The University of San Diego total enrollment as of Feb. 15, 1996, was 6430 graduate and undergraduate students, and PWA held 4627 student computer accounts. If an additional 500 faculty and 385 administrative accounts are included, the volume of e-mail in February averaged 17,746 messages per day on PWA [Spear 1996]. I require regular e-mail assignments from all students, asking them to send me book reports, reading assignments, extra credit reports, class journal commentaries, and even long research papers in electronic form rather than on paper. No more piles of term papers on the office floor. Using Eudora Pro I can create a variety of mailboxes to filter, sort and file these incoming e-mail assignments. Using the Reply feature I can instantly send my comments and grades back to the students. I can send to students book and article references that I copy and paste from online library catalogs such as the USD Sally catalog and the Melvyl catalog of the University of California system. I have found that e-mail allows me to better keep track of my students and to communicate more efficiently with them. This does not replace personal contact in the office, or in the classroom, or on the walkways of the campus. In fact, the inquiries and comments started by e-mail usually result in more personal contact than if e-mail were not used at all.
The sixth tool is the World Wide Web. Although it is fast-growing as a medium of entertainment and commerce on the Internet, I have used it to replace that dreaded pile of term papers. Students are given the opportunity during the semester to write a traditional paper or to write HTML pages. They can use their own computers or use one of the several Mac or Windows or UNIX computer labs available on campus. The brand of platform no longer matters. One great advantage of the Web is that it has become a uniform standard world-wide. Learning to write HTML tags is much easier than learning COBOL or C++. And it goes more quickly when students are shown how to do it rather than assigned a book to read about it. I bring the computer into the class room and spend one class showing them how to write a simple page. I then schedule sessions outside class in the computer lab to guide them through the creation of a Web page step by step. I use the several excellent tutorials online from NCSA [NCSA 1996] and USD's Department of Academic Computing [Stratton 1996]. I also wrote a short tutorial for my classes (and accessible from my home page) tailored to USD's network arrangement. Again, it is important to show how it is done rather than just read or talk about it. Concepts such as "hypertext" and "relative links" are best learned watching them get made on a computer screen and seeing the result immediately with the Netscape browser. In the past year, I have witnessed freshmen with little computer knowledge learn in a few days to write basic Web pages and improve them over a few weeks with pictures, links, and even designer graphics (e.g., Davina Hoyt's Tuskegee Airmen page before and after). They are excited and motivated because the process is creative as well as intellectual. They are making something rather than only writing something. This holds true for teachers as well as students. Linda Swanson has compilied a list of many different uses of the Web made by teachers and students at all grade levels in several different countries [Swanson 1996]. I believe every academic department in colleges should have a department page with information useful to students taking classes in that department. They can find information about professors, classes, research projects, social activities. At USD we even put on the History home page pictures of the Phi Alpha Theta meetings, lectures, and softball games [USD History Department 1996]. I have learned to write HTML to create pages for my classes and lectures on a daily basis, and to use Netscape as a presentation mechanism in the classroom. I can type a set of lecture notes in Microsoft Word, save them as a text file, drag and drop this file onto HTML Markup 2.0 from Scott Kleper to automatically turn it into a Web page, edit the page with a very simple HTML editor from Stan Stanier in England called High Tea (available from the MIT Info-Mac archive), add links to pictures and sounds, and run the page during the class with a portable computer. An example of these notes-turned-web-pages can be found in the World War II Timeline. This Timeline has been evolving since it was started in the summer of 1995, with new pictures and documents and timeline pages continually being added and modified. Students each semester have added pages of their own. One great advantage of the Web is its ability to change. While this can also be a source of confusion, I find it to be an inspiration to make things always a little bit better.
Finally, I want to end on the note that computers can do simple things in the classroom as well as big ones. When I give an exam, I run a little Mac shareware program written by Victor Franco called O'Clock 1.1.0, available from the Info-Mac archives. It shows a big round clock dial on the screen, easily visible to the class and a reminder of the exam's time limit. I don't have to write the time on the board, or answer constant requests for the time. I let the computer do it for me. By the way, O'Clock has been running in the background and I notice that my time is up.
References:
[Schoenherr, 1996] Schoenherr, Steven (1996). Home Page.
[Malone, 1981] Malone, Dumas (1981). The Sage of Monticello. Boston: Little, Brown, 233.
[Bedini, 1984] Bedini, Silvio A. (1984). Thomas Jefferson and His Copying Machines. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
[Schoenherr, 1994] Schoenherr, Steven (1994). Streets.
[Polsson 1996] Polsson, Ken (1996). Chronology of Events in the History of Microcomputers.
[Herther 1995] Herther, Nancy (1995). "CD-ROM at Ten Years: The Technology and the Industry Mature" Online 19 (March/April 1995), 86-93.
[Brinkley 1995] Brinkley, Allen (1995). American History, A Survey. New York: McGraw Hill, in the CD-ROM Encyclopedia of American History. New York: Compton.
[Rosensweig 1995] Rosensweig, Roy (1995)."'So, What's Next for Clio?' CD-ROM and Historians", Journal of American History 81 (March 1995) 1621-1640
[Schoenherr 1995] Schoenherr, Steven (1995). Recommended CD-ROMs.
[McLuhan 1964] McLuhan, Marshall (1964). Understanding Media. New York, McGraw-Hill.
[Schoenherr and Engstrand 1995] Schoenherr, Steven and Engstrand, Iris (1995). Old Town San Diego Interactive.
[Internet Domain Survey 1996] Internet Domain Survey (1996).
[Spear 1996] Spear, Steve (1996). ³Electronic Mail Traffic Chart.²; Academic Computing Access 11 (1).
[NCSA 1996] NCSA (1996). A Beginner's Guide to HTML.
[Stratton 1996] Stratton, Jerry (1996). A Guide to Writing on the Web.
[Swanson 1996] Swanson, Linda (1996). Using the Multimedia Tools of the Internet for Teaching History in K-12 Schools.
[USD History Department 1996] USD History Department Home Page (1996).
