From the electronic classroom

Academe, Sep/Oct 1999 by Friedheim, William, Jaffee, David

It's not easy to use the new media, but doing so does pay off pedagogically. Two history professors report on their experiences.

IN JUST ONE DECADE, THE INTERNET and CD-ROMs have converted unimaginable amounts of information into millions of binary digits and then back again into text, sound, and images almost instantaneously accessible to computer users around the world. Still, many academics are skeptical, associating the speed, audio buzz, and graphical interface of computer software with frivolous games rather than serious intellectual work. We see it otherwise. New media are not mere toys peripheral to education; instead, they offer a different way of conceptualizing the presentation of data and, ultimately, of analysis itself.

In small but sometimes profound ways, these media have changed the architecture of the classroom. Powerful search engines enable students to access voluminous amounts of data. The Web and CD-ROMs provide entree to galleries of images and sounds and to archives of scholarly data curated by diverse organizations such as museums, universities, the National Archives and Records Administration, and the Library of Congress. And electronic discussion extends classroom space, pushing dialogue into the hours beyond the actual scheduled class meeting and encouraging those sitting on the edges of a conversation to move closer to the front.

Student-Centered Learning

NEW MEDIA HAVE CHANGED THE CONtext for our own students' learning. We both teach at the City University of New York at colleges with modest, underfunded libraries that house few archival resources. Our students are mostly from the working poor-many of them are parents who must ration time and resources among family, work, and education. Given this reality, a simple piece of software like a CD or a Web browser puts students in the center of a vast store of multimedia and primary sources that suddenly open possibilities for intellectual discourse and connections across disciplines, geographic borders, and college classrooms.

But making these possibilities available is not easy. Assimilating new media into our classrooms revealed many of the assumptions buried in our practice, forcing us to rethink many of our views about teaching and learning. Implementation requires up-front planning that is as much pedagogical as it is technical and administrative: locating content; designing student exercises; and obtaining and organizing access to educational technology.

For us, having so many choices and tasks-and so little time to prepare or master the new technology-brought front and center the issue of what we wanted to achieve in our classrooms and what we wanted our students to learn. But we were left wondering whether the technology-or the pedagogical judgments it forced us to make-pushed us from teacher- to studentcentered learning. Either way, the new media eased our shift from a classroom in which a solitary text or faculty voice presents a particular story and set of materials to one in which students share in creating meaning, often constructing multiple, openended stories with the wealth of print and digital materials now available.

Integrating new media into the classroom is hard work. Academia is print-centered; access to computers for low-income students like ours is at best problematic. And too many colleges lack the administrative infrastructure and institutional will required to make academic and electronic connections between the Internet, the liberal arts, and sound pedagogy. Moreover, the learning curve for the new media classroom is steep-particularly for that generation of faculty who did not grow up with computers. Our stories are typical in that it took us several semesters and a considerable investment in time to develop some of the basic pedagogical, computer, and managerial skills necessary to negotiate these difficult issues. In the process, we learned as much from our failures as from our successes.

What follows are narratives about the evolution of our newmedia classrooms. We both teach American history. But even though we focus on some matters that are unique to survey courses in American history, our experience has not been so different from that of faculty members in other disciplines struggling with the pedagogical and institutional politics of the newmedia classroom. Our purpose in this article is to demystify the technology and to shift the primary focus from it to pedagogy. We focus on the crucial intervention of the teacher in the classroom. When good pedagogy drives technology, electronic media become tools that stretch the boundaries of teaching and learning; they force teachers and students to rethink how they produce and consume knowledge.

Bill Friedheim

WHEN BILL FIRST INTRODUCED new media into his American history survey courses, most of his college's computer laboratories lacked an Internet connection. Quite fortuitously, however, the authors of the book he assigned, Who BuiltAmerica?-Volume Two, produced a smartly constructed CD-ROM version of the first four chapters of the text. On the CD-ROM, students can navigate easily from the text, a secondary source, to an impressive archive of primary sources in multimedia. The disk holds five thousand pages of text; seven hundred still images; sixty graphs, charts, and maps; four-and-a-half hours of audio (speeches, oral history, songs, and the like); and forty-five minutes of period film. Using these materials, the students can affirm, question, amplify, or reject their text's historical interpretation, or they can create their own narrative and interpretation.