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Can these stones live? Computing and the classroom

By Teresa Leo

Today computing technology and network connections are recognized as important resources in research and scholarship. Scholars can share information with one another electronically via e-mail, listservs, discussion groups, and bulletin boards, and can tap into thousands of databases of source material for their research. At Penn, humanities faculty are extending their use of computing technology and networking to the classroom, bringing these resources together with traditional teaching and research methods to provide richer learning experiences for their students. This article presents just some of the ways Penn humanities faculty are using computing technology and network resources in their classes.

Augustine over the Internet

His 10 Penn graduate students are joined by more than 350 off-site subscribers, who signed up for the course after seeing an announcement posted to Internet discussion groups in areas related to the course's topic. Course material is posted to Penn's CCAT (Center for Computer Analysis of Texts) Gopher, including the course syllabus, selected text, rules of network etiquette, O'Donnell's biography, and a bibliography of source material. The class meets once a week, and after that session one student writes a digest of the class discussion that O'Donnell posts to the CCAT Gopher. Also posted to the Gopher are oral reports from members of the class, and whole or abridged versions of guest lectures. Off-site subscribers are encouraged to post papers on topics relevant to the class.

Though the formal seminar session takes place on Monday afternoons, further discussion occurs throughout the week via the class listserv. O'Donnell also hopes to attempt a network MOO (multi-user dungeon object-oriented) session during the semester, in which users would log on simultaneously to a virtual seminar room and engage in real-time discussion over the network. In the MOO session, individuals could take on a persona, perhaps even that of Augustine himself. The ability to take on a persona in a MOO session is thought to encourage freer, more open discussions.

O'Donnell opened the course to the Internet community so his Penn students would benefit from the larger group and have the opportunity to collaborate with scholars from around the world. "Contact with the world," according to O'Donnell, "allows students to connect with the best sources for information. Faculty then become more like mentors, tutors, or spin doctors for the kinds of information access their students have. This allows faculty to play a more interactive role with their students."

Shakespeare at a glance

Students in Dr. Phyllis Rackin's General Honors Shakespeare classes use the CCAT Gopher to search for all occurrences of a significant word or word cluster in a play or group of plays. In performance-oriented courses, where students are acting out scenes from particular plays, they use the Shakespeare database to do word searches on their characters' names. A search reveals every speech in the play made by a particular character and every place in the play where anyone addresses or refers to that character by name. Students also communicate with Rackin and each other via the courses' listservs, which allow for more teacher-student interaction and discussion.

Although Rackin would prefer a more powerful search tool combined with the authoritative Riverside edition of Shakespeare, "using the CCAT Gopher introduces students to the possibilities and resources available on the Internet. The point of the assignments is to get students familiar with the Internet early on so that later in the semester, they will want to use it on their own." Using online resources then, becomes an adjunct to traditional research methods, and students learn valuable skills that allow them to take advantage of all the Internet has to offer.

Multimedia box office

The classroom was conceived by Saper, who contributed to its design along with the University-wide Classroom Committee and Dr. John Abercrombie, Senior Director of Educational Technology Services in SAS Computing. The classroom was constructed in the summer of 1993 and was designed to accommodate specific film studies needs, ranging from a variable lighting scheme to equipment that would allow the instructor to jump to specific points in a film nonsequentially. Located in Williams Hall 103-105, the film studies classroom is equipped with a movie screen, a projector in a projection room, monitors along the classroom walls, and speakers. The projector is linked to both an IBM PS/2 90 and a Macintosh II computer. It is also linked to a stack of equipment, which includes VCRs, a tape deck, and a CD player. This equipment can be run either by remote control or by computer.

Although Saper is using the classroom's equipment to its fullest, he wants to take the technology one step further. He is working with Dr. Ralph Ginsberg, Professor of Regional Science, to create computer files that integrate information sources such as video, sound, graphics, and text into a multimedia format, which Saper eventually plans to use as course lectures. Clip Maker software is used to capture and digitize information from laser disks and video tape, and Action presentation software is used to integrate the various information sources. The goal is to retrieve these multimedia, gigabyte-size files from a server via one of the classroom's Ethernet-connected computers, and then display them on the movie screen using the computer-projector linkup.

"Multimedia format," according to Saper, "allows one to make an explicit reference to the movement of an image, to put two images together in a novel way to make a particular point, and to combine visual information with other media that can set a cultural context for the visual information. This both takes away the forced linearity of a film and allows students to see and analyze all the components that make up visual text."

The world at your fingertips

The course is intended to prepare junior-year English majors to write honor theses in the department the next year. English considered the needs of his students, who study everything from medieval to contemporary literature and culture, and realized that they would benefit in their research from the enormous number of resources available on the Internet.

The class meets in the MMETS (Multimedia and Educational Technology Services) classroom of David Rittenhouse Laboratory. All 12 students have Ethernet-connected Macintosh SE 30 computers on their desks, and accounts on Penn's CCAT computer. English's computer is hooked up to a projector, which allows him to demonstrate tasks that students then try on their machines. Online resources students use include the CCAT Gopher, World-Wide Web, discussion groups, bulletin boards, and news groups. The class also communicates via a listserv, which extends the boundaries of class discussion to include after-hours electronic exchange and conferencing.

Assignments are structured to allow students to practice basic and advanced research skills, both in the University libraries using traditional research methods, and online via the Internet. English believes that "there are benefits to both types of research and that it is important to do both. So while students learn to use the Library's rare book room, the card catalogue, the print-version MLA Bibliography, handbooks of style, and dictionaries of literary terms, they also learn to take advantage of all the Internet has to offer." The class discusses the advantages and disadvantages of both methods, and by the end of the term, students are prepared to do comprehensive research assignments.

A walk in the ancient Near East

The simulation focuses on Assurnasirpal's throne room, where eight- feet high elaborately carved stone slabs line the walls of the long, narrow room. These slabs preserve elaborate narrative depictions of the victories and accomplishments of the Assyrian king. The palace itself was excavated in the 1850s, and most of the slabs now reside in the British Museum (the University Museum also has one). To create the simulation, the palace building was reconstructed electronically, then line drawings of the throne room's reliefs were added and put in place on the walls.

Under the direction of Pittman, Francine Jaskiewicz, an art history major, took the palace's plan and plotted it point by point on a grid using AutoCad software. Next she scanned in line drawings of the reliefs and then pasted them on the walls electronically with a program called 3-D Studio. The three-minute simulation, which includes 4,000 different views, takes up roughly 100 Mbytes of storage space on an IBM 486 machine.

The simulation begins with the user "flying through" the palace door, other rooms, and the door to the throne room, stopping to view the throne base. Then the user turns to view the reliefs and begins a slow walk along the wall, with the ability to move closer to the reliefs. There is not enough storage capacity at present to go on a random walk. Once there is enough storage space, the goal is to allow users to go into the space and have any experience they want.

Pittman intends to use the simulation in her Art History 101 survey course and seminars on the ancient Near East. According to Pittman, the virtual walk "allows us to experience these lost monuments in a way that is not possible in any other format. When studying and comprehending works of art in an architectural context, art that is planned or organized in a particular space and setting, there is nothing like being in that space. Simulations like this one come closer than any still or print medium to replicating the experience."

Sidebar: Three ways to access the CCAT Gopher

• From the annex: prompt, type telnet gopher.upenn.edu, select "Gopher Servers at Penn," and then select "Center for Computer Analysis of Texts (ccat.sas)."
• From a Gopher client, point to ccat.sas.upenn.edu (port 70)
• From a WWW client, use the URL: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu