Thursday, December 7, 2006

The text linked Academic Companion

Many of the preceding points follow more or less logically (though not always obviously) from reading current literature on computer environments. The seeds of an `INTRAnet' are at least implicit in the WWW home pages of many colleges and universities. What I have done is to take that common currency and package it in a specific (and I hope interesting) way.

This section is much more of an invention. It follows logically from a project undertaken by Tom Smith and me between 1979 and 1982, when microcomputers were more of a concept than a reality, and when Dickinson College's PDP computer had no graphic functions.

I wanted to tie the computer to photographic images in bound volumes, so I could direct the attention of students to specific aspects of the photos, offer comments, and ask the students to respond. The resulting system was crude by all contemporary standards. We fastened a book stand to the top of the old terminal we used. The assigned volume (or loose photo) was placed on the stand. Tom's software directed the student to a page number. Then, left-center-right arrows pointed to the approximate region of the photo I wanted them to observe, while spitting out the comment "low" "middle" or "high." Crude as this was, it worked well enough to try out with groups of students for a couple of semesters. It perished as an instructional tool because of the extrordinary efforts required to program the text and to coach numbers of people through a single slow and cranky terminal. Certain seeds from that experiment survived and inform the present project.

The use of printed books has not been threatened by the rise of computer technology, despite some prognostications to the contrary. All signs suggest that texts of one sort or another will remain the backbone of college instruction for many years. (As I am a `book person' I regard this situation as satisfying.) Another sign is less encouraging: faculty argue that current students are less comfortable dealing with printed texts than even their fairly recent predecessors. It is difficult to get students to do close readings, assess material, deconstruct it, call it what you will. The requisite native intelligence is there, but skills are not. How then to build a skill that is fundamental to academic success without turning over part of the curriculum to remedial pursuits? It would be nice to have some sort of tutorial system for this task, a tool to help the student confront critical passages in texts and to understand them. Such a system would be of greatest use in entry-level courses, and might not be offered for senior level courses.

In this most specific subsection of Inventing an INTRAnet, I will again identify a series of outcomes I wish to achieve, and not the steps to obtain them. In this case, however, Tom Smith and I are working one one method of achieving the desired results. Many alternatives are possible.