Many students have watched a professor spend 10 minutes trying to figure out why a PowerPoint presentation isn’t showing up on the classroom projector screen or trying to operate other classroom technology. These faculty members do not have to struggle on their own — for instructors unfamiliar or uncomfortable with computers, the Teaching Effectiveness Program and the Center for Educational Technology host workshops that help faculty effectively employ different types of technology.
The first workshop, which began before fall term, included 62 faculty members and consisted of four workshops and a fellowship program. On Tuesday, the two programs hosted a seminar allowing University faculty who have attended previous workshops to provide feedback of how technology works in the classroom.
“We’re going out of our area of comfort and complacency by embracing technologies, but we’re only doing it if it’s more effective, and not just for the sake of using technology,” Terri Warpinski, vice provost for Academic
Affairs, said.
Part of the seminar showed faculty how to effectively use software programs and Internet applications such as Blackboard that appeal to students and how to allow greater access and interaction with students in and out of the classroom.
Some of the improvements faculty members want to address in the next year are options that give students wider access to media as classroom materials. This may transform the role of teacher or faculty members to that of a librarian who presents material and helps students wade through it to find the information relevant to a class.
Associate professor emeritus William Rockett is utilizing digitally scanned English literature ranging from 1473 to 1700 in the University’s library to interactively involve students in classes such as Shakespeare and Early Tudor England, a research-oriented course.
It is part of a program called Early English Books Online, which has catalogued more than 100,000 books, ballads, pamphlets and advertisements from Great Britain or other locations that are now available to students. Further goals for the project are to include more English publications and allow keyword search referencing ability so students can find material more easily.
“You can select a page from a 16th-century Shakespeare and a 20th-century page and see the differences in type,” Rockett said. “I’m happy to get students to write term papers (for Early Tudor England) on subjects during 1515 to 1535. For students, this will accompany and sharpen their research.”
The library’s cache of books is also a great benefit to the faculty.
“Before we had it, the only way we could access the books was to travel and go to special collections in libraries all over the world, like London and Oxford,” Rockett said. “Now we can see the texts in our office. It allows you to see how remarkable it really is.”
One professor who is pushing technology to the brink in the classroom is Jim Tice, an associate professor of architecture. Tice has engineered a comprehensive map of Notti, Rome, which contains 2,300 building entries at this point in its development. The map was created in part by graduate student Eric Steiner, who works for the InfoGraphics lab at the Department of Geography. Digitally remastering the map, through the help of Mark Bremmenan, has allowed the map to have information through the entries, but it also gives the map — known as “The Holy Grail of Architecture,” Tice said — better accessibility than its 6-by-7-foot paper copy.
“The map gives a Pompeii-like view of the city, but it also shows the lives of everyday people in Rome at that time,” Tice said. “It has been used in lecture classes and seminars I teach.”
The map project began six years ago and has grown in detail ever since. Now as the map becomes more comprehensive, it’s nearing a public release in April that everyone can access on the Department of Architecture’s Web site.
The seminar also reintroduced the human element in technology education — that is, the infrastructure of services among faculty members, what is most effective to student learning and what is simply a
flashy distraction.
TEP, along with CET, has introduced improvements for faculty to enhance presentation and the information in and out of the classroom. Many faculty members point to the University’s online “course management system” Blackboard as a primary improvement for faculty-student communication.
Kassia Dellabough was one of the first two professors to embrace Blackboard in 1997 for her class Art and Human Values — before this term the class was taught in a classroom but has since gone completely online. She uses the system to share audio samples, images important to the class curriculum and video clips.
“Using Blackboard and PowerPoint is crucial, otherwise it would be just sending e-mails to each other,” Dellabough said. “It’s been a process of evangelizing (Blackboard) to our faculty.”
Dellabough said she makes up for the lack of face-to-face communication by utilizing the discussion boards to communicate with her students on any given subject.
“I think part of it is a generational thing,” Dellabough said. “For the faculty over our 40s, we first started using computers in our mid-20s. For me, I was lucky that I was interested in computers ever since.”
To help faculty members that are having difficulty with technology, TEP Director Georgeanne Cooper said she will employ student assistants if funding allows. The assistants would help any professor having technical difficulty and stay throughout the class to ensure technological presentations run smoothly.
“I think faculty must be self-sufficient and be realistic about it without expecting a magic genie to save any problems,” Cooper said.

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