26 July - 1 August 1997
Clayton Miles Lehmann
The sponsors of the annual Syllabus conference, Syllabus Press and Sonoma State University, bill it as the premier conference on the use of technology in the classroom. This year's conference had about 1500 registrants from around the world. They included professors, students, information specialists, representatives of software and hardware companies, academic administrators, and representatives of publishers. Those attending exchanged information about the World Wide Web and learning, technology payback in education, faculty-student communications, distance-learning, and each other's educational projects. The fora for communication included hands-on labs and workshops ranging from two hours to a full day, demonstrations by vendors of their products, two-hour presentations about particular issues or solutions, half-hour to one-hour case studies, plenary sessions, exhibits, and conversation at meals and evening receptions.
In this report I shall describe my particular navigation
through a program full of options. Highlights of the program are
available at Syllabus's
web site, and I have a copy of the program with abstracts for
loan. I also have a copy of the proceedings on disk for loan;
please contact me. The
proceedings include a minority of the presentations; mine and I
presume others are unaccountably missing. But you can read my
presentation at http:www.usd.edu/honors/hwb_syl.htm.
Two days of full-day workshops on the educational use of the Web
and
multimedia preceded and followed the conference. I
attended two days of multimedia workshops following the
conference. Evenings and Wednesday afternoon were free and I used
this time to tour beautiful Sonoma county and sample the fruits
of its vineyards.
I attended both plenary sessions. Charles M Geschke, president of Adobe Systems, Inc, gave a history of the progress of publishing from classical books (he was trained as a classicist) to the Gutenburg press to desktop publishing and Internet publishing. He insisted that communication, critical thought, and expressive power are essential to success in the high-tech future and called on educators to maintain the curriculum in the liberal arts.
Carlos Cruz, President of the Virtual University, ITESM-Mexico, told about the seven years of experiments, successes, and failures he has experienced in bringing education to Mexico's hinterland and forging Internet alliances with universities throughout the Americas.
The panel of advisors to Syllabus, made up of academics, administrators, and information specialists, responded to the speakers, who also faced vigorous questioning from the audience. To repeated questions about the cost of introducing technology in the curriculum, given a limited pie of resources for the slicing, the speakers and panelists spoke of taking only a thin slice from the old pie and then adding a new one out of grants. To publishers threatened by the expansion of Internet-publishing, Geschke pointed out that they needed to move themselves into this arena more vigorously and recognize the enormous savings in capital investment (workstations and ISDN lines not warehouse-sized presses and forests of paper). To questions about the diversion of faculty energies toward learning the technology and away from teaching and research the administrators insisted that faculty must learn it just as they have ad to come up to speed on any new and widely adopted tool (electron microscopes came up here), and that they rewarded faculty who took chances as long as they were as serious about those chances and disseminating results as they were about their research. Finally, to questions about bureaucratic management of courses and degree programs and the granting of degrees, Cruz said that he had worked out various ad hoc arrangements with universities and governments throughout Latin America. (His Virtual University does grant undergraduate and graduate degrees.)
Case studies featuring the application of technology in specific settings were programmed Monday and Tuesday afternoon. On Monday I attended on about students writing for the Web. Unfortunately, the two presenters had understood that they had an hour each when in fact they had to share the hour. The resulting improvised presentations were nearly without value. But I subsequently profited from conversations with one of them, John Laroe, and enjoyed visiting his students' site, An American Quilt. My own paper was a case study programmed Tuesday afternoon (see The House the West Built).
I attended hour-long vendor presentations by Adobe and Microsoft. These were surveys of certain of their programs, which I already knew pretty well, so I found little of value in them. Other venders included Apple, Asymetrix, Compaq, Daedalus, Lotus, Macromedia, Quark, and Silicon Graphics. The program included hands-on workshops where vendors presented their products in computer labs where participants could dabble with them for two hours. I did not take time for these.
Most valuable were the morning sessions. Monday morning I attended the presentation on Faculty/Student Communications: The Wake Forest University Template by David Brown, the provost. Wake Forest has a Lotus Notes-based template that sets up an electronic file cabinet for everyone and every organization on campus. Each cabinet stores files in one of ten standard drawers with various levels of access. They are used for file transfer, e-mail, chat and conferences, announcements, editing papers, etc. Brown is supposed to send me a copy of the template, which is available for free public distribution.
Tuesday morning I attended an excellent session by a group from the Center for Instructional Technologies at the University of Texas at Austin. They described a course on multimedia production in which students individually or in groups work on a project with a professor in order to produce a prototypical multimedia presentation. One the students gave her perspective on this very successful course. The teachers showed us a few of these impressive projects, including one that featured a 3-D model of an alligator's skull that could be rotated and sliced up for sectional viewing. One of the projects is growing into a commercial mapping product.
Wednesday morning I attended another session on collaborative learning at Southern Methodist University where the Center for Media and Instructional Technology helps faculty compare and evaluate appropriate tools. One professor used FirstClass to provide a uniform interface for himself and his students to communicate via e-mail, chat, file exchange, etc. Another professor presented evidence for the effect of adopting computer technology on student performance and found a positive correlation between the amount of time spent at a computer and a student's grade.
I spent some time in the Exhibit Hall, picked up a lot of pens, buttons, caps, and other giveaways, and a little bit of useful information. Compac and Toshiba demonstrated their latest machines. Adobe and Epson also had a large presence. There were several companies specializing in data projectors.
After the conference I attended the intermediate and advanced workshops on multimedia in education. I was a little disappointed because these two workshops turned out to be oriented heavily to the use of a particular program, Toolbook II Instructor by Asymetrix, which is now being replaced for the sorts of applications we would use by Toolbook Assistant. Of course much of what I learned would be transferable to Assistant or to other multimedia authoring programs. And these workshops could be valuable to those unfamiliar with using scanners, digital cameras, and digital capture to acquire graphics, with programs that manipulate graphics, and with programs used to integrate text with graphics, animation, video, and sound within a multimedia presentation.
This is a good, useful conference in a lovely setting. I really enjoyed being there for a few days at the end of August, and hope to go again. I hope some of the faculty and staff at US will go, too, to learn about what people in universities throughout the world are doing with educational technology. If what I have written here whets interest in attending the next Syllabus, I am eager to provide further information. Syllabus magazine is free; request a subscription from Syllabus Press.