Sasha Welsh '99 powers up an iMac in the Beardsley Hall public computing area and starts her program. Seven tiny, rainbow-colored "human" figures come from all directions on the monitor, meeting in the middle of the screen, where they begin to dance to Shostakovich's Quartet No. 8. The dancers glide across the cyberstage like ice-skaters; they perform somersaults and arabesques, pirouettes and grand jetés, and, as the music rises to its climax, defy gravity and begin to float through the air.
"They each have their own personality," Welsh says of her virtual dancers. "This isn't choreography for people, but as a choreographer, I find it fun to play with the figures. Using the computer, I have the opportunity to have my 'dancers' do three movements a second, slide across the floor, and even fly."
Welsh's performance piece, titled "Blue Moon Event," debuted as part of the dance and art major's senior gallery show in mid-April. A week later, the multihued figures took to the main stage of the Lang Performing Arts Center when the dance was projected onto a screen at the spring dance concert.
The LifeForms software with which Welsh choreographed her work was developed to allow professional choreographers to sketch out numbers before they begin rehearsal with live dancers. It also serves as a notation system that makes it easier to preserve and disseminate choreography, says Sharon Friedler, professor and director of dance.
Friedler first tested the software during its development stages in the late 1980s, and students in her 1991 dance composition course were the first college students in the country to use the groundbreaking program, which is now a routine part of some choreography classes. "LifeForms is a really wonderful way to teach the basics of choreography. It enables young choreographers to experiment with movement without the pressure of dancers waiting for them. It also makes rehearsal time more productive," Friedler explains.
Computer technology holds the promise of transforming academic life in ways small and large. As student artist Welsh says, "Technology has become essential, no matter what field you're in."
Welsh and her computer-savvy peers share a passion for technology nourished by a childhood in which terms like byte, mouse, e-mail, RAM, and the Web have been a part of everyday vocabulary. The technology that can stymie or frighten their elders is simply a part of life for today's college students.
On a typical Monday morning in midsemester, more than 20 students are using the computers in the Beards- ley public computer center. Most use them as word processors. Others compose e-mail, read online course-related materials, or use a Web browser for research.
Access to the Web opens up a world of new research possibilities to undergraduates, making foreign and domestic newspapers as well as primary documents such as government reports easily retrievable. Each year, more professors are posting syllabi, homework, library reserve materials, and class notes on course Web pages.
As a senior on the job-interview circuit, Ani Hsieh is finding out how essential her computer skills are in the work world. Hsieh's computer knowledge was limited to Windows 3.1 when she was an incoming freshman. After four years of work in data analysis and data acquisition, this engineering and economics double major thinks she can come up to speed quickly on most any software. "Every interviewer asks about computer skills," she says. "You may not be a computer programmer, but you still need to know how to use software, to analyze information and calculations done on computers, and to be comfortable with a computer in general."
But computers alone would not have so tranformed the ways students--and others--work were it not for the series of connections that make up the Internet and the World Wide Web.
"The Web gives me a uniform way to give students a wide variety of educational materials--text, color graphics, and computer source code or software," points out Erik Cheever '82, associate professor of engineering. "Having all the course information on the Web allows students to access it wherever they happen to be."
Easy Internet access has made e-mail the communication of choice among students at Swarthmore. "This is a very e-mail-happy school. People would rather e-mail than call on the phone," says Maria McMath '99. While admitting that e-mail can't convey emotion as well as personal interactions, students insist that it makes it easier to keep in touch with far-flung friends, is more convenient than voice mail for checking messages, and allows them to respond to letters and requests when it's convenient, not when the phone happens to ring. Swarthmore students share their e-mail affinity with the one-third of Americans who now send 2.2 billion e-mail messages a day, according to a recent article in U.S. News & World Report.
Electronic communication has proved to be just as important to members of the faculty: U.S. News estimates that 70 to 80 percent of American university faculty now use e-mail to communicate with colleagues and students.
Steve Maurer '67, professor of mathematics and statistics, was among the first to embrace the class use of e-mail, starting in the mid-1980s. His students routinely receive at least one e-mail a day from him. The topics range from each day's assignment to ancillary information on careers and commentary on previous homework problems. He can thus provide additional information to interested students without using class time. He's even posted his "mathematical autobiography" on his Web page.
Maurer no longer gives out a printed syllabus at the beginning of a course. Instead, he adjusts the material covered as the course progresses. "I don't want to feel hemmed in," he explains. "I want to decide what homework problems to give out after class has taken place; that way, I can tailor the homework to what went on that day. The use of e-mail makes it a much better course."
The increased presence of the Web in general has made Swarthmore students more accepting of e-mail assignments. A few years ago, students were hesitant about class use of e-mail, Maurer notes. "I now get incoming first-years sending me e-mail over the summer before I meet them. I always emphasize that students can choose to interact with me any way they like best. If you prefer to come see me and never send e-mail, that's fine. Most students feel it makes the professor accessible 24 hours a day."
Electronic submission of homework and projects has become more prevalent too. Math students no longer need to turn in hard copy; they just copy their computer file into a course drop box. The same holds true for some English classes. Tom Blackburn, Centennial Professor of English Literature, takes it a step further with some of his students, requiring them to submit a hypertext (Web-based) document as a final paper.
Hypertext allows writers and readers to go beyond the linear order of book and paper texts by providing links that serve as footnotes, cross-references, and gateways to tangential information, Blackburn explains. Photos, movies, and sound can all be incorporated into a text.
"Hypertext is becoming more and more a part of what professors will accept as work from students," says Maya Seligman '99. For students, it allows for more creativity and a greater variety of ways to explore a topic, she adds.
Some students cite their affinity for creative, nonlinear expression as their reason for having a personal Web page. Some 300 Swarthmore
students, nearly one-quarter of the College's total enrollment, have Web pages hosted on the Swarthmore College Computer Society (SCCS) server, according to SCCS president John Rieffel '99. That doesn't include the many student organizations that also have Web pages. (To visit a student Web page, enter the site at www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/studpages.html.)
Students can learn the basics of Web-page programming from their peers on the Swarthmore Web Enthusiasts Brigade. This spring, Seligman taught a series of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language, the programming language of the Web) classes, which attracted students of all majors and class years and an equal number of males and females.
"It's not hard to learn the basics of HTML," Seligman insists. "I encourage beginners not to be intimidated because it's a computer language. Web pages are not just for people interested in computers. It can be a creative outlet for anyone."
Students in George Moskos' first-year French class have traveled on Air France and toured Versailles, been to the exclusive Paris restaurant La Marée, and kept up with the Le Henni family in France, all without leaving the campus. According to Moskos, every modern language course at Swarthmore incorporates the Web to some extent, but he has taken advantage of the Web's potential more than most.
Moskos has incorporated the Internet into every aspect of the course. The syllabus is online. Interactive grammar and vocabulary exercises allow students to get instant feedback outside of class. For in-class and homework assignments, students have taken virtual tours, sung along to nursery rhyme tunes, located their dream home using French real-estate Web pages, and listened to African and Caribbean music online.
In September, Moskos will be a faculty fellow in residence at the Center for Educational Technology at Middlebury College. He will use the rest of his upcoming yearlong sabbatical to complete work on his "Dossiers du Web" and interactive exercises.
"I find the Dossiers extremely helpful in learning a new language," says Michael Arellano '00. "Sometimes the vocabulary is not made completely clear by the text, and the Dossiers help weed out any vagueness in the manner words are used on an everyday basis…. Like others, I love browsing the Web, so the exercises are far from boring."
Swarthmore's three-year-old computerized language lab has helped Moskos to exploit the available technology. It's an incredible improvement over the previous lab, he says. The assignments are available from any Web-accessible computer, so students can complete assignments in their dorm rooms, too.
All of this is only the beginning for Moskos' French classes. "My goal is to teach the whole course using the Web, with a grammar manual on the side," he says. No more dry textbooks or boring workbook exercises. Instead, students will take oral exams on the computer, see and hear the culture they are studying, and do homework assignments that give them "real-world" exposure to the language.
Like Moskos, Ann McNamee, professor of music, has been an early advocate of the Web's potential as a teaching tool. Her 1993 article "Grazyna Bacewicz's Second Piano Sonata" marked the first time a full piece of classical music by a woman composer was made available over the Internet. Since then, she has created two Web sites: Analyses of Music by Women (http://mcnamee.graham.com) and Women Composers: Music by Women Through the Ages (http://mcnamedia.com, under construction). She also helped to establish the journal Music Theory Online.
McNamee's Web sites join text with audio music and the composition's score, so listeners can see the notes as they are being played. She also includes a simplified analysis of the score that is highlighted as the song progresses. "Readers can listen to a piece of music repeatedly," she adds, "something they can't do with a print article."
McNamee is visibly excited when she discusses the advances to the study of music made possible by the convergence of a high-quality digital recording, analysis, photos, and even a composer's compositional sketches.
"How are you going to get more people to listen to music by women composers?" she asks. "It's very expensive and hard to find. On the Web, we can put it all together and make it available virtually free, so that students all over the country can study women composers."
In her fall 1996 class on women composers, students created multimedia research papers modeled after McNamee's (http://ash.cc.swarthmore.edu:80/wo-muse). One student accompanied her research report with a Quick-time video of herself performing a traditional African midwife song-dance that she learned while studying abroad. Others included recordings of themselves singing the arrangement they studied.
Another recent project of McNamee's was a joint endeavor with Carl Grossman of the Physics and Astronomy Department. The two used a $7,240 College grant to create two digital sound-production labs that were used in a cross-disciplinary course, The Physics of Musical Sound.
With every advance in technology, the number of skills expected of students grows. Sociology and Anthropology Professor Miguel Díaz-Barriga likens the value of digital video-editing skills in the workplace to that of word-processing skills in the early 1980s. This year, Díaz-Barriga, whose current research emphasizes visual ethnography, has introduced seminar students to the College's new Avid digital video-editing system. The multilayering of text, sound, and images that digital technology allows makes academic study much richer, he says.
"Ethnographic film is distinct from documentary film," he explains. "We're not teaching the students to be technicians or lighting experts, but digital technology allows for a much higher-quality film." The real value of videography, Díaz-Barriga says, is as a communications tool. For students, that means both watching videos made by others and learning to communicate their own knowledge through images.
Anthropology student Maria McMath '99 is convinced that "the power of visual imagery is immense." As Díaz-Barriga's research assistant, she is editing his film on the role of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the lives of Mexican migrant workers in Kennett Square, Pa. She's also doing several films of her own, including a joint production with Prachi Patankar '00 about the anitracism rally held by students in the fall semester.
It's been more than six months since Patankar and McMath started using the Avid system. Already they seem quite adept at working with the two computer monitors, keyboard, television monitor, speakers, and rack of audio equipment that make up the editing system. They laugh when asked how much time they spend in the editing room, claiming that it is impossible to calculate. "Just yesterday, we were here for three hours in the afternoon and then again from 6 p.m. to 1 a.m.," Patankar says.
Patankar produced a 30-minute video, The Parityakta: Abandoned Women in Western India, for the Visual Ethnography seminar. The piece focuses on women who have been abandoned by their husbands or family and, in Indian society, have no place to go socially or economically. Many end up as homeless outcasts. Patankar directed filming in India last summer and then edited the video footage on the digital machine. The video premiered at Swarthmore in April. Patankar hopes to educate others about the plight of these abandoned women by distributing her video in the United States and India.
Pantankar, like her peers, welcomes the computer as a medium for communication, research, creativity, and, sometimes, change. Indeed, computers have already had tremendous impact on the way learning takes place.
"In the sciences, computers have led to a major initiative in visualization," says Tom Stephenson, professor of chemistry and associate provost for information technology. "Computers have allowed for three-dimensional molecular modeling as well as complex simulations that generate analysis results in easy-to-understand graph or model forms," Stephenson adds. Likewise, they've eliminated much of the drudgery associated with these fields, allowing science and math students to concentrate more on conceptual material.
Yet the digital revolution has not been confined to math and science. In every discipline, the Internet allows students and faculty to communicate easily and cheaply with colleagues around the world, thus disseminating research more quickly and more widely--and making it more open to valuable critique.
Computer technology has even opened up entire new fields, Stephenson says. "A subject like African-American religions, for example, is not solely a text-based discipline, as it often relies on the study of rituals that have been handed down over the years as visual and oral experiences. Students have to move beyond a text to study and collect visual images to really engage the subject."
The study of nearly every academic field has been enhanced by technology, and today's Swarthmore students are exploiting this potential with confidence, skill, and enthusiasm. n
Theresa Gawlas Medoff is a freelance writer from Wilmington, Del. She made extensive use of e-mail, Web pages, and the Internet to research this article.
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