 . . . March 1995
Clicking in the Classroom
The best minds of a generation
By Judy Dean
Tillinghast saunters to the podium, waits for a technician to plug in all the right cables and adjust the lighting and sound levels, and then clicks the mouse on his portable computer PowerBook. The music fades and a new slide comes up. The subject of today's lecture is the poet Allen Ginsberg. But Tillinghast opens with a 20-minute discussion of the 1950s film classics The Wild One and Rebel Without a Cause--required viewing for the class. The discussion segues to a comment, projected now in slide format, that came to the instructor in a student's e-mail message: "Who 'owns' an art form, like jazz or haiku? How freely can we borrow from artists of other eras, ethnic groups, or forms?"
The next hour's lecture on Ginsberg's work is liberally annotated with references to the Old Testament, Jackson Pollock, William Blake, and Handel's Messiah. Tillinghast pauses frequently to pose questions. By the end of class, students will have seen several text slides, including the e-mail message, various quotes and definitions, a half-dozen photos of Ginsberg, and a Franz Kline painting. They will have heard a sound clip of Ginsberg reading, as well as a bit of jazz.
"The course material is ideally suited to his approach," explains Tillinghast, a poet whose acquaintance with Ginsberg and several other writers in the course adds an added dimension to the subject matter. "For example, the phenomenon of improvisation was central to all the arts of the period, and having the ability to illustrate this through audio and visual materials was central to my goals."
Charles Dershimer, an instructional designer at OIT, was assigned to the project. The new course was conceived as a series of 28 lectures, each of which would contain between 12 and 20 visual images and sound clips. "We start by listening to the instructors describe their vision for the course," Dershimer says. "Then we help them select--or in some cases, develop--software for the delivery of their material. In this case, we decided to go with PowerPoint, a commercial product. It can accommodate the visual and sound files the instructor required in his lectures, and is available for student use in most Campus Computing Sites." Tillinghast's funding allowed him to hire an assistant, Sebastian Matthews '93 MA, a graduate of the Creative Writing Program in which Tillinghast also teaches. Matthews spent the summer researching and gathering the source materials for the series. Matthews culled the numerous recordings of poetry readings and interviews and located photographs and paintings needed to annotate lectures. Tillinghast also relied on Matthews's expert knowledge of music to help select jazz clips for the class. Staff at ITD's Instructional Technology Lab provided training and assistance in the digitizing of images and audio clips for inclusion in the PowerPoint format. By the end of the summer, Tillinghast and Matthews had amassed a great deal of material for the course. During the fall term, the English department reduced Tillinghast's teaching load so he could spend time programming his lectures.
This is not a passive-listening type of class," Tillinghast says. "I expect the students to go to the films, visit the museum to see original works and participate in the weekly discussion sections." In lecture, he constantly challenges his students to draw comparisons and make connections between works of art-whether they be poetry, paintings, films, fiction or jazz. Another way students can "get involved" with the course material is by viewing the class presentations at any Campus Computing Site that has a course software server. "I felt it was very important to put the material directly in the hands of students for review or further study," Tillinghast points out. The presentations are available only to enrolled students on a "read-only" basis due to copyright restrictions on some of the materials. The cost of some materials that are commercially popular, such as James Dean photographs, also posed problems. Tillinghast cautions other faculty who are entertaining the thought of adopting a multimedia teaching approach that although it is "great fun to organize and teach a course this way, it also involves a huge amount of work, along with the usual component of computer frustration-worth it in the long run, though, I would say." "When I describe this class to my friends, I talk about how much fun it is to be working with art and music in addition to literature," he says. "I consider myself part professor, part disk jockey, part museum guide. One word always associated with this 'cool.'" Judy Dean, a computer systems consultant for the U-M Information Technology Division, wrote this article for the March 1995 Information Technology Digest. While supplies last, readers may obtain a booklet, Works in Progress, describing dozens of multimedia applications at U-M. Write to Ed Saunders, U-M Office of Instructional Technology, 1600 School of Education Bldg., Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1259.
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The new course was ready to roll, on schedule, in January. Of course, there's always the issue of delivering audiovisual presentations once you create them. "We meet in 1300 Chemistry, which is well-suited for multimedia," Tillinghast notes. "Staff from LS&A Media have been on hand for every class to make sure we're up and running. "With the exception of a few glitches, the presentations have been going smoothly.
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