Imagine receiving a beautiful $38-million building full of $7 million worth of equipment, from desktop computers linked to the latest audiovisual, to virtual-reality and digital recording technology. A building with studios and spaces for dance and theater; with graphic design studios, with furnishings custom-designed to promote comfort and collaboration, with electronic libraries and interactive multimedia equipment and with almost no marching orders, rules or limitations on how you would use these resources.
No one would build such a facility without prescribing how it would be used, you say? Well, the University of Michigan has done just that.
The building is dedicated to creative collaboration among students, faculty, staff and researchers interested in the fields of music, art, engineering, architecture, education, the humanities, medicine and manufacturing.
This January, the state-funded, 225,000-square-foot, four-story Integrated Technology Instructional Center (ITIC) will open its doors and offer campuswide users a new learning, teaching and performing environment.
ITIC is a pet project of President James J. Duderstadt who, as a nuclear engineer and former dean of the College of Engineering before becoming U-M’s provost and then president, has long had a keen interest in forging concrete links between technological, creative and pedagogical endeavors.
Duderstadt sees ITIC as a "Media Union"—an educational building that, unlike others on campus, "is not owned by any single department or school, but truly a meeting place open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to the entire University community."
ITIC is more than a high-tech playpen, however. Duderstadt sees it as a facility required to help the state and nation move through "transformations in knowledge that may ultimately prove as profound as the Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution."
This "knowledge revolution," he says, may well "lead to a shift in our intellectual culture. While the ‘analytic’ professions such as law and business dominated the 20th century, there is a great deal of evidence that the ‘creative’ professions such as art, medicine, organic chemistry, literature and engineering will dominate the 21st. Instead of manipulating and rearranging knowledge, it is becoming increasingly clear that the driving intellectual activity of the future will be the act of creation itself."
With the world of industry undergoing profound structural changes under the impact of computers, networking, satellites, fiber optics and related technologies, Duderstadt emphasizes, it is vital that the state of Michigan and the nation "grapple with the challenges and possibilities that this new world brings." ITIC will be a training ground for those who will do the grappling.
Here are some of the ways three ITIC executive committee members foresee how that training may evolve:
PAUL C. BOYLAN,
vice provost for the arts and
dean of the School of Music:
"An academic phenomenon that has emerged in the last two decades is that students are much more visually oriented than people were when my generation was in school. How these students process information is influenced by their incessant interaction with media—with video games and MTV and all the rest—and they seem to visualize, assimilate and process imagery much more quickly and thoroughly than previous generations.
"Linked with these new mental processes are the technological advances that have resulted in the capacity to store in digital form vast amounts of information. These students have available to them new information systems that provide immediate access, retrieval, analysis and organization of this information, and the students must learn how to present the resulting ideas cogently.
"What are the most effective ways to teach this new generation? That’s something that ITIC will help us study and learn. We have to take a new look at how students of this generation learn so we can be more effective teachers, and create more effective learning resources for them—not just in the classroom but in their living environment as well.
"We in earlier generations have considered traditional values of learning to include memorization of math tables, accurate spelling, mastery of certain forms of syntactical organization and communication. But the need for those older methods and rules is mitigated by new software technology which provides calculators, spell-checking, sentence analysis. So our previous strategies may not be as relevant to this new generation. We just don’t know that they are. ITIC may help us find out. We are going to see some enormous tinkering in ITIC."
DOUGLAS E. VAN HOUWELING,
vice provost for information technology:
"When I was an undergraduate, I ran a printing service for our residence hall association. I did the layout myself; and typed copy on a big special IBM typewriter that couldn’t backspace. Then I got the plates made and saw the publications through printing. We did all kinds of things, brochures, newsletters, calendars of events and custom-made Christmas cards.
"If I were asked to do the same thing as a student here at Michigan, next year I’d go out to ITIC and prepare multimedia presentations for all sorts of events and put them on the Web. I’d make videos for groups to use to advertise their events. If jazz concerts or leadership conferences wanted publicity, instead of brochures, I’d place illustrations, snatches of sound, perhaps animation, right on the Web. Or I might produce a virtual reality presentation for a dance recital.
"ITIC’s library function is also important. Most people think of libraries as places to store information that has been put in the can, so to speak. We’ll have some materials like that. But whether it’s books, videos, computer graphics packages or video presentations, everything in the library will be coupled with the creative sections of the building, so that what’s created can go right into the library, and what’s in the library can be conveniently retrieved by creative people here and throughout the world.
"ITIC will provide facilities that—on the few campuses that have such resources—are situated only in advanced research laboratories. But here they will be available to all students, faculty and staff from wherever they come on campus. What will students do at ITIC? It will all depend on their creativity, and I think we have many extremely creative people on campus.
"Almost all movies today include objects that are virtual, and then merged with the rest of the movie, sometimes in ways that cannot be detected. This lets the creators present events that never happened in the real world, but seem to within the context of the movie. Forrest Gump is an obvious example. Well, how will that kind of capability affect the learning environment? We’re exploring that at Michigan. We’re already using simulated environments to help social work students learn how to conduct group therapy sessions and to help business students come up with a strategic plan. Students are involved in creating these new learning environments, and my guess is they’ll play an increasingly greater role in the process."
RANDALL L. FRANK,
director of the ITIC:
"Students in any field will come up with ways to make a multimedia ‘paper,’ as it were—we’re really going to need a new name for the new academic and intellectual productions. Physics students will be able to make a visualization of the ways that a physical principle or law operates.
"The building’s layout creates particular kinds of study spaces that foster collaborative efforts. There are 25 group collaboration rooms for students. The rooms are equipped with work stations that facilitate working on group projects. Design studios have transparent walls that are intended to encourage and inspire collaboration. The idea that seeing the projects under way may spark ideas in other students passing by. Wherever users of the centers sit down, they will have a computer that connects them with the Internet. Right from opening day there will be 1,200 network interfaces via plug-in jacks for laptop computers or portable digital assistants.
"ITIC will have an ongoing educational program. Experts will be on-site, ready to help those who show up with just the germ of an idea that they don’t yet know how to carry out. We’ll also run short courses on the use of the technology, which is getting easier to use all the time. Even now, there are things an individual can easily learn how to do that only a few years ago took a special Hollywood studio to do."
The ITIC executive committee also included Edie Goldenberg, dean of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts; Daniel E. Atkins III, dean of the School of Information and Library Studies; Robert M. Beckley, dean of the College of Architecture and Urban Planning; Allen J. Samuels, dean of the School of Art; and Glenn Knoll, interim dean of the College of Engineering.
. . . October 1995
