Reed Magazine February
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2003

It may sound as though there’s no downside to the use of technology in educating college students, but of course that’s not true. For one thing, all the new bells and whistles can tempt a teacher to go overboard. “There’s so much out there that at some point you have to stop and ask yourself, ‘How much time do I want to invest in doing this stuff?’” Peter Russell says. He’s developed media packages and used animation, only to find that students sit and look rather than engage in discussion. “This year,” he says, “I’ve gone back much more to drawing on the board. You have to experiment, keep changing things.”

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computer arts
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The underlying question here is, how well does technology help students learn? Lois Leveen is a participant in the Visible Knowledge Project, a Georgetown-sponsored study of that question. It involves faculty members from at least 20 campuses and focuses not only on using technology to impart knowledge but also finding ways to assess how effectively the technology is doing its job.

It’s one thing to evaluate a student’s progress by assigning and grading a paper, Leveen says. It’s quite another—in fact, it’s a leap of faith— to subject the student to new and untried assessment protocols, but of course it must be done. Multiple-choice tests were once new and untried, after all.

Leveen devised a computer-based method to find out how much her students knew and didn’t know at the beginning of a course on Asian American fiction. “They went through a series of slides and were asked to respond to questions and images,” she says. Leveen then reviewed the results, with individual names removed. “It was a way for me to figure out how best to open the discussion,” she says. “I want to do another assessment like this at the end of the course to see what has and hasn’t changed.”

Another caution in the rush to computer-based teaching is that students brought up in a media-saturated culture may not approach the web critically enough. Charlene Makley addresses that issue head on. As she flashes images of a particular ritual in front of her class, she tells them “to treat the images as critically as text—analyze how the visual presentation is constructed and how well it frames the ritual.” In one class on China and Tibet, Makley had each student do a critique of a chosen website. “I’m teaching media literacy,” she says.

next page
Reed Magazine February
Go to Page 1 go to page two go to page three go to page 4 go to page 5 Page 6, you are here go to page 7 Link to Reed Mag  Home
2003