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Brandon Ball is a CSU, Chico Honors Program student and journalism major. A second-semester freshman from Troy, Montana (population 1,000), Ball (in photo at right with graduate Eva Horvath) seems in some ways an unlikely exponent of technology on university campuses: His hobbies include hunting and fishing, and he has extensive experience as an auto-body repairman (“People hit a lot of deer out where I’m from ...”). He also enjoys video games, photography, and poetry, though, and hopes someday to have a regular column in a travel magazine. Ball was in an Honors Academic Writing class I taught last fall, and although he usually sat front and center, I didn’t see much of him. That is, even though he had nearly perfect attendance, his laptop computer was open on his desk every day, and about all I could see was bright red hair and his intense eyes peering out over the top. Having heard stories of students doing all kinds of “off-task” things in class with their computers, I asked Ball one day what he used his for. His answer surprised me: He had one window open to the course’s daily schedule, he said, another to the syllabus, another to a Word document for taking notes, and still another to an Internet search engine. “Instant Internet access makes it much easier to grasp hard concepts, or to bookmark pages that contain more information on topics I find interesting in the lecture,” he notes. A new world They read their syllabi and submit homework on their computers using Blackboard Vista, an e-learning platform, and they have class discussions, and even peer-evaluate classmates’ papers, in class-specific chat rooms—that is, on their computers from their dorm rooms, from cybercafés in downtown Chico, or even on weekends from their hometowns. Sight-impaired students use special programs that read on-screen computer text—homework assignments, journal articles—out loud to them. And, unfortunately, some students play online poker—and e-mail and text message each other—in class. There are 98 Smart Classrooms on campus, each with a computer, projector, stereo speakers, and a screen. On that screen, professors can project everything from their own PowerPoint presentations to lectures by other professors, authors, and company recruiters located almost anywhere in the world. The new Student Services Center (scheduled to be completed this spring) will have 26 smart conference and training rooms. For the final in my Writing for Mass Media class last semester, I showed my students a video of a Dennis Kucinich speech (from YouTube), which the students then had to report on. They wrote their stories at their desks on iMacs and then printed them on one of the room’s four printers to submit. (They could also have e-mailed them to me or “deposited” them into their on-screen course folders that only I would be able to open.) Wireless access is also available in areas throughout campus. According to Scott Claverie, director of Communications Services, it is provided both through a campuswide general plan in places where students tend to congregate (Meriam Library, the Bell Memorial Union, Selvester’s Café, common areas in the residence halls, O’Connell Technology Center, and some Smart Classrooms and large lecture halls) and in response to departmental request or special needs (Langdon Engineering Center and Taylor; Kendall, Holt, and Ayres halls; and the Physical Science Building). In these buildings, students with laptops can research any subject at any time via the Internet. As can instructors: I know many professors who have turned to the Internet in class to answer a student question or to enrich class discussion. Ball says he once looked up the density of coal for his geography professor. By 2009, the entire campus will have wireless access. In fact, according to Claverie, it has no choice. “With the students communicating and collaborating in a mobile environment, the handheld devices that they use will leverage the campus wireless network to provide more content at a faster rate than ever before,” he says. “There seems to be no limit to what features are now becoming standard on mobile devices, including laptop computers.” Ball brings his laptop to all of his classes, unless he knows a quiz or exam is scheduled. On lecture days, he uses it primarily for note-taking. “Depending on the class, and how well the professor lectures, I might use a program called Audacity to record the lecture and review it later,” he says. He also brings it to class when he knows he’s getting a paper back, “so that I can make the corrections on the hard copy and put them into my archived copy.” Ball says most of his classes last semester followed the same format—basically notes, essays, tests—“so I typed notes most days, organized them in my Documents folder by class, and used my laptop as a portable tome of acquired knowledge, looking up facts and checking things over before I turned essays in.” The business of technology “Chico is the only school with this level of participation, and the curriculum being developed by these teams will be deployed in the schools throughout the world,” says Corbitt, who is also on the SAP University Alliance Program advisory board. “It’s pretty exciting.” Corbitt also works with companies such as Chevron and Hewlett-Packard (where she was on system-implementation teams) that aggressively recruit College of Business students. CSU, Chico “teaches the students valuable skills used by businesses that use SAP products, as well has how to function on a business team that analyzes business processes and figures out ways to improve them,” says Corbitt. In fact, she says, students with SAP experience “enter the workforce with special high-demand skills that add between $5,000 and $10,000 to their starting salaries.” Corbitt and her colleagues are currently working with SAP curriculum-development teams on a product called Datango, which will translate curriculum into more than 100 different languages so the same material can be used by universities throughout the world. This opens the door, she says, “to collaboration among students at different universities.” She adds, “I think we are just seeing the beginning of how technology will change education throughout the next decade.” The creative side Horvath also used digital cameras and scanners to incorporate graphics and other media into presentations and projects. “Technology really opens up the door to more creativity, along with providing easier access to fact-checking and a wider array of information,” she notes. “There was not a single class where I did not in some way use technology.” In the capstone class for English education majors, Horvath was required to create a wiki page (a Web page that can be edited by users) for a range of adolescent literature books. “I remember thinking, ‘What the heck is a wiki page?’ ” she recalls. “I had no idea. Over the course of the next few weeks, my professor showed us places to find tutorials on how to create wiki and what a ‘good’ wiki might consist of, and that uncovered the mystery. In the end I created a wiki that I am proud of.” (For more on this, see “Working on a Wiki” below.) Horvath says that one of the best uses of technology on campus is its nearly endless opportunity for networking. “The fact that I can send an e-mail to a professor, who communicates with the dean, and the dean then communicates with me, all via e-mail in a matter of minutes, is amazing,” she says. “It makes things so much more equitable.” As a future teacher, Horvath plans to incorporate technology into her own classes. As a student teacher, she worked to fine-tune her own Web site and used it to assign research projects that required the use of technology. “I created the site first because it was required for my education class,” she says. After turning the project in, she decided to improve the site and refocus it for the American literature class she was teaching. “I was able to post assignments, provide resources, and create a place for students and parents to contact me and gather class information,” she says. “Students really liked this because they knew what was going on in the class if they were absent or lost an assignment. Eventually, I completely cut paper assignments out of the class.” Which is another advantage of technology, according to Horvath: making education “greener.” “If you are doing everything on a computer, there is not much use for 100 paper copies of whatever handout you are using that day,” she says. Linked in Shott was originally intimidated by the idea of online classes. “Being an older student, I worried I was going to be held back by my lack of computer skills,” she says. She was also worried about the commitment—she was teaching theatre full time at a charter school. “I had lesson plans to do, a husband to feed, and a granddaughter to get to know. I was wife, mother, grandmother, teacher, theatre director, and student.” Both of Shott’s daughters (see sidebar on her daughter Cassie below) were in college and encouraged her to go back and finish. “My oldest daughter had already taken a few online classes and told me that I should try one,” she recalls. “So I took a math class at our local community college. I was hooked.” Shott is impressed by the communities that online classes establish. “Just because we take classes online doesn’t mean we live in caves,” she says. “Some people are, of course, very private, but most online students are used to talking through the printed word and love having long discussions about the class.” Shott also points out that people tend to be less inhibited in online class discussions. “Friendships are different,” she says. “When you sit in a classroom one or two days a week, you make friends, but that is usually it. In an online class, you talk almost every day in discussion groups and find out things about people that you probably wouldn’t have found out in a regular classroom. I have known some of my classmates for years already … online.” Shott is scheduled to get a BA in liberal studies in December 2008, 36 years after she first started college. The dark side In fact, the vast majority of CSU, Chico students appear to be using the technology responsibly and respectfully. “Of course we see more cheating and distractions with technology, but I think the advantages of engaging the students in technology that they know will lead to better jobs is enticing,” says Corbitt. “We continue to work to reduce the disadvantages.” Ball adds: “Technology is a tool, not a necessity. I think that cell phones are the biggest disruption, as I see more students using and abusing them. Laptops, on the other hand, seem to be primarily used for work. From what I’ve noticed, very few students are just idling around with a laptop.” Practically speaking In the end, though, technology is both unavoidable and indispensable—not only to the journalism instructor and his students but to the journalist, even a latter-day transcendentalist such as myself. All of the interviews for this story were done by e-mail. Corbitt was at a conference in Hawaii; Ball was in Montana for winter break (it took me about 10 seconds, without leaving my desk, to learn the population of Troy); and Shott, of course, was in Southern California. The completed story, which I e-mailed from my home to the Chico Statements office in Kendall Hall, will probably be read more widely in its online form than in hard copy. And, as Shott suggests, technology is contributing to and redefining the human community in unexpected ways. “Two summers ago my two brothers were killed in an auto accident, and I was right in the middle of an online astronomy class,” she recalls. “I wrote to the professor to explain, and he offered extra time to finish the class. I declined because of stress of their deaths. But I posted on the class discussion board and asked people to pray for my family. I had over 30 e-mails offering condolences and help. The generosity was overwhelming. I carry those fellow students in my heart to this day.” About the author
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