Gems from Rough Stones: Teaching with Technology in the Two-Year Environment.

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    HISTORIANS AT TRADITIONAL four-year colleges probably haven't heard their students say things such as mine often do. While they might have been told, "May I turn my paper in late--my four-year old has the chicken pox?," they would probably not have heard, "I'm sorry I missed class--I had to get my son out of jail" or "I'm sorry I was late--my husband is a policeman and got wounded last night." Two-year students are a different breed, a fact to which instructors in any such college will attest. At Floyd College in Rome, Georgia, forty-nine percent of our student body is nontraditional, twenty-five years or older, and those who are traditional college age usually work a substantial number of hours off-campus. I have great respect for most of my students--what they accomplish seems unbelievable to me. Their difference and diversity causes me constantly to reevaluate my expectations. These people are caught up in jobs and families, and intellectual stimulation has to compete with immediate problems in their lives. I always hope that a few out of each class will connect with me and develop an appreciation for history, related to life on a certain plane, that they did not have before. They all have the potential to enrich their minds if student and instructor can reach common ground. I try to get to that ground even while explaining that, no, they cannot use the terms Europe and England interchangeably.
    In Georgia almost 45,000 students attend a two-year school within the state's University System, accounting for a quarter of all the students in the System.(FN1) Of the incoming freshmen at these schools, almost fifty percent will need some form of remedial skills course.(FN2) One reason for this high percentage is that a large percentage of two-year college students are there because the senior colleges have raised admissions standards. We euphemistically term students in the developmental courses "under- prepared," while the sad truth is that many are quite unprepared for college work. Some enter the classroom with little or no knowledge of geography, political systems, grammar, etc., and find the amount of writing I require daunting, if not impossible.
    But I wish to focus attention upon something special in Georgia, a program of computer-assisted learning created to meet this challenge. The plan was designed to help us improve our ability to teach our students, but it also has raised a whole host of challenges. Floyd College may be the only two-year school in the country that has been completely wired for computer access, but also where each student is required to lease a laptop computer with which to access CD-ROMs and the Internet. The Instructional Technology Project (ITP) requires all students to lease the same model machine, complete with the same software, Microsoft Word and Powerpoint Presentation. It also has required miles of wire and hundreds of Internet connections whose plugs link our students directly to the college's computer system, and thereby to the Internet. Four years ago the Chancellor of the University System of Georgia instituted planning for this at Floyd College and at Clayton State College and University. The two pilot programs, one hundred miles apart, could potentially spread to the entire system of colleges and universities. We are now almost two-thirds of the way through the pilot period and in a position to make some sense of the project and its impact on learning. As we look back at where we were and how far we have come, it is now time for honest evaluation and critical thinking about the future of the project.
    The faculty got their computers a year before the ITP started and immediately began agonizing over the best way to use them. To be sure, some faculty did not want to use them at all, but most of us now cannot live without them--in or out of the classroom. I have colleagues across town at a private college who must go to the library to get their e-mail; I find it difficult not to check mine at least every twenty minutes. Most important of all, the ITP helps me in my main concern about my students: their lack of basic information about history, geography, and research. With the advent of multimedia in the classroom, gaining this type of information becomes quicker and more palatable. Each student in my course receives a CD-ROM accompanying their text, from which they can see and hear pertinent material (basic text, maps, and pictures). The CD-Rom also enables them to take practice essays and quizzes, after which they have immediate feedback. They can even save their work, send it to me via e-mail, and receive a quick response. For the student who would probably never sit down and read the textbook to better prepare herself, going through the CD-Rom is much more enriching.
    The Internet also provides many resources with which to tackle the problem. The larger textbook publishers offer web sites to complement their books (sometimes adoption of the text is required, sometimes not). These sites, from companies such as Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch and W. W. Norton, often have the basics laid out in an enticing and colorful format.(FN3) There are also many sites on history in general that outline background material very well. Many of these come from universities and colleges, but a few are commercial.(FN4) The Net is most useful for students doing in-depth research. I have had many students become extremely proficient in one particular area, usually their research topic, and in the process I often learn about new web sites to explore. Using the Net, however, requires that the instructor must spend some time teaching students how to sift through the thousands of sites they are likely to find. There is a lot of garbage out there, and they will need to practice, under your watchful eye, identifying the bad from the good. A common sign of a good site is one that comes from a college or university (many of those addresses end with ".edu"). Also, many towns and cities have put together web sites to present the history of their area. Here in Northwest Georgia, for example, there are several sites on the Cherokee tribe.(FN5)
    Teaching with the ITP has challenged me to change my teaching style extensively. My lectures had always included as much discussion as was possible, helping my students to use concepts through classroom participation. But getting them to this point is harder now that the laptop is so central to the teaching process, for I find that my tried and true lecture methods are no longer satisfactory. Part of the problem is an economic pressure that comes from students. Since they pay a technology fee each term, they complain when an instructor does not use the laptop as fully as they think appropriate. Because they are required to pay to lease the equipment, they want to use it. When the project began we thought that this type of criticism would fade, but it certainly has not. The last issue of our school newspaper, The Six Mile Post, contained just as much passionate discussion of the ITP as did the first issue when the project began. We have therefore been diligently searching for better ways to utilize the technology in the classroom. Many of us have now had at least a year of experimentation time and have learned what works and what does not.
    One of the easiest and most productive uses of the laptop has been e-mail communication. I offer twenty-four-hour access to my students, which has been a boon to me for ironing out problems with most students. But there usually are several students in each class who profess not to know how to use it, or simply refuse to. My queries about overdue papers are usually met with, "oh, I never read my mail," or "I don't know how to use it." Floyd College holds seminar after seminar on such techniques, but certain students still never use them. We even have posters up that say: "Read your e-mail!" Still, the machines do help me facilitate questions from most students marvelously, questions about papers, tests, and absences. We have found that e-mail is especially helpful for those instructors who cannot be in their offices due to heavy class schedules or classes at an off-campus site.
    Many of my colleagues use some type of chatroom, where students communicate synchronously with each other, sometimes with the instructor also on-line. While I tried this tactic for two semesters, I abandoned it after I discovered that, as wonderful as it was in theory, my students just did not take much advantage of it. I might have one or two students who were interested in starting a dialogue and would post comments or interesting web sites. The potential interchange usually dried up after several weeks of no response. Our faculty is indeed discouraged to see that the ITP has not ended student apathy, a problem not unique to two-year colleges.
    However, the laptops do provide wonderful presentation tools. It is no surprise that students benefit from having material projected in front of them while they listen and discuss. The Powerpoint program has made doing this much easier and more successful for me. I have been assigning group presentations whereby three students do research on how to match historical text with illustrative graphics. A good example of this has been done for the Renaissance: pairing a work of art with contemporary description of the artist. To determine their grades I count a third each for content, looks, and group participation. Results are mixed, as you might expect. Most groups put together a very nice-looking and informative presentation, but I fear that they do not know their topics as well as I would like. When I question them about their topic, most of them only know what they put on the slides, and sometimes they do not even know that very well. Perhaps I expect too much, but if you use a slide of La Scala for a presentation about Milan, I expect you to know that it is an opera house. For all my pleasure with the ITP, I still keep asking myself whether students do really learn more effectively, or are we just dealing with new "bells and whistles."
    Instructors who are experienced in using technology usually find that the assignment of authoring a web page yields a productive research activity. I have heard several students rave about creating their own page. Not only do they acquire a valuable skill, but they are forced to research and find sites with information on a specific topic. They tell me that they learned much more from the assignment than they would have in class, partly because they chose topics that interested them. I use this device as extra credit. After spending about twenty minutes in class learning the basics of creating a page in Microsoft Word, they get a handout and are left on their own to create a page if they wish. This semester a woman originally from northern Italy did a page on the Hapsburg Dynasty, a subject that had always fascinated her. She wrote several well-integrated pages on the history of the family and some of its most colorful figures, along with genealogical charts. She had really done her homework, and was keen to share her knowledge with me.
    Conducting this kind of thorough Internet research can be difficult and time-consuming, and for that home access to the Internet is important. I now require that some of the sources for term papers be from the Internet. This necessitates that students practice combing through sources in order to identify which are the most appropriate for understanding a topic. A classroom exercise demonstrating a poor source and an exemplary one is useful. When making this assignment, the first suggestion I give is that the students should be suspicious of everything, then start making some distinctions. I have been impressed with how discerning they become. There are hundreds of thousands of sources out there. For example, students looking for illustrative material will find that many galleries have sites--for example the Uffizi in Florence and the Louvre in Paris.(FN6) In addition, I have also found some fascinating sites about Medieval and Renaissance culture.(FN7) It is possible to find the text (and sometimes a picture) of anything from the Magna Carta to Luther's Ninety-Five Theses right on the web.
    Internet research has now become key for the community college. It is invaluable if your college library is as small as ours is and helps students access information at home or at work. Our students are doing wonderful things with materials that have never before been so close to their fingertips. It has been of great benefit to those in my classes who are only on campus for the class itself, due to their complicated schedules. I have heard that this is the one aspect of the ITP that they appreciate most, because it frees them up to create their own study and research schedule.
    But let me warn against taking all this too far. There are those who advocate a totally "virtual" educational experience, and leaders of our University System have, in fact, been investigating the possibility of a virtual college. As a history teacher, I cling doggedly to my lecture. I still see its benefits; I know that many of my students will not succeed if I am not there (in flesh and blood) to lead them down the correct path of discovery. To be sure, they can make discoveries on their own, but history is such a complex (and at times misunderstood) animal that I truly believe they need me. As I stress on the first day of class, history is not just the nuts and bolts (or stories)--there is a wealth of controversy and methodology involved. I am convinced that the students cannot just read the information and get a proper perspective. Each instructor must find the right combination of tools for their own taste; there is no one correct answer.
    It is only fair to mention a few points about how the students view the ITP. They are concerned about the leasing fee, about professors who do not use the laptops in class, and about the irregularity of electronic services. The problems with computer service is of particular concern to teachers. Many students each semester go through an obstacle course of red tape and dysfunctional machines. Either the students have played around with their machines, removing or altering something vital, or computer services has accidentally deleted or mis-keyed their passwords. But the most frustrating and potentially worrisome problem is the hardware. After almost two years of giving laptops to every student each semester, the machines are wearing out. While the company sends replacement parts and our computer people do wonders with the machines, at the end of the day, these laptops must suffice until the project is over. I worry greatly for their condition through the coming year.
    Assessing the contribution of the laptops has become a huge issue at Floyd. We have great dreams concerning how much faster students will acquire knowledge, and how much longer they will retain that knowledge. Truthfully, we are not sure yet if either will actually be the case. After almost two years, we are still not really sure how to assess either hoped-for result. Clearly, the students have more information than before and seem to process it efficiently. But has it made a difference in the individual grades in my classes? No. I have not witnessed a significant rise in grades; their better access to information does not seem to transfer to their test-taking. Neither have their writing skills improved, nor do their analytical skills seem better. Still, I can say that they have an improved ability to synthesize knowledge because they have worked with diverse Internet source material, and that will help them in their future work. However, these skills have just not made them better historians. Floyd has developed an assessment instrument for the faculty. It was given two months ago, at almost two years through the project. It asked what new materials the students have access to, how often instructors use the technology in class, and whether they have seen improvement in student learning. The results should prove interesting. It is beginning to seem that issuing every student a laptop might not be the most practical way to achieve our goals. The logistics are a nightmare, as we have seen. The financial aspect is also troublesome. A possible alternative would be to require a computer of every student, letting them provide the machine themselves, either laptop or PC. The outcome of the project is far from set. Our next step has yet to be determined.
    However, my hope is that mulling over their work and newfound knowledge will push students to think of the world in a new way. That is my goal--to change their mind-set. I have no illusions about affecting all of my students, but for those that I do, I want that effect to be long lasting. One of our goals at Floyd is to help our students become more marketable in the workplace with their computer knowledge, but I still want more. Although my students will probably never be required to expound on Renaissance humanism, I hope that the knowledge of why the modern frame of mind is what it is will follow them always. Enlarging their perspective is really what I am after--making them better citizens of the world. Ten years after they leave my classroom, I do not care if they remember the minutia, but I want them to see the larger picture--this is the gift of a college education, with or without technology.
    The role of the two-year teacher takes on great importance when you examine current reports of the percentage of students who begin their careers at community colleges. With so many students entrusted to us, the basic survey becomes crucial, because it is here that we as historians will capture them or lose them. Technology has helped me capture some of them, in addition to making the classroom a more enticing and colorful place. As discouraging as the survey class sometimes seems, the reward of snatching any number of them back from the abyss far outweighs the struggle.
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    Laura G. Musselwhite is assistant professor of history at Floyd College in Rome, Georgia, specializing in medieval and renaissance topics. She holds an M.A. from the University of Georgia and is currently working toward a Ph.D. at Georgia State University.

FOOTNOTES
1. Arlethia Perry-Johnson, et. al., Eds., Access to Academic Excellence, The Campuses of the University System of Georgia (Atlanta, 1997), 6.
2. "Learning Support Programs," University System of Georgia, http://www.peachnet.edu.
3. Here are the websites: http://www.wwnorton.com and http://www.harbrace.com
4. Two that I have found are: http://www.historyplace.com and http://history.cc.ukans.edu/history/www_history_main.html
5. An example is: http://www.ngeorgia.com
6. Http://www.televisual.it/uffizi/ and http://mistral.culture.fr/louvre/
7. Medieval and Renaissance Weddings: http://paul.spu.edu/˜kst/bib/bib.html, Medieval and Renaissance Literature: http://www.luminarium.org/lumina.htm