CLASSICS & COMPUTERS: SACK (con't.)

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John Gruber-Miller wants to enhance his upper level Greek and Latin courses; he felt that a critical mass of students beyond his campus would provide more opportunities than Cornell could currently offer. Neil Bernstein would like to expose students to perspectives and methods beyond what he can provide in the classroom. David Guinee wants to create better opportunities for sharing student research projects, either virtually or face-to-face. Tom Sienkewicz finds his students heavily relying on web-based research materials, and wants to get students to be critical users of material.
The group turned to ways to address these needs. Regarding the critical use of web-based materials, Dave suggested creating online annotated bibliographies. Neil pointed out the work of MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Onling Teaching). John observed that students need advice with research projects beyond the specialties of the faculty on their campuses, and suggested that the Erato site could include a list of faculty specialties, so students could consult with faculty on other campuses. Tom added that the site could also include lists of students and their research topics. Dave said that visiting speakers could help supplement an individual campus’s resources. To help build a critical mass, Neil suggested organizing conferences where students could present their research, perhaps sponsored by state classics organizations; Tom pointed out that Eta Sigma Phi has also done this.

A lot of the meeting focused on what role an online course might play in meeting these needs. Tom pointed out that technology should be a resource for supplementing classics instruction rather than replacing it. Dave said that an online course would need to be really flexible, so that different schools could use it in different ways. Tom suggested creating a joint proseminar which could introduce new majors to the discipline; to show the breadth of the field it would draw on the specialties found on all the campuses. Neil said that such a course could present a series of lectures, each on a subdiscipline. Dave warned that this might end up teasing students with interests that aren’t supported on their campuses. The group debated on how such a course could work for a broad variety of classics majors, and how it would fit into different curricula. For the last issue, Neil suggested that the course could be administratively treated as study abroad, while Tom saw the course as rooted in each department, with a local professor as the instructor of record. While ACM and GLCA do not have the technological infrastructure that ACS has, Dave said that an online course would require mainly a web board and streaming audio. Dave wondered if ACM and GLCA could simply join the Associated Colleges of the South’s Sunoikisis project; Tom replied that the ACS deans might not welcome the idea, but that we were invited to send participants to an upcoming ACS conference. John suggested bringing students together for a face-to-face conference at the close of an online course. Tom suggested shared discrete activities (like evaluating online resources) rather than an entire course.

Dan described ACM’s three projects that might support collaborative work on the part of ACM and GLCA classicists. All are supported by separate grants from the Mellon Foundation.
1) Information Literacy: This project will bring together several disciplinary and interdisciplinary groups of faculty, interested in developing materials to teach their students information literacy. (Briefly, information literacy is the ability to critically appraise and skillfully use information, both electronic and print, in the classroom, research, writing, and in professional life.) ACM is starting this work with economists and a broader group of social scientists. This project provides funds for meetings and material development.
2) Academic collaboration: Most of this project will focus on evaluating and strengthening first-year programs on ACM campuses. There will be some resources available, however, to help faculty members in a given field (like classics, for instance) connect across institutions. This could support more meetings like this one.
3) Midwest Instructional Technology Center: Several years ago the Associated Colleges of the South established a technology center, which (among other things) hosts their Sunoikisis project. The Great Lakes Colleges Association and ACM have recently created a similar (but different) center called the Midwest Instructional Technology Center. MITC, based in Ann Arbor, will help ACM and GLCA faculty integrate instructional technology into their teaching through training and consulting. Unlike the ACS center, MITC will not have an extensive technical infrastructure or staff. Their staff of trainers and consultants will do most of their work on individual campuses or groups of campuses. They could help classicists develop materials for their classrooms, but there won't be the kind of infrastructure or staffing that ACS uses for Sunoikisis.
Dave wondered if the collaboration grant could support a conference of students presenting their research; Dan thought it could.

After lunch, John summarized the group’s ideas:
1) We could create a full online course, complete with streaming audio lectures and a chat board, and concluding with a face-to-face conference.
2) We could create a collection of lectures or modules to be used in classes
3) We could post a list of specialties of faculty who could be consultants for independent study or be guest speakers
4) We could organize a colloquium where students could present their research
5) We could create an electronic journal of student papers
6) We could encourage students to participate in inter-campus chats—via VRoma, “penpal” programs, or discussions connected to particular assignments.
Dave said that the #6 would be easy, and would only require coordination, and that it would not be hard to get a list of faculty specialties. Tom pointed out that #3 would need a commitment to collaboration. He suggested communicating across campuses, eventually moving toward shared materials and courses. This group would consult with MITC on how technology could strengthen this communication, and would eventually look toward getting additional grant money. Dave said that he was also looking towards eventually organizing a joint course, and wanted to know from Kenny Morrell (at Rhodes) the technological issues that Sunoikisis confronted. Tom thought that we could start with evaluating web resources and go from there, but Dave and John said they hadn’t seen too much problem with material from the web. Instead, Dave said that the field needed a course that would get students excited about classics, something beyond what could be done on one campus. One example, John said, would be a multidisciplinary look at Cicero’s speeches—or archeological approaches to Livy, Dave suggested.

While members of the group liked the idea of a joint course, they also raised concerns. John observed that lecturing online requires careful preparation to keep students’ attention, which would increase the burden of course preparation; we would need more than four schools involved, to spread that burden out. Neil wondered how such a course might fit with current ideas of active learning. He also raised concerns about intellectual property and fair use. Dave observed that chat room discussions are often disappointing, and that it might need to be better structured—perhaps with the guidance of MITC. Students could use a discussion board to share their research, for instance, he observed. Neil warned that some students—let alone colleagues—are not inclined to use the web often. John wondered how we could make an online course attractive to students; just listening to a webcast requires substantial discipline, he observed. Tom wondered who would be the technology leader. The group agreed that it would require a campus with the technology and IT staff interested in taking on this project. Tom asked if we really wanted to follow the ACS model. We agree on collaboration, he said, but asked if technology was the only way to get students together. Dave suggested occasional collaboration over the web—the guest lecture model.

The group broke at 2 p.m. to witness a demonstration of the ACS webcast system. Kenny Morrell, of the classics department at Rhodes College, gave a brief live lecture over the Internet and responded to questions we asked via a chatboard. Kenny said that the technology was fairly simple—all he needed was a microphone connected to his computer and a piece of free software. That software linked to a server at the ACS technical center in Texas, which has the audio streaming software. He said that the streaming software was not free, but was reasonably priced and could run on a standard server. The group appreciated the audio quality, but was a little surprised at the several-minute time lag between when Kenny spoke and when his words arrived at the computer in Chicago. They also explored a few online resources, including VRoma.

Tom said that we need to get responses from beyond this meeting’s four participants, and proposed a survey about collaboration before the April meeting of ACM and GLCA classicists. We need to find the most committed people in the consortia, and to develop grassroots support.