Out with the Old School

A Whole New You

If college is supposed to provide an environment where young men and women can discover who they are, then the students in Bill Kirkpatrick’s “Digital Technology and Cultural Change” class are getting their money’s worth. Over the last three years, they have switched genders, changed race and ethnicity, and consorted with vampires.

They’ve done so with the help of Second Life, a virtual-reality world in which players can adopt online identities, or avatars, of their own design (hence the vampires). Kirkpatrick requires his students to spend several hours a semester immersed in Second Life, imposing but one condition. “I have them pick an avatar unlike themselves in some important respect,” says the assistant professor of communication, who aims to challenge students’ assumptions about how identity works and force them to think beyond the limits of their own social experiences.

Wandering through a virtual world and interacting with other players who see only your avatar can be highly instructive, as when women passing for men discover that they must learn how to talk (or type) like guys. It also can be disturbing, as when black students who select white avatars find themselves suddenly privy to racist chatter, or when male students with female avatars are sexually harassed.

“The most interesting things that come out of it are when they experience what it’s like to be someone unlike themselves,” Kirkpatrick says. “You hope that empathy will translate back into real life.”

While students often find it challenging to disguise themselves online, the ease of trying out different personas highlights the fluidity of identity in general, and illustrates just how much of the “self” is socially constructed– a product of how we present ourselves and how others react to us. “There’s not as much difference as you might think between performing an identity in Second Life and performing one in First Life,” Kirkpatrick says, using the gamers’ term for the real world.

Not all students embrace their inner avatars. “There is a social stigma attached to some of these role-playing games, especially for Denison students, who value their real social lives very highly,” Kirkpatrick says. And despite their progressive social and political attitudes, many students find it difficult to view the world through the eyes of others.

For Kirkpatrick, that only affirms the game’s value as a teaching tool. “It begins to break down that resistance to imagining a world different from your own.”

The Sweet, Sweet Music 
of a Chicken’s Cackle

Composer HyeKyung Lee hears music in the sound of footsteps, the clatter of silverware in Curtis Dining Hall, and the cackle of a chicken at the Homestead. “Any sound can be music,” says Lee, who teaches a course in computer music taken mostly by non-music majors. “But it has to be organized in time.” That last bit is the trick, one accomplished with the help of specialized music software like GarageBand, Pro Tools, and Logic.

Armed with digital audio recorders from the Media Technology Services desk at the library, Lee’s students fan out across campus, free to record “whatever’s out there–except any pitch-oriented sound, such as musical instruments or singing.” Back in class, Lee teaches them the basics of digital audio editing, and has them cut and paste their raw materials into musical compositions.

Once they have the basic structures of their works in place, Lee introduces students to digital signal processing, a catch-all term for the electronic effects that can be used to massage musical sounds, from equalization to reverb and delay. And while most lack musical training, Lee even gets her students to create their own melodies using digitally synthesized instrument sounds, and also plays recordings of electronic music in class so that students can learn from the work of professional composers.

The course culminates with a public concert in which each student presents a three- to five-minute work, along with self-penned program notes. Throughout the semester, Lee keeps the focus on the music itself, rather than on the hardware and software used to produce it.

“There is a necessary level of technical understanding to compose for the computer, just as there is a necessary understanding to compose for musical instruments,” says Lee. “Once you have that understanding, music can be limitless.”

The Problem with Skin

“A big problem with anatomy,” says Brian Hortz ‘94, associate professor of physical education, “is that you’re looking at someone with skin.”

As a former anatomy student himself, first at Denison, then at Ohio University and Ohio State, where he earned advanced degrees in sports medicine and exercise science, Hortz spent plenty of time poring over hand-drawn illustrations in textbooks.

Yet making the mental leap from a two-dimensional representation of a muscle or tendon to a three-dimensional structure buried deep inside the body can be tricky. Hortz estimates that only a third of the students in his “Applied Anatomy” course can immediately envision a three-dimensional shape based on a two-dimensional drawing; another third manage to do so only with great difficulty, and the rest never get there at all. So in the absence of an on-campus cadaver lab where students can peer beneath the skin of a real body to make sense of the overlapping muscles of the thorax or the intricate mechanisms of the knee, Hortz has turned to digital corpses.

The first online anatomy tutorial he tried was little more than a cartoonish 2-D skeleton. But that was 10 years ago, and the technology since has improved. Hortz now sends students to Anatomy.tv, a Web site where they can zoom in on illustrated 3-D images of various body parts and peel them like onions to reveal ever-deeper structures, from muscles to arteries and bones. Mouse over a length of ligament or nerve, and a detailed description of the item will pop up. Click on a button, and you can rotate what you see by 10 degrees. You can even examine MRI scans of particular anatomical features.

The static 3-D models on Anatomy.tv proved to be so helpful that Hortz immediately began dreaming of 3-D movies. Last year, he asked instructional technologist Trent Edmunds (see sidebar) to create an animated 3-D film illustrating how stress on the pelvis and lumbar spine can cause a disc to herniate.

Observing that kind of pathology in action helps students understand the form and function of the normal anatomical structures they see online. Hortz plans to work with Edmunds to produce more such films in hopes of helping all of his students see–and understand–what lies beneath the surface of their own bodies.

Can’t Meet you for Lunch–
I’ll be in Japan

Few of the students who register for Michael Tangeman’s intermediate Japanese language class have actually been to Japan. By the end of the semester, however, they might all feel as if they have.

Tangeman ‘91 uses Google Maps to take his students on a virtual tour of Tokyo. Diving down to street level on the large screen in his hi-tech “smart” classroom in Fellows Hall, he has pairs of students assume the roles of direction-seekers and direction-givers. As they plot a course to a particular location–a coffee shop, a bank– Tangeman visually illustrates their path onscreen. Navigating through the city allows students to practice their directional vocabulary, and the digital imagery adds a welcome degree of verisimilitude. “The objective is to put students on the street, in Tokyo, as much as possible,” Tangeman says.

Tangeman and his students use another online software application called Wimba to send each other “voice e-mails” that contain both text and audio. For example, Tangeman often has students send him recordings of oral homework assignments. He then responds with verbal evaluations and corrections. “I ask students to do a certain drill, then I listen to their performance and give them feedback, performing what I think is a better version,” he says. “It’s a great way to get model pronunciations out to them.”

It also allows him to treat material that isn’t included in the textbook or its accompanying CD-ROM. Last year, for example, Tangeman wanted to show students how the Japanese use borrowed Chinese characters called kanji to spell common surnames. But those names weren’t in the textbook, and their pronunciations aren’t obvious. So Tangeman e-mailed students the written forms of the names along with a recording of him speaking them aloud, then checked students’ pronunciation back in class. Combining text and audio allows students to exercise all four language skills: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. And since most people are better at some of those than at others, everyone has a chance to succeed.

“If we can use one skill with which students are more comfortable, it might improve their confidence and performance in class–and then out in the big, bad world, where they actually have to use the language.”

Digital Killed the VCR Star

Listening to Sandra Mathern-Smith talk about the journals she asks her students to keep, you might think that she was an instructor in the cinema department rather than an associate professor of dance.

“Often, I’ll say you have to have at least one extreme close-up,” says Mathern-Smith, who goes on to describe the importance of camera angles, editing, and special effects.

That’s because the journals Mathern-Smith assigns to her contemporary dance classes aren’t the standard 2-D variety; they’re video journals that students compose using digital video cameras and iMovie editing software.

A journal entry can be inspired by just about anything, from a reading assignment to a master class by a visiting artist. After viewing a contemporary dance performance, in which a clothes rack served as the entry and exit point on stage, one student shot a journal entry, during which she played with her clothing as she danced, putting it on and taking it off in a way that referred to the original performance without imitating it.

The journals are an example of videodance, a genre of dance made specifically for film that combines elements of both art forms. On one hand, creating videodance entries allows students to develop their own choreography. On the other, it forces them to learn the language of film and the discipline of visual composition. “You have to think about the size of the frame, the highlighting in the background,” says Mathern-Smith–not to mention when to use a bird’s-eye-view shot or a slow dissolve.

Mathern-Smith also uses a graphic software environment called Isadora that permits real-time manipulation of digital video. Last year, she and her students premiered a work titled “We Are Here and This Is Now,” in which the dancers carried a video camera around the stage with them while another student used a keyboard interface to manipulate the images they chose to shoot: looping them, delaying them, and interspersing them with prerecorded footage of different locations around Granville. The results were projected on a large screen, forming a video backdrop to the onstage action; and the collaboration was as instructive for Mathern-Smith as it was for her students, giving her fresh insight into their personal aesthetics. “I can see students in their work in a way that I wouldn’t see them in class.”

Who Needs Textbooks, Anyway?

Waste not, want not. That was the philosophy behind Robin Bartlett’s decision to make her classes entirely paperless. Well, almost entirely. “I’m kind of old-school,” says the 62-year-old economist, who admits to printing out student essays for grading.

“Old-school” might be an exaggeration. In her zeal to save paper, Bartlett has fully embraced the digital resources now available to faculty and students alike. She teaches all of her classes in the computer lab just down the hall from her office in Higley, and distributes every potential handout, from syllabi and readings to exercises and tests, through Blackboard, Denison’s online learning system.

Bartlett structures her classes as workshops, and after running through whatever material she has planned for the day–like the diagrams she throws onto the projection screen at the front of the room, which students can digitally annotate on their own desktops–she divides everyone into groups to work on projects. Each team then submits the completed assignment to her digital dropbox. Students also can save their materials in “personal workspaces” that live on the college’s file server, accessing them anywhere and anytime.

Bartlett decided to go paperless for environmental reasons. But the decision has yielded other benefits, as well. Because she posts her workshop outlines to Blackboard, students spend less time taking notes and copying material from a chalkboard, and more time listening.

And since the entire classroom is wired, Bartlett can get the latest online data immediately without having to rely on printed sources that go out of date almost as soon as they’re published. “I don’t even use a textbook,” she says. “I just use the Web. Why should you read some tired statistic on the federal deficit, when you can go to the Congressional Budget Office and get the monthly tally?”

She even has a digital means of dissuading students from instant messaging their friends when they ought to be paying attention: a software application that allows her to pull any student’s desktop up on the big screen, effectively busting them in public.

“I warn them,” she says, sounding slightly old-school again. “ ‘If I see you getting on there, don’t be surprised if the whole class gets in on the conversation.’”

Alexander Gelfand is a writer based in New York City.