The Smart Classroom
New Tools for the Academy
TECHNOLOGY
REMEMBER THE SCENE in The Wizard of Oz where Toto pulls back the curtain and the wizard is revealed as a little man in front of the levers, knobs, and dials that control the special effects inside the great hall? That sums up the idea of the smart classroom. From a lectern at the front of 103 Rockefeller a professor can dim the lights, connect the room's array of televisions screens to the Internet, and start a film, tape, or CD by simply punching a few buttons on a touch screen.
Colleges across the country are trying to assemble the right blend of machinery and electronics for the ultimate multi-media classroom. Five years ago Dartmouth, long a leader in computer networking applications, found itself playing catch-up to the rest of the field. Today the College has five smart classrooms and more on the way.
A big stumbling block is cost. Malcolm Brown, director of academic computing and chair of the committee overseeing the development of smart classrooms, notes that it takes between $35,000 and $70,000 to make a dumb room smart. And that doesn't consider that the technology will need to be updated and improved in the near future.
Humanities and social sciences professors have been the heaviest users of the smart classrooms! History professor Sheila Culbert shows movie clips and web pages about the Civil War. German professor Joan Campbell puts up overheads, plays movies, visits various we and has her students listening to German music. Geography professor Daniel Karnes takes his students to web sites relating to cartography.
Brown predicts the classroom of the future will have an even greater reliance on the computer network. The day will come, he says, when high-speed connections will allow off-campus professors to beam their lectures up to Hanover. Someday students may even sit at home and tune into a lecture, watch a movies, or copy notes from the blackboard via the network. (Well, not Dartmouth students. Brown says that virtual attendance "isn't a considered option" at the College.)
Oh, and yes, there are still those professors who prefer to do without all the new technology. Last year the College bought them 1,134 boxes of chalk.
