Associate Professor of Russian Frank Sciacca, Reference Librarian Lynn Mayo and Instructional Technology Specialist Krista Siniscarco presented a session during the Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges (CLAC) Conference being held at Hamilton this week. The session, titled "Turn On, Tune In, Print Out: A Professor-Technologist-Librarian-Student Experiment in Multimedia Collaboration," reported the results of an "experiment" on conducting an entire seminar around multimedia.
CLAC is an annual conference for information technology professionals from highly selective liberal arts colleges. This year's theme "The Challenge of Change," deals with the rising expectations IT organizations face as IT is recognized as a fundamental enabler of new ways of thinking, promoting efficiencies and enhancing teaching and learning.
Sciacca taught the Sophomore Seminar "1968: Pop Culture in the Age of Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll" during the spring 2006 semester and designed the course, with the help of Mayo and Siniscarco, around the use of different multimedia. The course , which focused on the impact of the political and social movements of the late 1960's on popular culture, consisted of one 75-minute meeting and one three hour workshop per week. "This was a model taken from the sciences," said Sciacca, as seminars are usually taught in two 75-minute lecture periods per week. During the workshop, students learned how to use different programs and forms of technology to work towards their final projects, which were to be modeled after the magazine Aspen, published from 1968 to 1971, and was described as "a multimedia magazine in a box." The main lesson in the project came from Marshall McLuhan's ideas about the function of the medium in conveying the message.
Mayo briefly discussed the HILLgroup (Hamilton Information & Learning Liasions group), a collaboration of the Library and Instructional Technology Services that partners with Oral Communications and other Academic Development units. The goal of the HILLgroup is to support faculty in the identification, selection, and use of technologies and content applicable to their teaching or research needs. The HILLgroup was founded in January 2001 in response to the growing emphasis on interdisciplinary studies, such as sophomore seminars. "Our hope is it maximizes use of all the materials Hamilton has to offer," said Mayo.
Siniscarco, a member of HILLgroup, worked closely with Sciacca's class during the workshop periods. In the beginning of the course, said Siniscarco, the workshops were very structured. Later, the period became "more of an open lab," and at the end of the semester there was very little instruction. All of the technology used by the students was entry level. The projects each week had a theme and the projects built on each other, from all text to text and an image and so on. Siniscarco showed examples of projects, including flipbooks, audio CD's, and videos. Several of the projects were also on display at the session.
According to Sciacca, the main challenge for the students was development of an initial idea. He read some student comments, which included "the final project gave deeper meaning to the concepts," and "the workshop allowed me to use my own mind and intellect." Mayo said that from this experience and others like it the library staff has learned that it needs to acquire more digital content as students are using Google more and reference librarians less. However, she said, students need to understand the realities of research. "It's not a one-stop shopping enterprise," said Mayo. Siniscarco concluded by saying that all of the students responded very positively to the course. "The course and project was very ambitious, but it worked out well in the end," she said.
-- By Laura Trubiano '07
