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Issue: Spring 2004 Requiem for the Term Paper By Eric Mankin A virtual re-creation of Troy (the ancient city) by three undergraduates may be the best short introduction to the phenomenon that’s re-creating Troy (the modern university) – and, eventually, all of academe. A year ago, Jonathan Vidar ’04, Brian Olsen ’03 and Trevor Muirhead ’04 won the top humanities prize in USC’s Undergraduate Research Symposium, a university-wide scholarly competition sponsored by the Provost’s Office. Their “City of Troy” was no ordinary term paper. It synthesized digital architectural renderings, information technology resources, the text of Homer’s Iliad and the printed reports from more than a century of archaeological excavations. It included a “fly-through” of Troy VI, the subterranean site that best corresponds to Homeric accounts of the lost city. It concentrated – in easily accessible and highly comprehensible form – a hurricane of scholarly information: geography, classic texts, photography, drawings and 3-D graphics, audio and video, Web links, and bibliographical notes, not to mention original criticism. The students continued tinkering, compulsively expanding and improving even after they’d received their final grade in religion professor Lynn Swartz-Dodd’s “Near Eastern and Mediterranean Archaeology” course. Even after they’d won first prize in the provost’s symposium. Even after Olsen had graduated. This open-ended term paper was, of course, not a paper at all. It could be accessed through the Web or on CD-ROM and DVD. But it could not remotely be conveyed on paper. Vidar, Olsen and Muirhead are surfers on a wave that’s transforming one of the most immutable of human experiences: college student life. Generations of Trojans have listened to lectures, conducted library research, composed papers, sat for exams and received grades in ways that have remained constant since the university’s founding in 1880. But suddenly, changes that seem at once pedestrian and profound are palpable. “There hasn’t been one paper I’ve written that I felt like showing to friends,” says Vidar, a senior majoring in history in the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “But in the course of this [City of Troy] project, several of my close friends actually pulled all-nighters with me, just to keep me working.”
New media also may be transforming the very definition of scholarship. Academics, computer scientists, media artists, librarians and students themselves are now reweaving this venerable fabric. The looms are working round the clock. Amazing bolts of new intellectual material are rolled out by campuses across the country – but, as so often has been happening lately with changes in education, USC is at the vanguard. The university is pioneering new ways to keep professors in closer touch with students, new technical aids to help along the learning process, and new searchable knowledge resources (such as a prototype “scholars portal,” as distinct from commercial portals like Google) to zero in on research materials. It’s also here that the consequences of new ideas are being pushed farthest. The new paradigm represents more than just a change in style, packaging or add-ons. “We are talking about a reconceptualization of scholarship – a redefinition of literacy,” says Elizabeth Daley, executive director of the USC Annenberg Center for Communication. This university-based think-tank is home to the Institute for Multimedia Literacy, a trailblazer on the frontiers of digital scholarship. Because of this and other digital advances, USC is uniquely situated to be a leader driving the redefinition of literacy as it approaches its 125th birthday, Daley contends. The Faculty The shift to new media in education begins with seeming incidentals. For members of the class of 1923, or even 1993, communication with professors happened almost exclusively face-to-face (in lectures, hallways and office hours) or on paper (typed or handwritten, folded or stapled, left in mailboxes or pushed under doors). But when “millennial generation” students like Jonathan Vidar check their e-mail (as they do a dozen times a day), they find – in addition to spam and friendly chatter – a profusion of educational communications from teachers and classmates.
A note like this one, from professor Martin Krieger of the School of Policy, Planning, and Development to his “Visual Methods in Policy, Management, Planning and Development” class, gives an idea of just how powerful and flexible e-mail can be as a formal way for a teacher to stay in touch with his students, and vice versa. Krieger writes: On Wednesday, we will talk about the great documentary photographer Walker Evans.On 2 Dec: Alex, Yeghig, Marella, Lisa, Laura, David G, Lameese E, Gabriela and Elisa are scheduled to present. On 4 Dec: Michael B, Nicole, Lainie, Falon, Abbey, Tiffany, Lindsey, Eddie, Sean, Junhan, Corey, Stephen A, Neil are on board. About 10 of you are not listed. Get back to me to reserve a time. Krieger, a seasoned professor educated back in the age of the printed word, says only half-jokingly that he doesn’t know how he functioned as a teacher before e-mail. He now sends his students at least one and often as many as three or four messages a week. And the traffic is two-way. “Office hours have become outdated,” he says. “It used to be they’d come late, and they’d never come prepared.” Now they don’t come at all, but their messages flood Krieger’s electronic in-box by the “hundreds, or even a thousand.” For larger classes, Krieger and hosts of other USC professors turn to Blackboard, a Web-based utility that is offered through USC’s James Irvine Foundation Center for Scholarly Technology. CST is a unit of USC Information Services developed to support the digital needs of faculty. Blackboard lets instructors electronically post class materials, including tests. It provides e-bulletin boards for in-class discussions and effortless organization of teaching sections. Speaking of blackboards, USC still has them, but rather than being essential, they’re becoming optional. Thirteen lecture halls and 173 classrooms on the University Park campus are now equipped for multimedia teaching, and more are coming online continually. In these rooms, words and images flow from a computer, plugged into a podium, onto a giant screen. Faculty lecturers and student presenters can draw directly on the computer’s screen, or hyperlink to Web sites. Krieger’s syllabus is another eye-opener. It lists many books, of course. But the city-planning projects he assigns each student will rely heavily on a new electronic database: a collection of digitized fire-insurance maps showing every Los Angeles building from 1900 onward. The students combine these USC-owned virtual maps with their own research using Mapquest, a free Internet service that yields digital aerial photos of any street address, and a similar but much more detailed set of photos compiled by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Papers? They come to Krieger electronically. He reads them on screen. “I write notes to the authors as I read them,” he says. Final projects? For yesterday’s students, these almost invariably translated to text on paper, duly footnoted and formatted, perhaps with an illustration. In the new Troy, they arrive on diskette or CD. And, says Krieger, “I fully expect them to include movies or Web sites.” Courses don’t have to meet in USC’s advanced multimedia classrooms to partake of the digital revolution. The revolution trails students to their personal computers, where they can see and hear presentations via real-time Webcast, submit questions through a messaging interface, or even (in the case of graduate students in the School of Engineering’s Distance Education Network) watch a pre-recorded, digitized lecture from halfway around the world, earning credit toward an advanced degree without ever having set foot on campus. Now in the works is a teaching model that may, within the next 10 years, completely transform the time-honored notion of a lecture class. Geography professor John Wilson of the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences envisions a 300-person course that covers the same content as a conventional survey class in greater depth while giving students more direct access to the professor. In his prototype, the full class meets only a few times a year. Weekly sessions are configured through smaller groups focused on specific problems. In other words, a lecture class tailored to individual students. Couldn’t this be done without information technology? “Don’t even think about it,” says Wilson. The Millennial Generation Students are themselves an important ingredient in the new scholarly landscape. Children of the digital explosion, they come to campus with much different skills and expectations than previous generations. Today’s college students “multitask and expect 24/7 access to information with near-zero tolerance for delays,” says Sue Gautsch of USC’s CST. “They think non-linearly and learn through lurking, discovering, experimenting and experiencing. They consider it entirely acceptable to go straight to a source as the social boundaries between producer and consumer blur. They prefer self-service to personal service and consider the term ‘virtual’ to be old school.” Last May, Gautsch and colleagues from two centers based in the Provost’s Office – the Center for Distance Learning and the Center for Excellence in Teaching – organized a three-day conference on teaching “the Millennial Generation.” In a detailed socio-educational look at the class of 2006, conference speaker and University of Virginia dean of students Penny Rue enumerated what students today bring to campus besides cell phones and tattoos. Essentially they arrive “pre-wired.” Computer users since the early grades, they spend about 12 hours a week online, and correspondingly less time watching television. “They take technology for granted, and they expect cyber service,” says Rue. They’re independent problem solvers, accustomed to finding out how to do things by trial and error – poking around interactively in electronic environments that support this kind of learning. Some of these traits are obviously beneficial to educators. Lack of technical competency, for example – the ability to use basic information tools like e-mail and computers – has virtually vanished as a stumbling block. In other ways, they present a burden. The millennial-generation student is the most demanding one that universities have ever encountered, says Gautsch. The challenge for universities is to stay ahead of this generation’s impatience with old forms. Rue quotes from a 2003 survey indicating that 45 percent of college students report being “frequently bored in class” – much higher than in 1996. It doesn’t help that digital information of dubious value or accuracy is easily and abundantly available via Google and other popular electronic sources. This ease and abundance threatens to submerge the very idea of documented fact. The good news, says Gautsch, is that these students “bring fresh and stimulating challenges to how we may teach.” Equipping the Millennial Generation USC has made enormous efforts to capitalize on the good-news part of this mixed message – the fact that millennial students come with both the skills and the motivation to engage in meaningful scholarship – and to overcome the bad-news message of disengagement and disinformation overload. A major player in this arena is USC Libraries, which has undergone a complete top-to-bottom rethinking and reconfiguration over the past decade. It’s a process occurring nationwide, with USC leading the way. The starting gun was fired in the fall of 1994, with the opening of USC’s Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Library. It was the nation’s first academic “cybrary,” the USC announcement proclaimed, “first of the next-generation facilities designed from the ground up to accommodate electronic information resources,” and aimed specifically at undergraduates. In a preview of the new-media wave to come, five classes met in Leavey that first semester – all using specialized digital and multimedia materials.
“When it was built,” says USC’s chief information officer and dean of university libraries Jerry D. Campbell, “there was no model. But somehow USC hit a home run the very first time up.” Scores of representatives from other universities have passed through the facility, looking to build their own high-tech library. Leavey’s most forward-looking innovation, the Information Commons, is also its most-copied feature: a large research space, equipped with hundreds of high-power computers, each loaded with the latest software, continually updated and licensed for on-site use only. In 1998, the library added a second Information Commons to meet heavy student demand. Digitally deft librarians are always on hand with tips and fixes. For collaborative projects, students can adjourn to glassed-in study rooms accommodating groups of six to 20. The first multimedia classrooms at USC debuted at Leavey. They’re now found all over campus. Ten years later, Leavey remains a student magnet. When classes are in session, the library, and particularly its two Information Commons, is at capacity by mid-day. It’s even busier in the evenings. The message from students is a succinct “more.” Student Senate leaders tell library administrators at every meeting that they want “more computer and other IT facilities: longer hours, more comfortable seating, more software and facilities,” says senior associate dean and executive director Lynn O’Leary-Archer, whose responsibilities include managing some 16 library facilities. USC recognized the intrinsic bond between libraries and computers early. When Campbell arrived in 1996, the terms of his appointment marked a major bellwether of change. Besides being dean of libraries, he would hold the newly created title of chief information officer. USC became one of the very first American universities to combine libraries and university computing in a single organizational unit, under a single scholar-administrator. The combination reflects provost Lloyd Armstrong, Jr.’s realization of an emerging truth: Education now takes place in “middle space” – a place where traditional paper-and-ink resources overlap the new digital ones. Campbell has made the academic expansion of “middle space” a major personal goal. After years of persistent work, a committee that he heads recently rolled out a master library-catalog/browser prototype at USC with six other universities. Campbell had first proposed his “Scholars Portal” in a 2000 white paper presented to the Association of Research Libraries, a prestigious group of the foremost North American academic libraries. (The white paper can be accessed online at www.arl.org/ newsltr/211/portal.html)
The problem is, Web-based university collections (like USC’s Homer library catalog) only access their own institutional holdings. And commercial search engines like Google, while highly efficient, are also highly commercial. They display most prominently things that are promoted; and they rarely display library resources at all. Worse still, as Campbell notes in the white paper, commercial search results “are not returned solely for their accuracy or quality but are based on unknown criteria – a circumstance unacceptable for scholarly research.” Campbell chairs the ARL Scholars Portal Working Group, which after years of intensive discussions and development signed a contract last year with a software company to design an interface capable of searching and returning verified, authenticated results from ARL-member collections. In October, an experimental version began operation, accessing only a small portion of the scholarly universe at USC (and Dartmouth, Iowa State, the University of Arizona, Arizona State, UC San Diego and the University of Utah). “We all have so much to gain from this,” says Campbell of the pilot. “It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen.” Within USC, middle space has expanded greatly in recent years – both through purchasing and through home-grown scholarly activity. The library acquisition budget no longer goes just towards purchasing printed books and serials. A growing portion goes to buying USC subscriptions in digital resources. The last decade has seen an explosion in the amount of material published in electronic form – an 11 percent increase last year alone. According to O’Leary-Archer, digital acquisitions come in two varieties: powerful mega-resources and special-purpose databases. Powerful mega-resources gather massive amounts of material from many sources. Some familiar examples: the Lexis-Nexis database that indexes, archives and offers full-text access to articles and transcripts from major newspapers, magazines and broadcasts as well as legal decisions over the past 20 years; and OCLC First Search, which does the same for a vast array of scholarly publications. USC libraries also host a profusion of special-purpose databases. Someone interested, for example, in women’s exercise and diet trends of the mid-19th century might consult the complete digital text of Godey’s Lady’s Magazine and find the 1848 version of Winsor Pilates: directions for walking “at least two miles a day, and preferably four” with illustrations showing how to work out with an exercise tool called the “scepter.” Equally detailed information on plate tectonics, coral reefs, the Los Angeles architectural photography of Julius Shulman and much more – including the fire maps that Martin Krieger finds so useful to his class – now resides on USC servers. In all, USC licenses almost 1,000 databases, large and small. Access to these resources has eased enormously even as the databases themselves have grown more powerful and versatile. Librarian Deborah Holmes-Wong remembers when early versions of such electronic tools were first available to business school students in the late 1980s: publishers “charged from $50 to over $200 per hour to connect and search them,” she says. “Because of the cost, we limited students and faculty to two free searches per year, not to exceed $50 per search.” Previously, students were trained in how to use library indexes and abstracts. A multi-year search required thumbing through indexes volume by volume. “It would take someone skilled in research a couple of days to pull the articles and reference materials together to write a company overview for a class project,” says Holmes-Wong. “We now have services in the business library, like Dow Jones Factiva and OneSource, that can pull this information into a report in a matter of seconds. The difficulty now isn’t finding information. It is determining if it’s authoritative, relevant and significant.” USC is also steadily creating digital resources based on its own huge holdings of old documents, maps, photos and even film and video. The digital archive Web site located at www.usc.edu/isd/archives/arc has a striking variety of one-of-a-kind local resources available online, many created here. For example, students can browse or search all 233 issues of El Clamor Publico, the Spanish-language newspaper of Los Angeles in the 1850s; or examine close up more than a thousand artifacts excavated from the site of the original Los Angeles Chinatown during construction of the Metro-Rail Red Line. Currently all digital archives, whether created here or purchased on the market, need to be accessed individually, notes O’Leary-Archer. A major effort is now underway to build a single comprehensive system capable of searching nearly all online material that USC either owns or subscribes to. Digital Resources Databases aren’t only useful, points out Campbell; in many fields they have become indispensable. Planetary science, biology and other data-intensive disciplines pile up enormous quantities of new information every year. Just to put that in perspective: If the entire holdings of the Library of Congress were converted to digital information, they would measure approximately 14 terabytes of data. Every month now, certain scientific databases record several times that number, says Campbell. “Maintaining useful access to this data will be a primary challenge for libraries and universities throughout this century,” Campbell predicts. But even students outside these data-hungry disciplines are seeing the light, particularly as non-textual media – images, sounds, video and film – become digitized, searchable, indexable and accessible in ways once reserved for the written word. One extraordinary new digital-video resource went online last fall for faculty research and teaching. A $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation allows USC, along with Yale and Rice universities, to partner with the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in bringing a unique repository of 52,000 eye-witness Holocaust testimonies directly into classrooms. Rather than arriving on tapes or disks, the video streams over next-generation Internet2 connections installed by USC technicians at the foundation’s North Hollywood headquarters. The testimonies are already in use in several USC classes. The same technology that makes it easy to access existing video, audio and sound material now makes it easy for students to incorporate these media in their own scholarship. Professor Michael Genzuk of the USC Rossier School of Education teaches a course on teaching schoolchildren whose native language is not English. The final project for this course is an ethnography – a case study prepared by Genzuk’s student-teachers focusing on an actual pupil, the pupil’s family and school environment, the educational theories at play, and how they apply in the real world. “For years this involved [my students] following pupils around and taking copious notes, producing a written paper 50- to 100-pages long with photos, plus citations,” says Genzuk. The new version of the course, created over three years of consultations with USC’s Center for Scholarly Technology and the USC Annenberg Center’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy (IML), is a classic “middle-space” solution. “Rather than taking notes, we use a digital video camera, and edit the video to tell the story,” says Genzuk. Students still write a shorter paper with footnotes, but Web-based video is now an integral part of the project.
More than 60 academic courses at USC, ranging from religion and philosophy to medicine, now require students to compose such multimedia term papers. IML, in particular, has worked with more than 40 professors in a long list of disciplines and helped some 2,500 students make the jump. Institute leaders, including USC Annenberg Center executive director Elizabeth Daley and IML director Stephanie Barish, are passionate about their mission: to totally integrate what had been considered “subordinate, auxiliary or purely popular” media into academia on an equal footing with long-predominant text. Barish acknowledges that this mission can inspire both fear and skepticism: “People worried that we were going to eliminate text or the book,” she says. Daley denies any such far-fetched agenda. “A major role of a university is to authenticate and certify,” she says. The challenge – undertaken nowhere more vigorously than at USC, she argues – is to search for rigorous academic standards for this material: “What do we accept as a dissertation? What do we accept as a citation?” For many historical reasons, USC is uniquely positioned to begin to broker this new scholarship. “We may in fact be the only place in the world that can do this,” Daley contends, pointing to USC’s top-ranked cinema school and the Annenberg Center she heads, the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the multimedia-immersed School of Engineering, along with the university’s leadership role in creating information technology and its strong academic studies in other aspects of popular culture. Many issues remain far from settled, but it is encouraging to remember that new information tools have inspired fear through the ages. Even the alphabet originally met with resistance. Plato’s Phaedrus records the god-king of Egypt voicing grave doubts after he witnessed a demonstration of a new-fangled medium called “writing”: This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing, having the show of wisdom without the reality. Somehow, education survived the dangerous introduction of the alphabet. The act of writing down the words of Homer and his Trojan epic did not destroy the reality of wisdom. Something to remember as modern Troy opens a new toolbox of electronic characters and reveals them to the world. Eric Mankin is an engineering writer at USC. His last article for USC Trojan Family Magazine was on the robotics programs in the School of Engineering.
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