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The University of Tomorrow
- University Press of New England
- Chapter
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195 minute hand by force of telekinesis to move along. Their efforts are in vain, of course, but they have found the next best thing: devices that allay time and allow themselves to become, in the words of T. S. Eliot, patients “etherised upon a table.” The new technology is great stuff, but, like morphine—a useful analgesic —it is addictive. However, unlike morphine, no prescription is necessary, and my students, like students everywhere, have acquired the habit of self-medication. I’m sure my students have not perceived my frustration, because they still seem to like me and they give me good teacher evaluations. They laugh at my jokes and funny stories about growing up in Jersey City in the 1960s. Some of them are so oblivious to the depth of my antipathy for crapola uses of technology that they occasionally invite me into the vortex. The other day I opened my e-mail to find this subject heading: “Jeannie M. wants you to be her friend on Facebook.” I highlighted the e-mail and pressed “delete.” Small steps. o p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p p theuniversityoftomorrow Of all people to ask to take a maiden voyage on the ship of new technology! I still drafted my tests with pen and paper. I owned a typewriter and had stockpiled enough ribbons to last until Armageddon. I corrected my students’ papers on cassette tape. And I still lamented the passing of ditto machines. It was the early 1990s. My university was making its foray into the world of distance education: courses beamed out on closedcircuit television signals. It was viewed as a technology—the 196 p t h e f u t u r e i s n o w “university of tomorrow”—that had to be seized and developed, lest we lose the initiative to other schools. There was considerable opposition from the faculty, the presumption being that television—already viewed as a malignant distraction and monumental waste of time—was the problem, not the solution. Other faculty simply showed disinterest, hoping , perhaps, that if they ignored so-called interactive television (itv) it would crawl into a ditch and die. The university held a number of campus forums to introduce the concept and win converts. I went to a couple of these and was very skeptical about itv’s potential for success. I questioned its suitability for many types of courses, such as foreign languages and laboratory sciences. In addition, there was the problem of accountability: cheating and proxy students taking tests. It seemed, at the time, like a bad, faddish idea. And then my school asked if I would teach a course over the new system. There was start-up money and special stipends available to prime the pump and get faculty involved. My first response was to gag. But curiosity got the better of me, and before I knew what was happening I was standing before a camera in a classroom—a “send” site—with twenty or so students sitting before me. To my right, behind a window, was a control booth staffed by a technician. The course was Human Ecology and the Future and it would be sent out to ten other sites around the state. A total of sixty-five students had registered. I had my own show. The thing was, while I had those twenty students sitting in front of me—a valuable prop for orientation’s sake—I couldn’t see the students at the remote “receive” sites, some of which had only one or two people. But they could see me, of course. This seemed a bit unfair. I liked to stay on top of my students. If they were dozing off or goosing their neighbors, I intervened. In other words, I wanted to insure, to the extent that I could, that my students were paying attention. With itv, this was impossible . For all I knew, the students who were watching me on the [54.85.255.74] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 10:03 GMT) The University of Tomorrow p 197 tube were fast asleep, playing solitaire, or shooting spitballs. Or perhaps they weren’t there at all. In consideration of all this, I walked into that first lecture just a bit on edge. There were a few basic things I had to remember : look at the camera, stay in the frame, and ask frequent questions. This last point was...