TEACHING THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN TECHNOLOGY ON THE WEB WITH
BRYANT COLLEGE, EHU, AND MSU STUDENTS <

My topic today involves the course design and implementation steps needed to use a web-based syllabus in Distance Learning. More specifically, the point is to explain the Bryant College experiment enrolling students from the National Institute of Science (Minsk and Moscow) for Distance Learning in one particular Bryant College course, History 364 — The History of American Technology. The purpose of the experimental offering during the Fall semester 1998 was both to field test the technology required for distance learning and to explore what kinds of pedagogical issues might arise. The History 364 test has been what we might call a ‘cold start,’ that is, we engaged in the experiment without promising or guarantying outcomes. The idea was to provide a run through that would point up issues to be addressed as we launch two full-scale prototypes in the spring semester 1999.

What follows focuses on the second portion of the History 364 experience, that portion dealing with the pedagogy. Technology problems have appeared in many forms, but they can all be understood within the frameworks of what my colleagues are presenting today. Here, I plan to focus on the curriculum design and implementation issues.

There are numerous specific curriculum design issues we need to address as we move forward with Distance Learning contacts in the NIS. Testing formats, the development of appropriate materials to support asynchronous education–these are just examples of the kinds of course design issues that need attention. Above all else, however, the success of Distance Learning engagement with institutions in the NIS will depend on dealing with cultural differences. At first, this may seem an obvious point (as it did to us). In practice, however, this central issue took us (me at least) by surprise. The most important cultural barriers had little to do with East versus West, Communism versus Capitalism, or any other kinds of cultural barriers talked about a year ago as we planned this first experiment. The real cultural barrier has appeared, in fact, in the place least anticipated: the different understandings of what is involved in education.

At this point, in order for me to proceed to a second round of Distance Learning in the NIS, I need to reformat the curriculum design. To complete the first semester course, we have made corrections. In the face of the issues involved, however, such changes constitute a quick fix, not a solution. Running an asynchronous Distance Learning course effectively will require more than providing support, instructional aids, and extra time to enable the Distance Learning students to keep up. For History 364 the Distance Learning course design needs to be modified, even if it shares components with the on-campus version offered at Bryant College.

History 364 and Distance Learning in the NIS

As the History 364 Distance Learning experiment has unfolded over the past six months, I have repeatedly heard echoes of an exchange I had with my department chair at Virginia Tech nearly twenty years ago. New to the department, I was fresh from the ivory tower of the supposedly elite institution where I had gone to graduate school. Wanting to get off to a good start in teaching, I asked my chair if the students at this state university were as "good" as the students I had seen in my experience as a graduate assistant. He paused, and then answered: "They’re every bit as smart. They will do fine. First, you’ve just got to get them to understand what history is."

The answer was good. It gets to the heart of most of the problems I have ever seen since in teaching. When things are not working, look for a mismatch between student expectations and the expectations built into the course design. That certainly has come up in the NIS Distance Learning experience. The ‘expectations’ mismatch has created the most significant difficulties. If there is a theme–a lesson, thesis, or argument–to draw from the NIS Distance Learning experience, this is it: "First, you’ve just got to get them to understand what history is." We all face this issue. Students come into our classrooms with preconceived ideas about course content, about the value of the subject we teach, and about how a class should run. It’s a genuine rarity to find a seminar room (much less a 40-seat classroom) filled with shining faces eager to grapple with the intellectual issues we really want to talk about. More commonly, we have to break down the stereotypes, purge the false ideas, and then stimulate new curiosity about our topics. For an historian, this usually means first attacking the grammar school myths, and then getting students away from the high school history way of studying for the midterm by attempting short-term memorization of every name mentioned either in class or in the basic textbook. Colleagues in other disciplines from Accounting to Zoology tell me it is the same for them; their problems differ only in that it is something other than names, dates, battles, and treaties. Good curriculum design, even at the best institutions, needs to address this issue: how do you shape student expectations so that you can begin teaching your subject?

At Bryant, we certainly knew that student expectations would become central in attempting to establish Distance Learning links with the NIS. All the broad predictions about difficulties in this area have been borne out. Forewarned may be forearmed, but the practicalities of execution can befuddle even the best prepared. The ways in which cultural barriers cropped up are embarrassing to admit in hindsight. Still, as that Department Chair said, "These students are every bit as good." The job is to overcome the cultural.

Coming to a Web-based curriculum has been almost a ten-year process for History 364. When I came to Bryant College in 1990, I found the familiar "you’ve-got-to-teach-them-‘what-it-is’" syndrome. In response, I began working with one of our curriculum support specialists, W. Brett McKenzie, to develop new strategies geared to Bryant’s population of aspiring business students. I learned a great deal from working with Brett, but at this point there are just two critical issues: first, he persuaded me to try using hypermedia projects; second, he taught me the importance of putting a ‘black box’ around the technology.

This second point, ‘black-boxing’ technology, deserves explanation. This idea provides the key to technology-based curriculum design. To ‘black-box’ one simply transforms any technology into a kind of Turing Machine–that magical mental device that philosopher Alan Turing used in the 1930s to imagine computing technology that did not exist. With ‘black-boxes’, anything you want to do will work. Black-boxing has the effect of making the technology transparent–almost as if it does not actually exist ( http://obiwan.uvi.edu/computing/turing/ture.htm ).

At its core, the History of American Technology course (His 364) at Bryant College is a traditional history of American technology survey. If you compare the reading list, the lecture schedule, and the tests with those of any other mid level undergraduate course in any other history department, you would find little to comment on. When I began teaching the course in 1990, I found most Bryant students are at least slightly techno-phobic at heart–very unlike the science and engineering students I had grown accustomed to teaching. The hypermedia projects Brett McKenzie helped me formulate gave a twist to the course that helped draw students in so that I could begin teaching them what I think history is. Across the 1990s, the course has gone from a one section offering that our department expected to draw perhaps 20 students once each year to a course that can now regularly fill two sections of 35-40 each semester. When you do the arithmetic, that means an enrollment growth in the range of 750% (from 20 a year to 150 each year). I would flatter myself in vain if I believed that increase in drawing power came strictly from my success in spreading the word on good history among Bryant students. The drawing power comes from a curriculum design that incorporates students’ expectations.

The unique features of History 364 have grown out of the hypermedia projects of the early 1990s. When web capabilities first appeared on campus in 1996, it seemed it should be a fairly easy transition simply to ‘move up’ to the web from the stand-alone desktop platforms we had been using. The idea that the move to the web would be easy proved illusory, but that is not the issue here. What is critical is that by the time we started moving toward the web, the truly unique features of the course had become well established. The hypermedia projects had developed into collaborative learning, and we had worked out a good many of the difficulties involved in transforming the traditional "history term paper" into something that might be described best as a publication, a presentation, or even a performance. The project assignment has developed considerably since 1996, but at its heart it still rests on these two foundations: collaborative learning and ‘public performance.’

Each student in the course is required to develop or participate in the development of a hypermedia project related to the course material. Those projects then become part of the course materials. Every project–good, bad, or indifferent–is published on the course web site, and the ‘good’ ones become an integral part of the teaching materials. They serve as models for students in subsequent classes, and many of these projects show up in class as part of lecture materials or on the syllabus as suggested materials. Currently, the course syllabus features a library of over 200 web projects produced since the spring semester of 1997. Not all projects truly warrant "prime time" viewing, but a surprising number are exceptional in their quality, both as multimedia and as history. The good ones offer a strong confirmation for my former Department Chair’s dictum about what it takes to teach history.

As Judy Litoff, Joe Ilacqua, and other colleagues planned for developing Distance Learning capabilities last year, the History of American Technology seemed an obvious testbed. Seemingly, the most basic technology for Distance Learning (in particular, a fully active on-line syllabus) was already in place, and once again it seemed a short leap to the development of a new prototype in curriculum design. Joe Ilacqua and Judy Litoff have already sketched some of our logistics problems–limited access to technology and non-synchronized term calendars–and Hal Records will address the technology issues. Here, I want to focus strictly on the problems of trying to carry innovative curriculum design across cultures.

The traditional survey portion of His 364 has translated to Distance Learning with NIS students fairly readily. Just as my colleagues predicted, the nine Distance Learning students proved voracious in their willingness to digest readings and engage in very sophisticated dialogue about the meaning and content of what they were reading. They truly are eager. They read ahead, and they delight in dialogue on what they have conquered in the reading. The troubling and unexpected issues that have shown up here can all be solved through the logistics arrangements and improving the technology access.

Given the ‘black boxes’ needed to iron out the communications issues, this traditional content teaching promises to become genuinely enjoyable. Many examples would illustrate the point, but one particular stands out in representing the kind of exchanges that have developed very quickly. Our lone Moscow student, Nick, launched into Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s More Work for Mother with a vengeance well before the semester started in the NIS. It was the only assigned reading he could find in any library or bookstore in Moscow. His first questions all involved the "Doctrine of Separate Spheres," and they led me on a merry chase. In the end, it turned out that Nick could not understand how there could be such a doctrine when Cowan did not ascribe it to any particular author, or trace the roots of her understanding of this ‘political doctrine’. It took several exchanges to get the question framed. When it finally did come clear to me, Nick’s question was embedded in a very long discourse on the theory and practice of history. It obviously went far beyond the book’s content. He was actually raising a question about the nature of the historian’s role as interpreter of events. He was surprised at the liberties Western historians take in applying explanations to their material. Perhaps the best way to see how this kind of cross-cultural educational issue can appear is simply to quote the central point from Nick’s final e-mail on the point:

When we reached this point in our exchanges, Nick and I had a basis for beginning the study of history.

Those early exchanges with Nick proved prophetic. The most striking feature of the exchanges with NIS students have appeared in this willingness to engage in reading and the eagerness with which very sophisticated questions pop out from the most unlikely places in the texts. As part of the collaborative learning environment of His 364, we had recruited six students to act as ‘mentors’ for the NIS students. These mentors proved remarkably adept at fielding these questions–much better than I. An example of this phenomenon appeared when I received a question about colonial marriage patterns, kinship, property rights, and dowries from a student in Minsk. Initially, I could not even understand the question. I put it to a Bryant student mentor, and he said he would try. In the end, his answer to the question unraveled its meaning for me.

Initially, I had conceived our Bryant mentors as technical assistants who would deal with the volume of routine e-mail traffic I expected from the NIS students. The technical limitations on e-mail traffic cut sharply into the need for any such technical assistance, but the mentors proved themselves far more important. When communication was established, they became much more than technical assistants answering routine questions. As an example of the kind of question our students deal with easily (but that I would find extraordinarily difficult to answer) consider this communication from Ludmila in Minsk:

Questions:

1. What stimulated the development of industrial innovation progress in the New World in the 17th -18th centuries?
2. Were there any facts to prove American Industrialization was based on European intellectual basis?
3. What do your think it would take the American to start industrialization if they knew nothing about the previous industrial achievements?

For me, such innocent questions would mean providing the entire first half the course via e-mail. For my students, it seemed easy to give an answer. In specific instances, these students genuinely did develop mentoring relationships rather quickly.

For this portion of our Distance Learning teaching experiment, the pathway is clear. The local mentors make it possible to imagine the development of quite solid exchanges in what I would term ‘directed studies’ based in peer mentoring. At only one point in the exchanges I monitored did it really become necessary to step in and provide clarification on the exchanges passing between students. In that case, the NIS student had posed a land tenure question that our Bryant mentor simply could not be expected to answer ["What’s the difference between a yeoman and a peasant?"]

For His 364, the real challenge in distance learning has come in the area that just a year ago seemed to offer the greatest promise: the web-based collaboration that is really at the heart of the course. What distinguishes His 364 from any other undergraduate survey on the same topic is the incorporation of collaborative projects. At this point, I have real doubts about whether we will find a quick solution to getting the NIS students to participate in this part of the course. Our faculty contact in Minsk reports that the delivery of CD ROM copies of the student projects proved very dispiriting. Apparently, the limitations of the technology in Minsk had kept students from actually browsing the library of student projects published on the course web site. When they got the opportunity to do so using a CD ROM copy, they became very discouraged about their ability to participate.

In this case, the cultural differences seem to lie entirely within the educational expectations. What motivates the Bryant students in their projects is the sense of participating in the construction of course content. Originally, I had thought it would be the idea of publication. That has not proven to be the case. Bryant students already know about web publishing. What causes them to put energy into their projects is the idea that next semester the students sitting in that classroom may be looking at their work on the screen. Effectively, peer pressure provides the motivation.

What makes that work for Bryant students seems (I am currently hypothesizing) to go against the grain very strongly among the NIS students. To set up the assignment for Bryant students, I tell them I do not care what software they use, who they collaborate with, or how they get it done. Their job is to get a web publication together on an approved topic. If nothing else, our students are very task oriented. I put a great deal into the topic approval process, but once they get a research question approved, they are on their own until they ask for help. I stop acting as ‘teacher’ and become the resource person.

Uniformly over the years, the response from Bryant students is that this ranks among their ‘best’ educational experiences. They say that the typical pattern in teaching with technology is to focus on the technological processes–learning to run the software. They also say this is their first experience with an open-ended ‘problem’ to solve using information technology. Many report the project as a ‘transforming’ experience.

At this point in our first course experience with Distance Learning in the NIS, it is impossible to know with real certainty how to get these students to feel the same kind of motivation. Once again, Nick in Moscow has proven himself the leader in getting at the point of the exercise. Recently, he furnished his own wrap up on the ‘directed study’, and his own course evaluation. His message provides an excellent summary and commentary on the points I have been making here:

I have quoted Nick’s entire message both for what it says, and for what he omits. His sense of the course falls squarely within the scope of the directed-studies model for Distance Learning. He feels he has gained in three areas: in understanding content, in understanding American culture, and in his language proficiency. What he does not mention is anything about what we saw as the central feature of the course as we designed the curriculum: The project and the on-line syllabus. I have offered to work with Nick in developing a project to load, suggesting that an essay expanding on this last e-mail would make a welcome addition to the student projects. At this point, I am waiting for his reply.

Overall, to this point, the strongest message that has come through in the History 364 Distance Learning experience is that we need to question the value of our ability to take advantage of technological capabilities to offer courses such as History 364. What makes it attractive to Bryant College students made it a logical candidate as a first offering in the NIS. As things have turned out, the collaborative learning, student-project features of the course simply have not translated meaningfully into an educational culture very different from Bryant’s.

Still, I should not close on a pessimistic note. Despite frustrations in this first experiment, I believe it is possible to take our classes into Distance Learning. Last week, a Bryant College student who was enrolled in History 364 last fall stopped by my office. He had not been among the six mentors dealing with the NIS students. He came by to talk to me because he thought I might want to know he had received an e-mail message from a student in Minsk. This NIS student had been browsing the History 364 projects and come across the Bryant student’s work on the history of stereo recording. The student in Minsk sent the message just to say how much he had liked the project. As my department chair told me, it is our job to get them to understand what it is. When we do, we can start to teach.