UNIVERSITY GAZETTE

 

[November 11, 1998 Page 13 (with a screen shot of one page of a lecture outline)]

Multimedia in class: Latest technology brings history back to the future

The stereotypical image of a history class consists of a tweed-jacketed man at a lectern, reading from yellowed notes to an indifferent class.

However in the course of an hour in John Semonche's "American History 1865-Present," students are likely to see caricatures of Teddy Roosevelt and graphs of election results, or contemporary photos of the Wild West.

Depending on the era they're studying, they might start class listening to period songs such as "Meet Me in St. Louis" (the turn of century) or "Brother Can You Spare A Dime?" (the Great Depression).

Semonche makes multimedia presentations an integral part of his classroom teaching. He thinks software-created presentations help students learn better.

"Our students have been brought up on visuals," Semonche said. "The more an idea or concept can be reinforced with pictorial representations, the better the chance that it will be remembered and used."

Semonche uses materials ranging from lecture outlines to maps and graphs. The cumulative result is a dynamic presentation that changes with the focus of the class.

"I am able to bring items up on the screen as I deal with them, so that students are never unsure as to where I am in the outline," he said.

"And I have a cordless mouse that enables me to do many things, including highlighting various portions of a map or graph and enlarging items on the screen," he added.

Semonche also has converted his lecture outlines, complete with sound and images, into web pages, so the class materials will be available twenty-four hours a day.

"My purpose in putting it on the web is to give students an opportunity to use the material in any way they find helpful," Semonche said. "For example, they can review the perspective questions at the end of each lecture, which we use as the springboard for discussion in the small sections that meet each Thursday or Friday."

To techno-skeptics who equate instructional technology with dumbing-down, Semonche may seem an unlikely proponent of multimedia presentations.

A respected Constitutional scholar who has been on the Carolina faculty since 1962, he regards his use of multimedia as a way "to make the subject come alive by reinforcing the dominant tendency to tell with a willingness to show and illustrate."

And while remarking that he doesn't have any hard data that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt his use of instructional works, his impression, based on his teaching experience, is that it works very well.

"Student response has been very, very good in terms of getting to learn in a way that is more than short-term memorization and in generating a level of student interaction," Semonche said.

His students support that assessment.

"I really like it," said Elora Belcher, a freshman in Semonche's class. "It [the presentation] just helps you understand the material better."

Belcher noted that the ease of use -- calling up materials with the click of a mouse -- frees Semonche to interact with the class.

"I've had classes where the professor writes a lot on the board with chalk," she said. "And sometimes they lose track of what they're saying because they concentrate on writing."

The Asheville freshman added the period music is particularly helpful because it engages her imagination.

"It's like a window into the period," she said. "The music helps us get a feel for what the people at the time were thinking and enjoying."

Belcher added she uses the web version of the lectures as a study guide for exams.

She noted that the web pages also would be useful for catching up if she missed class, but qualified that statement with perhaps the ultimate tribute to Semonche and his teaching: "But I don't miss class."

To learn how to use presentation software in the classroom, attend a Technology in Context Consortium workshop. Go to http://www.unc.edu/faculty/tic/ or call 2-9781 for more information.

 

Contributed by Kevin O'Kelly, Center for Instructional Technology