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COVER STORY
How new media technologies are changing the way students learn, teachers teach and the College is run
By Shira J. Boss '93

Technology is changing Columbia so quickly that even graduates who left campus last spring would be impressed by some of the new gadgetry and goings-on. When the class of 2000 was in school, its members still had to find a phone connection - or a public terminal - to surf the Web. Now students can sit on the Low steps with laptops and get their Internet connection out of the air, thanks to high-frequency radio waves that will soon allow a wireless connection in many other common areas, indoors and out.

Alumni used to have to come back to Morningside Heights to attend lectures and seminars, take a continuing education class or even tour the campus. Now they can tap into Columbia any time of the day, from anywhere with an Internet connection, and see and hear many events, both live and archived, or take a virtual tour (www.columbia.edu/acis/tour/js/index.html). Even those stuck in offices and feeling nostalgic for a moment on the steps can be transported there by a click, courtesy of a live webcam that broadcasts a view from Butler Library or a camera at the entrance to Low Library that lets the user zoom in on the Plaza or pan 180 degrees (www.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/research/qvtr/).

Digital culture has colonized the campus, and using the new technologies, the University is reaching out to the general public as far away as villages in Africa or corporate towers in Tokyo. Thanks to Fathom (www.fathom.com), a commercial site launched this fall, anyone with an Internet connection is able to soak up some of Columbia's offerings without any formal or physical connection to the campus or the school.

The University is starting to venture into offering e-courses and has started a non-profit company expressly to shepherd new media projects to the market and bring resulting revenue back home. That money is needed, because maintaining one of the fastest campus networks in the country and developing cutting-edge digital projects is costing the school tens of millions of dollars every year.

It's an investment University leaders view as essential to Columbia's future. "We're undergoing one of the most profound revolutions in access to knowledge," says Provost Jonathan Cole '64.

A new center was opened last year to help professors take advantage of what digital media can do for their teaching (www.ccnmtl.columbia.edu). To accommodate the increased use of new media in the classroom, many rooms themselves have been transformed into "smart classrooms" that come alive at the touch of a control-panel screen.

"We're seeing more and more that technology is very closely tied with the curriculum," says Robert Cartolano SEAS '86, manager of academic technologies at Academic Information Systems (AcIS), which provides a variety of central computing services to the entire Columbia community and manages the high-speed campus network, as well as computer labs and terminal clusters located throughout the campus. Courses in the Core Curriculum, as well as many others, are not only using digital resources but are being interconnected through them.

"The only thing that's not online is the gym," quipped Cartolano. "You still have to go sweat."

The University's efforts to develop new media fall into two categories: those used for teaching and learning, and those meant for outreach and profit. In this issue we will focus on the teaching and learning aspects, with the next issue of CCT highlighting some of the major commercial initiatives.

Dozens of digital media projects are blossoming in nearly every corner of the campus, and no report could hope to cover them all. To explore what is going on, readers may utilize the links in these articles or browse Columbia's Web site (www.columbia.edu), the College-specific site (www.college.columbia.edu) or the College alumni site (www.college.columbia.edu/alumni/).

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