| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |

COVER STORY
Music & Art Humanities
Digital to the Core

What is studied in the Core Curriculum might change relatively slowly over the decades, but how students study the material has changed quite drastically in a few short years. Music and Art Humanities are prime examples of courses being transformed through departmental efforts to incorporate technology into teaching.

Music Humanities sings with online syllabuses, virtual tapes, Sonic Glossary

Ian Bent, the Anne Parsons Bender Professor of Music, was an early proponent of using technology in teaching and encourages other instructors of Music Hum to take advantage of how the Web can be woven into the course. In Bent's section, no textbook is required and students don't have to buy the CD set either, since everything they need to listen to is accessible through the "virtual tapes" online.

Bent starts the semester by handing his students a paper syllabus, then tells them not to use it since the syllabus posted on the course's Web page reflects continual changes. And it is not just a list of what is happening when. Listening assignments and musical examples play at the click of the mouse, and reading assignments have been scanned in so they can be printed out or read on-screen.

Take the week of September 27 to October 2, when the class studied the Benjamin Britten opera, Turn of the Screw. The online syllabus takes students to a brief biography of Britten and an introduction to his music, with links to Web sites about him. The entire opera is online; students may listen to it in sections or all at once. Four scenes are detailed with the lyrics as well as Bent's notes about what requires particular attention. All 213 pages of the Henry James story on which the opera is based appear with a click, as well as notes on the text. Terms such as "melisma" are explained by linking to the department's online Sonic Glossary.

In addition, the syllabus tells students to see the opera performed live at Lincoln Center by the New York City Opera and to write a report about it.

It's not that students get vastly more material than in the olden days of reserve reading and cassette tapes, but that the material is more accessible. The theory is that by making so much material more readily available, more students will do the reading and the repeat listening that the course demands. And with students having done that much preparation before class even convenes, class time may be devoted to a more in-depth discussion of the subject, rather than basic instruction.

The Sonic Glossary (featured in a Fall 1998 CCT story) is an online study tool developed over the last three years by the Music Hum staff, the library, the University's Computer Music Center and the Center for New Media Teaching and Learning. It indexes approximately 60 terms, from "A niente" to "Word painting." Clicking on a term brings up a study site where students find an explanation of the term, complete with pictures, diagrams and musical examples. The explanation can be read out loud on request. Those wanting to go more in-depth can sometimes enter "study rooms" where they can learn and hear more. For example, the discussion of "madrigal" runs more than a half-hour, is divided into three sections and includes study rooms as well as listening rooms where users can hear entire, uninterrupted madrigals rather than excerpts.

Beyond that, mini-courses are now making their debut, the first one being "Hearing Major and Minor," which Bent says is an area where students often have difficulty. The mini-courses take students through a half-dozen lessons and then quiz them. "It's a bit like a computer game," Bent says. "You choose what you hear, and then either your score is tallied or it will ask, 'Do you want to try that again?'"

Virtual tapes are musical collections custom-created by each Music Hum instructor that may be accessed anytime online. "They've become an integral part of Music Humanities," Bent says. In addition to the virtual tapes, an online reserve collection has transformed hundreds of performances from CDs and records into a click & listen collection.

When Bent wants his class to listen to something that has not yet been digitized, he takes it to the CCNMTL computer lab in Butler Library that helps faculty use new technologies in their courses. He feeds it into the computer himself, then asks the staff to post it on the course Web site.

One downside of the virtual tapes is that students can't take them with them when they graduate; this could be the end of the era of alumni reminiscing about the Core over an old Music Hum cassette.

In Art Humanities, digital technology affords a new look at old masterpieces

The art history and archaeology department delved into using technology in teaching long before the creation of the Center for New Media Teaching and Learning last year. In 1995, the department formed the Media Center for Art History, which has since created several digital, interactive projects for studying art and architecture.

"Our original mission was to animate the teaching of the Core Curriculum," says Stephen Murray, chair of the department. "Now we've expanded that."

	The Search Result page of the Art Hum database displays images discussed in class as thumbnails with descriptive labels. Students may access larger, high-quality images for study. To enhance the functionality of the database, multiple images may be called up simultaneously, allowing students to explore details of complex compositions or compare a variety of images.

The first project was to start digitizing the images alumni may remember buying as a boxed set, and by now more than 1,500 images may be found in the digital reserve collection. Both in class and at home, faculty and students can bring up images in a customized portfolio, explore them by zooming in on details, make notes and save them.

When the collection first started to be digitized five years ago, teaching assistants were shown the paintings online and often reacted with surprise. They would point to small details and say, "'We never noticed that before,'" says Robert Cartolano, manager of academic technologies at Academic Information Systems (AcIS). "It's more detailed than what they've seen because they can get closer to the image online than they can looking at the original because it's behind glass, they can't get too close, can't spend too much time.."

The Media Center is working on developing a searchable database that would scour the collection and bring together images by time period, location, medium, subject matter and other criteria.

The model for that database comes from another departmental project, "Objects of Desire: The Mediaeval Millennium," which is a database and Web course material exploring 300 medieval art objects from the Cloisters and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. With the permission of the Met, the department took its own digital photographs and combined them into an online, sometimes-animated tour.

The next step for the digital reserve collection, once it is searchable, will be to add biographical information, historical notes and other contextual material. The site is used both by students for individual study and by faculty in class via an LCD projector, although some quality is lost in the projection and nobody is yet teaching wholly from Web images.

"Digital images on screen are still not as good as slides," Murray says. "I predict slides and projectors will have a long, long life. Digital technology is a supplement."

The first monument studied in Art Humanities is the Parthenon. In addition to the images normally used, photographs and lantern slides dating back to the 1870s have been digitized and put into a Parthenon Web site.

The School of Athens project is another Web-based presentation used by Art Hum sections in smart classrooms and at home. Part of it, the Raphael Project developed by Professor David Rosand (the subject of a Spring 1997 CCT cover story), explores Raphael's frescos in the Vatican. A three-dimensional, computer-animated video narrated by Rosand takes students through the space and explains it in words and by graphic dissection. Period music that is studied in Music Hum plays in the background. The images are more interactive than just pictures on a computer screen. By rolling the cursor over an image, for example, the people represented are identified.

Another multimedia tool being used in Art Humanities is the Amiens Cathedral CD-ROM. It is a virtual reality tour of the cathedral composed from 15 hours of video and over 2,000 images taken on-site by Media Center staff in the summer of 1997. During the interactive tour, the architecture and many of the objects within are explained. "The CD.was incredibly informative," wrote one student on an Art Hum evaluation. "The movies and interactive demos made it fun to explore. I thought the road noise and birds chirping were a nice realistic touch, and the choir singing also really brought out the majesty and grandeur of the building." Another student wrote, "The CD, more than anything else, has fueled my desire to physically go to see the cathedral someday."

Beyond Art Hum, Murray has been spearheading an effort to create collaborative teaching materials over the Web by bringing together scholars who teach similar courses at different universities. Because the faculty members all have specialites, their contributing material to a site that all can use creates a more in-depth resource for all.

"I'm collegial. I like to work with other people," Murray says. "We each have our specialties that we brief the rest of the faculty on, and we're all stronger because of it."

That approach has long been used within a department or through conferences. Now, by reaching out to other schools and creating an integrated resource using the Internet, Murray is bringing collective scholarship to a new level.

Here's how it works. Several professors in the field are invited to a summer conference. Each makes a presentation on his or her area of expertise and afterwards submits to Columbia written and visual materials about it. Columbia's Media Center then digitizes and integrates the materials onto a Web site that belongs to and is used by all of the universities whose faculty contributed. The site is meant to be used as teaching, study and resource material, but not as a self-contained course.

A site on the Cathedral of Notre Dame was developed in this way from a 1998 summer session in Paris. This past June, scholars from the United States and England met at the University of Granada in Spain to develop materials for their courses on medieval architecture.

"Normally at Columbia that course is taught by Stephen Murray - he covers 1,000 years of history," says Maurice Luker, associate director of the Media Center. "Now it can be broken down to specific periods by faculty who have expertise in those periods."

| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 |