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by Pat Carrillo, ITS
When Tom Cushman came to Wellesley College six years ago,
he knew that the teaching tools for mass media and communications
were on the crest of a tsunami-like wave of the future.
Tom Cushman, Assistant Professor of Sociology
Cushman, who teaches the sociology of popular culture and
sociology of mass media and communications, realized he had
better find a way to use the newest computer technology as
a teaching tool, or else watch his students of the '90s tread
water as the mass media surfed its way to bigger seas. He
was asking his students to write about visual images from
television, films, and videos, but they could not include
such images in their papers as easily as they could those
from the print media.
Cushman admits he was concerned about the initial time
commitment necessary to pursue his goal of integrating digital
video into the curriculum but decided to take the plunge.
In the spring of 1991, he used early video digitizing hardware
in his Macintosh to capture still frames from Nazi films
for his lectures on propaganda.
Excited by his students' reaction to this experiment, Cushman
wanted to make video digitizing techniques available to them.
That meant finding funds, so in November 1991 Cushman submitted
an Instruments in Laboratory Improvement grant proposal to
the National Science Foundation (NSF), with a commitment
from the College to match NSF funding. His proposal to create
an embryonic "Visual Image Laboratory for the Social Sciences" was
successful.
In the fall of 1993, Kenny Freundlich, Manager of Advanced
Technology Applications, used the $20,000 grant to set up
a lab for Cushman's students in the Language Lab in Margaret
Clapp Library. By that point, digitizing technology had advanced
to allow capture and playback of video at rates approaching
thirty frames per second. Three complete workstations were
installed, each of which included a Macintosh Centris 650;
SuperMac VideoSpigot digitizer; Sony VCR; and a Pioneer laserdisc
player. Cushman dubbed the space "VILAB" - Visual Image Laboratory.
No longer restricted to quotes and graphs to illustrate their
ideas, Cushman's students could now digitize brief video
clips of newscasts, films, and advertisements and easily
insert them into their Microsoft Word documents. Instead
of turning in printed papers, students would now turn in
disks to Cushman, who could read them on screen in his office,
write and save his comments on their disks, and return them
to the students.
Since even a ten second video clip with sound takes up
1.5 megabytes of storage space (more than can fit on a conventional
floppy diskette), students used special magneto-optical (MO)
disks which store 100 times more information (and which require
a special drive to be read). Thicker than its floppy cousin,
the MO disk also carries a heftier price tag ($40 per cartridge),
which the students pick up. Because there were only three
workstations for a class of fifty, students work in teams
of two or three for Cushman's assignments, sharing the cost
of the MO disk and often selling it at course end.
Cushman reports that the necessary team project approach
had an unexpected positive effect on students. They learned
to manage conflicts and gained increased respect for each
other. One student wrote in a class evaluation that she learned
to leave her ego at the door and gained confidence in the
abilities of her classmates.
Another unanticipated bonus the project created was improvement
in the written quality of student papers. Cushman believes
students doing VILAB assignments work harder in their analyses.
One assignment involved comparing the structure of a contemporary
female "buddy film" (Thelma and Louise) with images
of a classic male buddy film (Lethal Weapon). Sounds
fun. But students were not able to watch films as entertainment,
explains Cushman. Viewing and reviewing video footage, using
their eyes as telescopic lenses, magnifying images to gain
a broader perspective from which to analyze the contents--all
while jotting down notes--is real work. In other projects,
Cushman has asked students to:
- analyze the television coverage of the downing of KAL
Flight 007 to show how it constructs a moral order;
- examine Beavis and Butthead through the lens of cultural
criticism and cultural theorists such as Herbert Gans and
John Fiske;
- compare the TV coverage of four different military interventions
(the Vietnam War, the Grenada intervention, the invasion
of Panama, and the Persian Gulf War) to show how the proximity
of journalists to the combat affects the social construction
of the reality of war.
For those who might argue that students produce glitz and not
content, Cushman maintains that the core assignment of the
course remains solid, analytical,
well-written papers. "Successful papers use digitized video only when it effectively
expresses the ethnographic feel of a visual text," says Cushman. "Emphasis in
evaluation remains on the quality and clarity of the written
content."
In their class evaluations, Cushman's students are positive about the use
of technology in spite of the heavy work load, and enthused about their first
and, for many, only opportunity to work with this technology in their sociology
courses. Freundlich believes the success of this project is due, in part, to
Cushman's pioneering attitude towards technology and to his willingness to
take risks in his teaching. Both Cushman and Freundlich believe the application
has possibilities beyond mass media courses. Cushman's demonstrations for other
faculty members have drawn considerable interest. Margaret Ward of the German
Department had her students digitize clips of German cinema from the silent
era in their final papers this fall. This spring, students in Ward's writing
course on views of Berlin will also be incorporating digital video in their
papers. Michèle Respaut of the French Department hopes to see French
students using the technology next year. Two more VILAB workstations will be
added to the Language Lab before the end of February.
This spring, Cushman will be introducing digital video into his course on
contemporary social theory. Students will read the works of the well-known
social theorist, Erving Goffman, and use video cameras to collect ethnographic
data which illustrate Goffman's concepts and theories. This data will then
be digitized and analyzed on the VILAB Macs. In a new extradepartmental course
on propaganda and persuasion in the twentieth century (to be taught with Assistant
Professor of Art Pat Berman), students will use VILAB Macs to digitize and
analyze the propaganda and persuasive strategies of national cultures and social
movements.
Cushman's work has not gone unnoticed. This August, he will present a workshop
at the American Sociological Association annual meeting entitled "Teaching
the Sociology of Culture with Computers." Based on the success of his students'
projects, Cushman is optimistic that VILAB will grow into a multimedia computer
lab for all the social sciences at the College, enabling Wellesley students
to continue to "catch the wave."
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