by Dianne McCorry, ITS
It's not unusual to see students leaving the Science
Center late at night. It's not unusual to see a professor
working into the wee hours. What was unusual during the
spring '96 semester was to see one Physics professor leaving every night
at those late hours. What would inspire someone to spend
all of her evening hours away from family and hearth? Instructional
Technology! Yue Hu, Assistant Professor of Physics, has
discovered an avenue of teaching that inspires her and
her students and has led to a major change in the way she
has prepared for her course in Basic Concepts in Physics
(Physics 106). Although instructional technology is usually
approached in stages and most instructors add it to their
programs in a more gradual and relaxed manner, Professor
Hu undertook the bold task of converting an entire course
from transparency projection to a more multi-media platform
while the course was in progress.
Hu spent hours preparing a computer-based presentation
for every lecture and discussion section of the semester.
These electronic slides, unlike traditional overhead diagrams,
include layers of information and animation that appeal
to logical sequence and trigger the eye and memory to see
and remember in a more orderly way. Created with the presentation
application Adobe Persuasion, the slides included not only
text, but also graphics, sound, digital video, animation,
and layering. Once created, these slide shows can then
be saved in a "frozen" format and viewed with a Persuasion
Player application that can be freely distributed. Each
lecture's set can then be placed on a networked file server
for students to download to their own computers for review.
The payoff? A class of seventy two students with a greater
depth of understanding and a bonus of spontaneous applause
for Professor Hu during the last class, which brought a
wide smile to this modest teacher's face.
Here is a sample Persuasion
Player file created by Prof Hu. It is approximately 800 KB.
Windows users: Before downloading this file, you'll need to verify
some settings in one of your helper applications. Open Stuffit Expander for
Windows. Choose Options, Cross-Platform. Under Save Macintosh files in MacBinary
Format, choose Never. Click OK.
To view this document, you will need the Persuasion Player application. If
you don't have it already:
Macintosh users can download the free Mac
version of Persuasion Player from the Adobe web site. PowerMacs should
download the file called Persuasion Player 3.02 for Power Macintosh.
Windows users can download the free Windows
version of Persuasion Player from the Adobe web site. You should
download the file called Persuasion Player 3.02 for Windows 3.xx.
Professor Hu says that the electronic slides enhance her lectures because she
can introduce the information in smaller and cumulative parts. "Sometimes, what
you can remove is as important as what you are adding. On an overhead, I can
add features to a graph, but removing them for "instant reply" is much easier
when you can go back one layer on a slide instead of rubbing out on a
transparency." While the completed slides are colorful and animated and have
a professional appeal to the eye, the control over sequence and timing allows
enormous amounts of information which might appear in one textbook diagram to
be digested in manageable segments.
What do the students think of this impressive collection of slide shows?
A short survey of the class yielded results that would remove any doubt of
the value of the time Professor Hu invested in preparing for this class. While
finding a high comfort level herself with this semester's endeavors, Hu wanted
to make sure her students liked her methods as well. A written survey polled
sixty-four students. While lectures, discussions, homework and solution sets
were all available, the majority of access was for the lectures themselves,
most often for clarifying lecture points. Students often viewed the presentations
from Macs in Wellesley's public clusters, but almost fifty percent used their
own computers in their dorm rooms most frequently, typically one to two times
each week. An impressive eight-seven per cent of the class ranked the usefulness
of the lecture slides as "very useful" in a five-point range from "not useful
at all" to "very useful," and over ninety-five per cent felt they would recommend
the use of instructional technology for their other classes.
While slide shows can be assembled with just an introductory knowledge of
Persuasion, the complexity of the topics covered in Physics 106 demanded unusual
perseverance and dedication. Creating them required a Mac (or a Windows PC),
at least 4MB of RAM for Persuasion, 33 MB of free hard disk space, and easy
access to a scanner to digitize and edit graphics.
Yue Hu's interest and use of technology didn't happen overnight, and Persuasion
isn't her first use of an electronic presentation program to stimulate interest
and understanding for her class. Claiming that her electronic skills initially
did not extend beyond word processing, Hu says that her first interest was
generated by an ITS workshop given in 1990 by Kenny Freundlich on the authoring
tool HyperCard. "I kept saying, 'Stop Kenny! How did you do that again?'" she
chuckles, remembering her first venture. Kenny says, "All she needed was a
few HyperCard pointers and tips. After that, she basically taught herself everything
else." Her first HyperCard stack, created for a Hughes grant in 1991, illustrated
concepts of projectile motion, and allowed students to set a launch angle, "launch" one
or two projectiles, and then click on any point in the resulting graph to see
the projectile's position and velocity. Later, she developed stacks on traveling
waves and standing waves that features impressive animations, as well as a
stack which illustrated projection of a vector, addition of vectors, multiplication
by scalars, and unit vectors. Yet another stack explained free-fall motion
and uniform circular motion. She was awarded the grant and others in subsequent
years and began adding this technology to her lectures.
Macintosh users can download and view Yue Hu's HyperCard
stack animating standing waves. It is aproximately 300 KB.
To view this document, you will need either the HyperCard application or
the HyperCard player application.
If you don't have it already, Mac users can download HyperCard player from Apple's ftp site.
While HyperCard requires a certain amount of scripting to create animations,
presentation programs like Persuasion allow users to add animation, sound,
branching, and video clips with a few mouse clicks. Moreover, unlike HyperCard,
color is fully integrated into Persuasion. Hu discovered Persuasion when she
attended an ITS multimedia workshop in January of 1996 which included lectures,
hands on practice, and curriculum discussions on using new technologies. In
addition to ITS staff, other faculty members already proficient in the use
of these tools taught various ways that they had used them and connected the
results to their own fields. Naomi Ribner, Assistant Professor in the Art Department,
introduced Adobe Photoshop, a program for editing still images, which Hu says
she has found extremely useful in creating the graphics she needs for adding
to her slides. Professor Mary Coyne of the Biology Department, one of the first
faculty members to create computer-based slide shows accessible to students
on servers, also shared her tips in using Photoshop and Persuasion. With only
two weeks left before the new semester, Hu decided that she had found another
medium for presenting material to her class.
Hu credits the availability of technology at Wellesley for making her endeavors
successful, noting that this level of accessibility is not present in many
schools. The networked dorms and public computer clusters allow every student
to review digital presentations easily. Yue Hu's concern for her students and
her enthusiasm for making her material interesting to them is apparent. While
her mastery of current technologies is an avenue she has chosen to express
this, it is obvious that the driving force is her dedication to her students
and to her profession.
Be sure to take a look at Yue
Hu's Home Page
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