Wellesley College Information Services staff work closely with faculty to explore a wide range of software and hardware that might be incorporated into the curriculum.

Our philosophy stresses the simple but oft-forgotten idea that technology is only useful when it enhances teaching and learning. We strive to make technology fade into the background so that faculty and students can focus on their work. We take on projects in all sizes, and favor reusable tools and methods that have broad applicability across the curriculum.

We also emphasize projects that increase accessibility to course-related materials. For example, many departments make use of digitized images on the network; others, particularly foreign languages, take advantage of digitized audio and occasionally digital video as well. These resources are available 24x7 from all computers on the Wellesley campus network (and, in some cases, from off-campus as well with a password).

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Many of the most exciting projects are developed during the summer. Since 1997, we have directed a program which matches interested faculty with teams of carefully selected and trained student interns. The internships were funded for two years by a grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation, and then by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Currently, the internships are funded by a generous gift from Betsy Wood Knapp '64. Almost all of the projects described on this site were developed with summer instructional technology interns. Click on Humanities, Social Sciences, or Sciences to see brief descriptions of over one hundred projects developed by summer interns.

Internship Description
Intern Binder

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. . . FirstClass . . .

Web sites are not the answer to every course need. Since 1999, many faculty have used the FirstClass conferencing system to support their classes. More than eighty-five percent of Wellesley courses have a FirstClass conference. Faculty and students use these conferences not only for announcements, discussions, and distribution of readings and syllabi, but also for submission of student assignments; easy links to web resources; collaborative work, digital images, audio, and video; chat (particularly useful for foreign languages); and even "virtual" take home tests. Wellesley faculty and students express very high rates of satisfaction with FirstClass as a Course Management System (CMS); they are particularly pleased with how little time it takes to learn to use it. IS staff also appreciate its speedy performance as well as its relative low cost for hardware, software, and administrative time.

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. . . Knapp Center . . .

Much of the accelerated development of instructional technology projects is due to the Knapp Media and Technology Center , which opened its doors to the Wellesley community in September 1997. The Center incorporates foreign language facilities, course support services, and media services, but the forty-three computing and audiovisual workstations are its most visible presence. It also houses a large format printer; group project rooms (one of which includes a videoconferencing setup); special areas for video editing (both conventional and nonlinear); and a television studio. In June of 1998, the Knapp Center co-hosted the New Media Centers annual conference. The Center has also sponsored Faculty Fellows (from both within Wellesley or from another institution) for a semester of work as an adjunct member of the staff.

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. . . Computing Labs. . .

Wellesley College has staffed and unstaffed Computing Labs that provide a generous array of computing resources, free of charge, to students, faculty and staff. Located in the Science Center and Pendleton East, these labs contain a mix of Windows and Macintosh computers, duplex laser printers, scanners, and stations where users can connect their own laptops. In addition to all of the college-supported academic software, the labs also provide a standard suite of software for email, web browsing, word processing, and multimedia design.

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. . . Classrooms . . .

Of course, many of these projects would be useless without appropriate levels of technology in Wellesley's classrooms. As of Fall 2005, 67 of 82 classrooms spaces (82%) have at least an instructor computer and projection equipment. Most of these spaces are equipped with an overhead projector, a slide projector, a VCR, a DVD/Laserdisc player, and a document camera. (Ten rooms also have computers for the students.) Details on classroom computer and A/V equipment are kept up to date in the online Campus Calendar system. In January 2001, the newly renovated Pendleton East building opened. Three computer classrooms are located on PNE's new first floor and contain state-of-the-art technology at individual student workstations. A video-conferencing facility is featured in one of the case-study rooms permitting interactions beyond the College gates.

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Faculty often have generated ideas for summer projects during January workshops in instructional technology. Since 1996, Information Services has held two-to-four day workshops for faculty to introduce them to specific applications and tools that facilitate the learning process. In partnership with the Learning and Teaching Center, IS also sponsors lunchtime "shop talks" where faculty present their projects to their colleagues.

More information on January Workshops

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QuickTime Overview
Digitizing Audio
Digitizing Video-Using iMovie and iDVD
MediaCleaner Pro Overview and Settings Suggestions
Using ProTools for High-End Digital Audio Editing

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. . . Ancient (1973 -1981): Wherein early vision pays big dividends . . .

From 1973 to 1977 the sole source of computing resources for academic use was the Dartmouth TimeSharing System (DTSS) which was accessed via a handful of rented teletypewriter terminals located in the basement of Green Hall and in the Margaret Clapp Library. Two events in 1977 spurred the development of academic computing at Wellesley: the completion of the new Science Center, and a grant from the National Science Foundation. The Science Center included space for a machine room and terminal room; the NSF matching grant and a generous discount from the Digital Equipment Corporation made possible the purchase of a DECSYSTEM-2040 timesharing system, at that time DEC's most powerful computer.

With state-of-the-art equipment in place, Wellesley applied successfully to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for financial support for faculty computer literacy programs. The Sloan grant made possible three intensive faculty workshops: 1978 - Computing in the Social Sciences, 1979 - Computing in the Sciences; and 1980 - Computing in the Humanities. The emphasis of these workshops was on integrating the computer into the curriculum. The Sloan project was highly successful, training forty members of the faculty and creating a ripple effect that saw 135 faculty and 1261 (58.2%) students using the computer during the 1980-81 academic year. The enormous growth in computer use was attributable to the burgeoning enrollments in computer science courses and to the number of faculty and students who had discovered the wonders of word processing and electronic mail.

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. . . Middle Ages (1981-1988): Wherein Wellesley fiddles while ROM burns . . .

Unfortunately, computer use had increased to the point where the DEC-2040 was saturated. Slow response time discouraged many faculty from continuing to give assignments requiring use of the computer. During the summer of 1981 the College upgraded the computer in memory, processor power, and disk space. Use of the system immediately resurged. In 1983-84 1662 students (72.6%) and 223 faculty used the computer, once again straining the limits of the central computing facilities and the patience of faculty, students, and support staff alike.

Meanwhile, out in the real world, a revolution was taking place - the Microcomputer Revolution. Word of the wonders of doing word-processing on relatively inexpensive "personal computers" in one's own home or office soon reached campus, and was music to the ears of faculty who can become addicted to word processing, but not to queuing up for a terminal in a public lab and then enduring slow system response time. In many cases the off-the-shelf graphics-oriented instructional software (some even in color!) available for microcomputers was superior to that available for general time-sharing systems, so over time much of the instructional software on Wellesley's timesharing computer fell into disuse as individual faculty and departments acquired their own PCs and software.

Every revolution has its down side. When everyone used a single computer, training, documentation, and support needs were minimal. Files were backed up on a regular basis, and could be restored from tape when disaster befell. Electronic mail provided a convenient mechanism for requesting services and reporting problems. The evolution to a stand-alone PC environment made access to computing more convenient, but broke down the technical support system that had served the academic community so long and so well. It also put a tremendous strain of the support staff in that it was no longer enough to know the ins and outs of the central timesharing system; one also needed to master various PC operating systems and applications software.

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. . . Renaissance (1988-present): Wherein we pull it all together . . .

Acting on the advice of the Technology Advisory Committee (TAC), Wellesley College initiated two major capital projects that burnished its technological luster:

• the campus-wide network project to connect rooms (voice, data, and video) in all academic and residential buildings to campus and Internet computing resources;
  
• the Faculty Workstation Project to provide each faculty member with a networked computer.
  

The campus-wide network grew gradually, beginning with connections in 1988 to Green Hall, Founders, Pendleton, the Science Center, Clapp, and Jewett. Today, the network has become so ubiquitous that it reaches virtually every building on campus. A key component of that expansion - the presence of the network in the residence halls - began in the fall of 1993 with the first high-speed connections to dorm common computing rooms. A year later, students were able to connect from their own dorm rooms.

The Faculty Workstation Project began in the summer of 1988, as fifty-five members of academic departments started using Zenith PCs and Macintosh SEs. Today, every professor, instructor, and lecturer in every academic department has a desktop computer, and the College replaces computers every 3.5 years (occasionally at more frequent intervals.)

The real payoff from this investment came as classrooms were renovated to include computers and projection equipment. In 1989, Wellesley created its first "classroom of the future" -- the Math Graphics Classroom in SCI 257, with a computer for the instructor as well as fifteen computers for students. In the summer of 1994, as part of the complete renovation of Founders, Information Services installed new audiovisual equipment into almost every classroom in the building; many classrooms also received computers. As of fall 1998, across campus there were nine classrooms with student and instructor stations, as well as twenty-six classrooms with an instructor's computer.

What did faculty and students do with these rich computing resources? Some instructional computing projects have been quite simple. The electronic Bulletin program, first introduced in the fall of 1990, allowed students to engage in electronic discussions with faculty and with their peers outside of class hours. Other projects took greater advantage of the graphics and ease-of-use of desktop computers. Some faculty found instructional software developed commercially or at other academic institutions. Director of the Writing Program Wini Wood, for example, adapted the Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment developed at the University of Texas to the Writing 125 curriculum in 1992.

Other faculty with more time to invest used authoring tools such as HyperCard and Toolbook to create specialized software for their courses, such as HyperChinese (1993) and Pesnia (1994). Tom Cushman, Professor of Sociology, used another approach which leveraged the power of multimedia. Confronted with his mass media students' inability to include "quotations" of such media in typewritten papers, he set up a digital video lab in 1993 to allow students to include digitized clips from films and television in their papers. Biology professor Mary Coyne pioneered the use of computer-based presentations in 1993. The following year, digitized Art History images stored on network file servers completely changed the way students studied for Art 100 exams.

Wellesley's use of the World Wide Web began in January 1994 as a "corridor-wide information system", which became campus-wide that fall. At first a tool for disseminating information (much of it administrative), Wellesley's web server eventually became one more tool for instructional computing in the fall of 1996 as the common social science statistics course became the first course to distribute lab assignments and other course material via the web. By January 1998, there were more than sixty Wellesley courses with dedicated web sites. An increasing number of faculty paired up with student interns each summer to create graphically enticing (and academically challenging) web pages. By the spring of 2005, the number of course-related web sites was over three hundred fifty.

Browse through these pages to get a flavor of what Instructional Technology is like here at Wellesley. The projects described evolved from the cooperative efforts of the Faculty and IS staff of Wellesley College.

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Kenneth Freundlich
Kenny Freundlich is the Director of the Instructional Technology group within Information Services, providing leadership and planning for instructional projects. He directs a staff whose responsibilities include the Knapp Media and Technology Center, computer installation and repair, summer instructional technology interns, and instructional use of FirstClass (Wellesley's email/conferencing system and course management system.) He played a major role in creating Wellesley's first web server (then known as the "Campus Wide Information System") in early 1994. While he cannot tell the difference between mauve and orange, he can distinguish a tenor saxophone from an alto in three notes or less, and is always eager to learn more about digital audio. In Spring 2006, Kenny co-taught Music 276 — From Cylinders to CDs to Cyberspace: American Popular Music and Technology with Tamar Barzel. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1983. He has been at Wellesley College since 1990.

David O'Steen
David O'Steen serves as senior advisor on all web technical issues, databases, and cross-platform projects--as he says, "the crosser the better!" He has been at Wellesley since 1993.

Jarlath Waldron
Jarlath Waldron is the Director of Media Technology. He has worked and taught in media technology at Boston University, Lesley College and MIT. He received his undergraduate degree from Ireland's National College of Art and Design and Trinity College, and did his graduate studies at MIT, focusing on film/video and holography. His work has been shown in this country and in Europe. Jarlath has been at Wellesley College since 1994.

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Created by: Tuyet Nguyen '01 and Erin Foti '04
Maintained by: Kenny Freundlich
Information Services
Date Created: December 29, 2003
Last Modified: August 15, 2007
Expires: June 1, 2008