The College hopes to complete construction on its first completely integrated audiovisual and computerized classroom by the start of Fall term 1994, according to Malcolm Brown, director of academic computing at the College.
Dartmouth Hall Room 217 will be transformed into a teaching facility capable of displaying both multimedia and traditional audiovisual materials, according to an article written by Brown in Interface, the Dartmouth Computing Services magazine.
"We are building the first classroom in the arts and sciences at the College to integrate both digital and traditional media capabilities," Brown said in an interview yesterday.
"A number of classrooms have overheads and a number of classrooms have projectors for computer screens, but there are no classrooms with both types of projections," he said.
"We have great ambitions for this new classroom," Brown added. "We hope it will be fantastically successful."
The classroom will contain a number of technological innovations for teaching, Brown said.
Some of these new additions include a large screen projection system for displaying computer and video presentations and a "media cabinet," which will contain a VCR, a cassette deck, an amplifier and connections to the data and cable TV networks, according to Brown's article.
Other alterations in the classroom will be a new podium to support the use of Macintosh PowerBook computers by professors, lighting control improvements, new projection screens and blackboard space and easily accessible for storage space for slide and overhead projectors, Brown wrote.
The Room 217 project is a prototype, Brown said. There are currently no plans for additional cutting-edge classrooms to be built.
"Right now, we are devoting all of our energy to making 217 happen," he said. "We'll do it now and then take a step back to assess how well we did. Then we will move on."
The new classroom will be used primarily by the language departments located in Dartmouth Hall, Brown said.
The chairs of the various language departments were involved in the planning of Room 217, along with the Office of Instructional Services, the Language Resource Center and Computing Services, according to Lynn Higgins, chair of the department of French and Italian.
Higgins said French 8, an intermediate language course, would utilize the new features of the classroom.
The class will use "Philippe," a multimedia program that makes use of videotape of Paris and Macintosh computers to take students on an interactive tour of Paris in French, Higgins said.
Before this classroom was constructed, using such a program would have been impossible.
"It's an interesting and pedagogically sound way to teach language at that level," Higgins said. "It will not be a different course, it will just be using new materials."
Higgins said Philippe could be considered a cutting edge material.
"I'm excited to see this and what can be done in the future," she said. "We will be looking for more effective ways to learn the language in realistic ways. If you can bring Paris into the classroom, so much the better."
Marsha Swisloski, chair of the Spanish and Portuguese department, said she was also excited about having the classroom as a new teaching tool.
"I think it is a very interesting development," Swisloski said. "I'm looking forward to seeing what possibilities will be available to us to integrate into the classroom."
Steven Scher, chair of the German department, said he did not foresee the German department using the new classroom very often.
"Of course I am excited about the new facility, but the proof is in the pudding," Scher said. "We may not use it now, but in five to ten years, we may use it to its full potential."
However, Scher said he did not think the new classroom would change the way German is taught at the College.
"It doesn't replace the actual teacher," Scher said. "None of this stuff does. We need an actual, living teacher in the classroom, just like we need actual, living students in the classroom."
The idea to build new technologically updated classrooms was developed last Fall by the Subcommittee on Classroom Development and Utilization, which Brown chairs.
The subcommittee was established in early 1993 by the Facilities Advisory Committee to assess the state of the College's classrooms, Brown said.
The Facilities Advisory Committee monitors the state of all of Dartmouth's buildings and decides which departments and organizations receive space on campus.