Multimedia curricula enters higher education

America has long been in love with the infinite possibilities afforded to us by new technologies. We love to hear how some day our TVs will be interactive, our newspapers electronic, and our refrigerators “smart” enough to order the groceries. But will we still be enamored of these technologies if indeed they become tomorrow’s reality?

Too often we create the technologies first and ask the important questions later. The corporate world isn’t a likely place to find social criticism as part of the development process, because most companies that wish to remain viable today cannot afford to engage in that kind of long-term deep-think. In the business of making products that make money, they’re now finding themselves competing not only within their own industry but with powerful outsiders as well, as the digital convergence continues to gain steam.

For those concerned with the social as well as the technological aspects of new media, the educational system may offer refuge. Dangling the carrot of no product deadlines and no particular corporate religion — mixed with a strong dose of intellectual dialog on the effects of new media — some of the most prestigious learning institutions in the country are offering master’s and doctoral-level programs specifically focused on interactive telecommunications, multimedia applications, digital video and interactive television, and human interface design.

What these universities offer is an opportunity to engage in constructive play, where the curious are encouraged to experiment and implement their visions of the future for a critical audience.

THE EAST COAST TRIUMVIRATE

Although the West Coast is a technology haven for many of the converging industries, it is the East Coast that provides the most established learning programs in these new forms of communications. Renowned institutions, including New York University, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, offer advanced degrees in new media technologies and interactive telecommunications.

While there are many other excellent degree-granting technology programs throughout the United States today, these three are most representative of the different teaching philosophies and cultures within the technology-and-education community.

Each university’s curriculum takes a different cut at the technology itself, concentrating in varying degrees on production, design, content or research. But all have one thing in common: a desire to see students go beyond their love affair with the technology itself, so that they can better focus on its potential merit to society.

Hands-on production at NYU. One of the oldest programs to concentrate on multimedia applications is the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, which was established in 1979, in part under the guidance of Red Burns, one of the founding directors of the Alternate Media Center and the chair of ITP since 1983.

Notably the school shares residence with NYU’s well-regarded film school in the Tisch School of the Arts, which, Burns emphasizes, is important because “we are primarily interested in digital technologies as creative tools.”

The basic philosophy of the two-year program is “understanding craft and content,” according to Burns, who began her career as a documentary filmmaker in the early days of the Film Board of Canada. The school reflects her early interest in independent film work, offering students at the university as well as people in the outside community many opportunities to experiment with interactive television.

Jumping right into it. The Electronic Neighborhood project, for instance, is an interactive cable television program that is a multimedia bulletin board. It is interactive in two ways: Viewers at home with touchtone phones can call a number at NYU and actually control the TV show from their home, navigating through images stored in a video server, for instance, by pressing certain buttons on the phone. At this point, only one home viewer at a time can control the show via the phone, while other viewers watch. Anyone, anywhere, however, can send information into the Electronic Neighborhood virtual environment by fax, modem or network. The experiment tests interface design, interactivity and interoperability issues among computers, cable television and telephone networks.

Encouraged to fail. Obviously, the school takes a hands-on approach to studying interactive media. Students enrolled in the program spend a lot of time actually producing, working with hardware and software to build new media titles and interactive art installations. Currently an installation designed by students Sharleen Smith and Mark Avnet is on view at the Cooper Hewitt Museum as part of their Mechanical Brides exhibit.

Unlike what often happens in the corporate environment, students are “encouraged to fail” as they explore what is possible with the emerging technologies, according to Burns. Most of the students walk away from the program with a final product or thesis, an interactive media demo that they can present to prospective employers. As one former student says, “This is the place where multimedia wannabes find out if they have the right stuff.”

NOT JUST PRODUCTS, BUT CONNECTIONS RESULT

Students not only leave with a product under their arm, but also with some fairly powerful industry connections. In addition to Burns, the faculty of ITP includes, among others, Pat O’Hara, the associate director of the Alternate Media Center and senior production faculty; John Thompson, credited with writing and designing Lingo, the scripting language for MacroMind Director; Kenny Miller, who is working on new interactive technology applications at MTV; Jeff Jones, who is currently electronic media coordinator at the American Museum of Natural History; Stacy Horn, founder of Echo, an electronic bulletin board service; and Daniel O’Sullivan, who is considered the pioneer of navigable movies on the Macintosh.

O’Sullivan created the interactive public access program called Dan’s Apartment, which is shown on cable TV and was lionized in the pages of the New Yorker a couple of years back. His work in this field spurred Apple to create several navigable video prototypes, including one that tours the Golden Gate Bridge and another in which the viewer can walk through a Russian palace. Many industry leaders such as Michael Mills of Apple’s Advanced Technology Group are affiliated with the program as well, and have taught at the school.

Good internships. In addition to forging relationships on campus, the school offers a strong internship program, often placing students at such companies as Apple, MTV the Nynex Media Lab, Microsoft and The Voyager Company during summer break.

“My career absolutely advanced because of attending NYU,” says Abbe Don, an interactive installation artist who is now working at Kaleida Labs. “I got a level of hands-on training that I couldn’t find elsewhere. I got to play around with different interfaces, different computers. I created my own laserdisc.” Based on Don’s work at NYU, she received an internship in Apple’s Human Interface Group, where she began working on the Guides project, a research project that explored the usefulness of human-like characters or “agents” in interactive media.

She then went back to NYU and produced her thesis, an interactive laserdisc, which was the prototype for “We Make Memories,” a media installation that became Don’s entrée into the field. After graduating she became an independent consultant to such companies as Apple and Paramount.

HARVARD CONCENTRATES ON INTERACTION BETWEEN TECHNOLOGY AND EDUCATION

While NYU focuses on design and production work, Harvard’s Technology In Education (TIE) program takes a more theoretical approach, concentrating on the interaction between the two disciplines.

The one-year program, offered within the department of Human Development within the Graduate School of Education, offers students a range of courses designed to provide both a solid theoretical foundation and practical experience in areas related to effective use of educational technologies, including conceptions of teaching and learning, principles of instructional design and evaluation, and the process and effects of incorporating new technologies into education settings.

Production skills not required. Unlike NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, the TIE program does not require basic computer literacy or video production skills. It is not a school for hands-on production work. Students are not expected to learn how to program interactive titles, nor are they expected to produce a final product. It is designed to be a think tank for those interested in understanding the influence of technology in a learning environment, and includes some pioneers in the field as teachers.

Gerry Lesser, TIE program chair, teaches courses on child development, the effects of visual media on children, and the design of education programs using various video media, ranging from TV broadcasting, to cable, to videocassettes. He was one of the principal architects in the creation of Sesame Street and is chair of the National Board of Advisors of the Children’s Television Workshop.

David Perkins, a lecturer within the TIE program, is a senior research associate in education at Harvard, an associate of the Educational Technology Center, and the co-director of Harvard Project Zero, a basic research project investigating human symbolic capacities and their development. He is world renowned for his work on the interactions between technology and advanced thinking and has written several books on the topic, including The Teaching of Thinking and Teaching and Thinking: Issues and Approaches.

Tinkertoys and technology. Judah Schwartz, a co-director of the Educational Technology Center at Harvard, teaches courses on the teaching and learning of mathematics and science as well as on the design of computer software. He has authored more than 20 educational software applications and has written a number of seminal papers in the field of technology and education. Schwartz is also a professor at MIT.

Other faculty members include Carol Chomsky, a linguist, who teaches courses on software design, educational applications of multimedia, and computers and language; Colette Daiute, whose research projects involve studying the value of multimedia composing tools for writers in multicultural classrooms; and Martha Stone Wiske, co-director of the Educational Technology Center, where her research focuses on the process and effects of integrating new technologies and guided inquiry approaches in schools.

Award-winning software developer George Brackett, who created the Bank Street Writer for the Macintosh, and David Docktorman, who is vice president of development at Tom Snyder Productions, which is one of the largest publishers of children’s educational software, also lecture at Harvard within the TIE program.

Emphasis on education. The school serves two types of people: those who want to know more about technology in education and those who want to work in education and use technology-based tools. The emphasis is on the value of technology for education, not on technology itself.

“It’s fair to characterize the program as an attempt to create critical producers and critical consumers of products in technological education,” says Schwartz. “Technology is just another [educational] tool. It’s seductive to some people and that makes me eager to use it, but my primary goal is to get people to think. The actual substantive knowledge that gets transmitted in the program is ephemeral.”

An E-mail away. According to TIE coordinator Yesha Sivan, there are about 19 students enrolled this year. And although the university would like to see the attendance number increase even more, for now the small class size means a great deal of individual attention for individual students. Professors are never more than an electronic mail message away.

After graduating, many of the students will find themselves working in publishing houses, software companies, other universities and as producers for public access TV, according to Sivan. “In a year you can’t do a lot with the technology,” he says. “You can expose students to a lot of different types of technology, and we do that part very well.”

INDEPENDENCE IS CORE AT MIT AND MEDIA LAB

Independent research is at the core of MIT’s Media Arts and Sciences program. Students accepted into a master’s or doctoral program within this school of MIT, which is affiliated with the MIT’s famed think tank, the Media Lab, develop their own concentration and curriculum.

Within the program, there are three broad topic areas of study including learning and common sense, perceptual computing, and information and entertainment. In order to be accepted into the program, a student must be sponsored by one of the professors who actively conduct research as well as teach within one of these topic areas.

Chart your own course. Upon acceptance, each individual can, for the most part, customize his or her coursework within a particular field of inquiry: today there are 83 different foci listed under the three topic areas. Some of the student-selected areas of study in the Media Arts and Sciences program include intelligent animation, speech recognition, robot design competitions, games, fractal-based bandwidth image coding, paperback movies, listening to television and salient stills.

All degree programs are heavily weighted on the side of research and practice, with education being very much in the “research apprenticeship” mode. In case it’s not already obvious, this is not a curriculum for individuals looking for structure.

The ability to work with independence is rewarded: each student at the graduate level is fully funded by the university, in addition to a monthly stipend they receive for the duration of their time at MIT. In return, they are expected to work about 40 hours a week as research assistants at MIT’s Media Lab, where they work on research programs and faculty projects, including assisting with courses.

Loaded with luminaries. As at NYU and Harvard, the school is loaded with luminaries from the respective fields of study. To name a few: Seymour Papert, Lego professor of learning research at the MIT Media Lab, is the force behind Lego/Logo, a programmable construction kit that enables children to control machines made out of Lego building blocks. Marvin Minsky is considered to be one of the founders of artificial intelligence. Muriel Cooper is head of the visible language workshop, which investigates ways of designing, browsing, navigating and expressing complex, multimedia and hypermedia information using computer graphics, artificial intelligence and physical, psychological and creative models. And Stephen Benton is the inventor of white-light holography.

In addition to the invaluable relationships formed with their professors, students have access to a wealth of information from past researchers, faculty and students, much of it seminal in the area of new media and communication. The school operates on an “open information policy,” so that all the results from research done at the MIT Media Lab are made available for use by all the students via MIT’s Technology Licensing Office and the Media Lab’s policies. (MIT holds the copyrights and patents on all research work done at the institute.)

Students enrolled in MIT’s Media Arts and Sciences program are primarily interested in pursuing careers in research. Many of the students who attend MIT, in fact, remain there. It is a place of ferment for anyone interested in emerging technology research, and despite the fact that little of its work makes it from the research lab into products, the Media Lab especially is widely considered to be doing some of the most important research around key technology issues of the future. Those who do venture out of the Media Lab find homes in corporate think tanks, including Thinking Machines, Interval Research, Apple’s Advanced Technology Group and Mitsubishi’s Electronic Research Laboratory.

PROFESSIONAL SCHOOLS GAINING POPULARITY, TOO

The growing need for focused education in multimedia technologies transcends the university setting, especially for potential students who don’t want to, or can’t afford to, attend school full time. Professional schools, continuing education programs and workshops that offer narrowly focused courses in individual areas of expertise are also gaining momentum. Unlike the degree-granting programs mentioned above, these courses offer professionals in the industry a chance to brush up in a specific technology area or forge new relationships with others who share their interests. (For a sampling of some of these programs, see p. 9.)

A WAR WON BY DEGREES

Technology in education programs are still evolving. At many of the schools, the curriculum changes with the available technology. But one thing remains constant at each of these schools: an understanding that new media — in all of its disparate forms — is really just a new service industry. They exist only to help us communicate more clearly with each other.

To date, institutions of higher learning are among the only places that encourage individuals to consider aesthetic and sociological values, not only the technological aspects, of new media. Indeed, the universities mentioned are creating a new generation of gatekeepers, discerning technologists who understand these nascent forms of communication, the tools and the issues surrounding them.

Perhaps the greatest challenge for individuals enrolled in these multimedia curricula will come once they leave the comfort of the university setting behind and join the fray in the private sector, bringing a deep and broad set of technological and aesthetic values with them. If they can successfully use those values to influence future developments of emerging technologies, that’s when they can say they’ve truly graduated.

Janice Maloney

BACK TO SCHOOL

Here’s a sampling of schools around the nation that offer comprehensive coursework in the fields of interactive telecommunications and multimedia. This list may seem sparse; however, within the next few years, we predict the number of schools granting degrees in interactive media studies will fill catalogs.

Arizona State University
Gary Bitter, program coordinator
Educational Media and Computers
Tempe, AZ 85287
(602) 965-4960, fax (602) 965-8887
E-mail: aogbb@asuacad

Bloomsburg University
Dr. Harold Bailey, director
Institute for Interactive Technologies
McCormick Building, Room 1212
Bloomsburg, PA 17815
(717) 389-4848, fax (717) 389-2094
E-mail: bai1@husky.bloomu.edu

Florida State University
Ed Forrest
College of Communication
Tallahassee, FL 32306-8742
(904) 644-8742, fax (904) 644-8642

Harvard University
Yesha Sivan, program coordinator
Graduate School of Education
The Technology in Education Program
Larson Hall, Appian Way
Cambridge, MA 02138
(617) 496-6072, fax (617) 495-9268
E-mail: sivanye@hugse1.harvard.edu

Massachussetts Institute of Technology
Linda Peterson, academic program coordinator
Room E15-224
20 Ames St.
Cambridge, MA 02139
(617) 253-5114, fax (617) 258-6264;
E-mail: linda@media-lab.media.mit.edu

Michigan State University
Dr. Gilbert Williams, director of graduate programs
Room 409
Communications Arts Building
East Lansing, MI 48824-1212
(517) 353-9151, fax (517) 355-1292
E-mail: 21998gaw@msu.edu

New York University
Red Burns, chair
Interactive Telecommunications Program
Tisch School of the Arts
721 Broadway, 4th Floor
New York, NY 10003
(212) 998-1880, fax (212) 998-1898

The Ohio State University
Rohan Samarajiva, chair
Dept. of Communications
3016 Derby Hall
154 North Oval Mall
Columbus, OH 43210
(614) 292-3400, fax (614) 292-2055
E-mail: comm+@osu.edu

Stanford University
Patricia Detton
Institute for Communication Research
McClatchy Hall
Stanford, CA 94305-2050
(415) 723-1941, fax (415) 725-2472
E-mail: patricia.detton@forsythe.stanford.edu

University of Southern California
School of Cinema Television/Student Affairs
University Park
Los Angeles, CA 90089-2211
(213) 740-2911, fax (213) 740-7682

CONTINUING EDUCATION PROGRAMS

The American Film Institute
2021 North Western Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90027
(213) 856-7600, fax (213) 467-4578

Center for Creative Imaging
51 Mechanic St.
Camden, ME 04843
(207) 236-7400, fax (207) 236-7490

Pratt Institute
Isaac Victor Kerlow, chair of computer graphics program
200 Willoughby Ave.
PS21 Brooklyn, NY 11205
(718) 636-3600, fax (718) 622-6174

Ringling School of Art & Design
Maria Palazzi, computer arts department head
2700 North Tamiami Trail
Sarasota, Fl 34234-5895
(813) 359-7521, fax (813) 359-7517

San Francisco State University
Beth Rogozinski, program developer
Multimedia Program
425 Market St., 2nd Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
(415) 904-7741, fax (415) 904-7760

The School of Visual Arts
Timothy Binkley
MFA Computer Art
141 W. 21st Street, 10th Floor
New York, NY 10011
(212) 592-2535, fax (212) 592-2560