Like many UC Davis faculty in the social sciences and humanities, I'm a great believer in term papers as learning tools, and have always required them. But tracking and grading an average of 100 student papers in large upper division classes is a challenge.

In 1991, persuaded that email could speed the iterative evaluation of student drafts and rewrites, I tried using it not only for personal communications but also for this new purpose. This caused some consternation and resentment, because neither personal computers nor email were then widely deployed on campus outside of the sciences and engineering. I worked to change this state of affairs with Joan Gargano and Ken Weiss, whose job it was to promote educational uses of distributed computing.

Because they thought I was curious and a risk-taker, Gargano and Weiss introduced me (in 1993, I think), to what was then called the World Wide Web. At the time, the Web browser was a “stand-alone” application. I sensed immediately, however, that once the Web became integrated with email, as well as with spreadsheet applications, word processors, and presentation programs like PowerPoint, neither teaching nor learning would ever be the same again.

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This was a vision shared by those of us who established the. Summer Institute on Technology in Teaching (SITT) in 1994 and by many, though not all, of those who became SITT alumni/ae. Because the learning curve for using the Web was steep - good Web editing programs were only three or four years old and faculty had no direct and unrestricted access to servers in 1994 - PowerPoint became (and remains to this day for the vast majority of faculty) the teaching technology of choice. It is an obvious improvement over the chalkboard for organizing and presenting lecture outlines.

Moreover, Web browsers did not immediately become integrated with other tools on a PC platform. They work painfully slowly over a modem connection. And, if one wanted to develop or have students develop Web pages and Web sites as expanded alternatives to lecture notes and term papers, there were still other obstacles to consider.

Classrooms were not equipped in the early 1990s in ways that made it easy or pleasant to use the Web (or even PowerPoint) for teaching purposes. The first projectors installed in some of the larger lecture rooms in 1997 (though often without good roll-down screens) were crude and clumsy, and connecting them to the network was a nightmare. Laptops were a scarce faculty resource, although now just about anyone who wants one can have one, and they are a standard supplement (or alternative) to desktop machines.

Today, because large numbers of faculty have insisted on it, the vast majority of classrooms have media cabinets, first installed in 1999. The Smart Panel in the media cabinet connects a laptop to the network (by dynamic host configuration since 2001) and a new generation of high quality projectors display material stored on the laptop or gathered, almost instantaneously over high-speed network connections, from servers that can literally be located either just around the corner or in any other corner of the world.

Because of a chance remark made to me by a colleague (who shall remain nameless) about how insane I was to imagine in 1991 that technology could have a profound effect on my own work and that of my students and other faculty, I have always trusted strongly my own instincts about using technology. For my colleague, on the other hand, trusting his instincts meant ignoring technology for as long as he possibly could. But I firmly believe that most faculty will and should insist on trusting their own instincts as they approach the integration of technology into their teaching.

Technologies are of no value for educational enterprises unless we can imagine a use for them and are prepared to learn how they work.

For me, the first rule is that I will never use something that my students can not also use. In my Law and Policy courses, I teach students to make Web pages and manage Web sites for their own research and writing in the same way that I use the Web to deliver instruction.

My second rule has been to proceed incrementally, never adopting a technology that made me uncomfortable (like Adobe Photoshop, which I would love to be able to use but can't, yet). I try to mix and match tools in ways that make sense to me - even though they may not be recommended by “experts” or manuals or advocates of pre-packaged “solutions” to pedagogical problems they think I ought to have.

The net result, over a decade, now, has been a succession of embarrassments and dead-ends, as technology itself has changed and not always in keeping with my own limited skills. But I also have a substantial body of work to show for my explorations in educational technology. I keep links to successive versions of my syllabi and some of the best student work at http://psclasses.ucdavis.edu/GAWS/best.htm. If you visit, you'll notice that everything created prior to 1997 has been removed, either because it would now seem so crude and unattractive or because I can no longer make it work - a sure and certain indicator of how fast we all have to keep running to keep ourselves, our students, and the campus ahead of the curve.

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