Making Media Work

Abstract

first reaction is to scoff. College-level media courses have sprung up all over the country, and it often seems that the faculty teaching Rhoda critiques and the Ethos of Rock are qualified only by a feverish desire to pander to an ever more jaded student population. Those alarmed by this proliferation feelnot always unjustlythat 50 pages of text, contemplated at leisure, usually convey more information than 2 hours of film footage. Even within the realm of books, one senses instinctively that a lavishly illustrated text is at best an introductory work; true scholarship must invariably rely upon words alone. So when one learns of the University of Delaware's Through course, in which students create multimedia presentations as an approach to learning history, one's prejudices bristle. How can such a course have the integrity of one requiring written examinations and term papers? How can the mechanical clacking of slide projectors possibly be as serious as the quiet rustle of pages? Delaware's History Through Media course grew out of the university's Media Center, which in turn grew out of the prodding of the American Historical Association (AHA). Early in 1969, the AHA, in cooperation with Indiana University's history department and Social Studies Development Center, established the History Education Project (HEP). HEP was designed to improve history teaching at all levelskindergarten through doctorate. To promote more effective student-teacher communication, the project trained teams of historians to fan out through academe to restructure teacher training, reeducate working teachers, and establish centers where historians could get in touch with scholars from other disciplinesideally to broaden the outlook of all. The HEP team at the University of Delaware comprised two members of the history department, William E. Pulliam and Joedd Price. With the support of Willard A. Fletcher, at that time chairman of the department, they proposed that Delaware establish a media center to produce and coordinate a collection of photographic slides, specifically for use in history department lectures, but also freely available to the entire university community, Together, HEP and Delaware generated $20,000 to cover the cost of converting two history department offices, hiring a full-time secretary, and purchasing essential hardand software. The center's facilities were soon put to heavy use. Where slides had once cost a professor as much as $2 apiece, the center produced color slides for only 12 cents each and black-and-white slides for about half that. The history department's collection of several hundred slides soon burgeoned to 55,000, and today nearly two thirds of the 26 members of the department routinely bring slides and films into class. The collection, in fact, has grown too fast for one workstudy student to catalog (nearly 20,000 slides, filed according to source, await indexing according to subject). The collection is used regularly not only by the history faculty but also by teachers in Delaware's College of Education and College of Business and Economics.