Among the most exciting computing developments at City University is the growing number of faculty-produced multimedia projects, which together offer the potential for revolutionizing the way class material at the college level is studied and taught.
A ground-breaking example is the "Who Built America?" series of multimedia modules based on existing videotape products that are now being developed by Professor Anthony Picciano of the Hunter College Department of Curriculum and Teaching, and by the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at Hunter. Last year their first interactive videodisc program, "The Five Points: A Multimedia Experience in Social History," was completed. The program, which has been widely demonstrated at CUNY and at various professional conferences nationwide, provides an in-depth look at the lives of a community of immigrants living in Lower Manhattan in the 1850s.
Their second module, titled "Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl," is nearing completion this fall. Like its predecessor "The Five Points," it is geared to college undergraduates and its content - an examination of labor conditions in New York in the 1900s - is pertinent to a broad spectrum of the social sciences, from sociology to urban and women's studies.
"Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl" focuses on a specific time and place: the strike of twenty thousand women factory workers in New York City in 1909, and their decision to join the newly-formed International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. The program evokes the sights and sounds of these events through the use of digitized archival photographs, full motion video of actual historical footage, and audio components including dramatized dialogues.
The program's protagonists are two young garment workers - one Jewish, the other Italian - who share a factory worktable and who, despite their religious and ethnic differences, have struck up a close friendship. By choosing from a variety of menu options, the user of the program is able to view their lives through critical moments such as exchanges with parents, friends, work supervisors, and among themselves as they gradually develop political awareness.
By providing an insight into history from the viewpoint of ordinary participants, "Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl" offers a socio-economic panorama of the turn-of-the-century city. Using vintage photographs of New York Harbor where immigrants landed, the Lower Eastside tenements where they lived, and Coney Island where they escaped the summer heat, it depicts for the user a society very much in the process of change, marked by generational rifts, new modes of leisure, increasing degrees of cultural assimilation, and the spread of new institutions.
"Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl" offers several supplementary study aids, such as a dictionary of the non-English terms encountered in the spoken dialogue, maps of neighborhoods referred to in the texts, and a file of related archival documents. The program also provides online space for taking notes on rich, many-layered material.
"Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl," like "The Five Points," was developed with funding support from the CUNY Office of Instructional Technology as part of the Multimedia Courseware Initiative. It is the work of CUNY faculty in the American Social History Project whose members include Anthony Picciano (see a profile on p. 12), Steve Brier, Bret Eynon, Josh Brown, Andrea Vasquez and Pennee Bender of the Center for Media and Learning at Hunter.
While all participants shared archival research, certain tasks were handled by individual members. Josh Brown, for example, wrote the script; Tony Picciano, using Toolbook software, created the design and layout, and Steve Brier handled the conversion to videodisc. (To obtain copies of "Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl," call Tony Picciano at (212) 772-4694.)
Eventually, the "Who Built America" series will include seven or eight multimedia modules based on the same discovery learning concept and a consistent user interface. As the conversion from existing videotape material to multimedia format progresses, successive modules will incorporate new features. As an example, while the original videotapes were designed in linear mode, "The Five Points" and "Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl" are accessed in non-linear fashion, serving as accurate models for history itself as a network of influences interweaving organically rather than as a simple chain of events. With their sights, sounds and texts, these multimedia programs bring pedagogical material vividly to life and demonstrate that computing technology is within the reach of any CUNY faculty wanting to create dynamic teaching tools.
-- by Holland Cotter