April '05 Newsletter

In the past decade, digital resources for undergraduate humanities and social science faculty have swelled from a small trickle to a mighty torrent. Today’s instructor looking to enrich the classroom experience has an overabundance of online libraries, image archives, media Web sites, video collections, and even personal research to choose from. But as a two-year study being conducted at UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) reveals, just because such learning assets are out there doesn’t mean everybody is taking advantage of them.

“You can have all this great stuff up there on the Web, but in many cases it’s not easy for a good faculty member to integrate the available materials into his or her style of teaching,” says Diane Harley, the study’s principal investigator and a senior researcher at CSHE.

In the past, one might have assumed that this is because humanities and social science professors are a bunch of technophobes. However, preliminary data from CSHE’s Digital Resource Study paint a different picture. Among the top-cited obstacles to using digital resources was inadequate classroom equipment. As one survey respondent put it: “I hate the tension that equipment introduces into the classroom, the fear of breakdown, the suspense, the frequent waste of time.” And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Sponsored by CITRIS as well as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the California Digital Library, the Digital Resource Study aims to provide a scan of which digital resources are used by undergraduate instructors in humanities and social sciences, how they are being used, and why (or why not). In addition to faculty focus groups, the study is analyzing more than 1200 responses to a survey of faculty from the University of California, community colleges, private liberal arts colleges across California, and humanities on-line discussion groups.

Harley’s hope is that this study, due out this fall, will improve both the digital resources themselves and instructors’ ability to take advantage of them.

“A lot of people who design technologies and systems tend to say: ‘I’ve got this great idea and we’re going to put it out there. Build it and they will come,’” she says.

If developers and funders of these projects are given a more accurate picture of how users actually behave in complex research and teaching environments, she believes they can make better decisions about what materials to provide and how best to make them useable and useful. Colleges and universities, in the meantime, can make smarter investments in equipment, resources, and technological infrastructure at universities.

Why the emphasis on social sciences and humanities? “For one,” says Harley, “compared to the sciences and engineering, they tend to be neglected by funders and developers.” Humanities and social sciences professors are also a particularly tough crowd to provide content to, making them ripe for study. While every introductory biology course will cover cell structure and DNA, no two instructors are going to teach American history in exactly the same way. “They would use very different kinds of supporting materials, primary sources,” says Harley. So perhaps it’s no surprise to learn that among those who employ digital resources in the classroom, the variety of what is used, in the words of CSHE research associate Jonathan Henke, is “staggering.”

But as early analysis of the study data shows, the biggest barriers to instructors using digital resources come from lack of time, equipment, and technical support, not any shortage of great materials. Faculty also said that technology often can’t improve on tried and true teaching methods. Especially when it comes to equipment there is huge variation among institutions, even among CITRIS campuses. For instance, 66 per cent of survey respondents from UC Berkeley said they don’t have reliable access to physical equipment in their classrooms, whereas at UC Davis only 26 percent said this was a problem.

Harley herself is no stranger to these difficulties. Before launching her survey, she struggled to find available server space. “That’s not something that’s always easy for social scientists and humanists to find on the UC Berkeley campus,” she says. Ultimately, CITRIS was able to provide not only server space and a platform for their custom online survey and analytical back-end, but technical support to ensure privacy protection of their respondents.

Harley believes that none of these obstacles is insurmountable. "Available digital resources have the potential to be a wonderful asset to many more teachers and students. But that won’t happen until the relationship between the social and the technical barriers to ease of use is addressed. Our research is focused on understanding that relationship,” she says.

For more information:

The Digital Resource Study

CSHE Publishes Preliminary Results of Digital Resources Study UC Berkeley Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center, November 2004

Center for Studies in Higher Education

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation

California Digital Library

On a recent overcast spring afternoon, Scott Shackleton, assistant dean for facilities and capital projects in the College of Engineering, sat down to discuss what's new with CITRIS's future headquarters. Since returning in December from a year-long tour of duty in Kuwait with the Navy Reserves, Shackleton has been put in charge of managing the project full-time, as it moves through the design and into the construction phase.

Intended to be a place where great minds from all over campus, as well as visiting researchers from industry and government, can mingle and collaborate, the seven-story, 140,000-square-foot building will feature a 150-seat auditorium, state-of-the-art classrooms and distance learning facilities, a cyber café and patio area looking out over the scenic Campanile, flexible office space, conference rooms on every floor, connecting walkways, as well as a premiere nanofabrication lab. A change in architects and a redesign have resulted in a more efficient, flexible, and affordable plan. Groundbreaking ceremonies took place in November.

The new design for the building looks a bit different from the previous one. Why the change in plans?

Because of what's happening in the marketplace, the price of concrete and steel have risen dramatically over the last couple of years. So, when we were receiving construction bids from contractors, our project came in way over budget. The Smith Group, a well-known architectural firm from San Francisco, was contracted to lead the redesign effort to bring down construction costs.

But it doesn't seem like you've sacrificed the appearance or usefulness of the building at all.

It's definitely going to be an attractive and important addition to the campus. We've kept the footprint of the building the same, which has allowed us to start digging out the foundation and installing retaining walls right away. The new architects have done a good job fitting their new design into the old footprint. We've only lost about 5,000 usable square feet, but overall the building is more efficient. We're using more glass and not so much heavy concrete, so it's a lighter weight surface structure. We've also taken a lot of the extra steel out of the building and unified the steel framing design to help reduce costs.

How will the building embody the ideals of CITRIS?

In the old days, we had what I call the "moat syndrome," in which departments maintained boundaries around their department spaces. This really reduced the collaboration among researchers. What CITRIS hopes to do is fill in those moats and bring everybody together to share ideas. The plaza and cyber café on the campus level are going to be really inviting areas where people can meet. Classrooms and breakout rooms are going to be on the lower levels to encourage foot traffic. Open landings on the third and sixth floors will connect to the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in Davis Hall. In the future, we're planning to build an additional bridge connecting to EECS in Cory Hall. Finally, we're learning a lot from industry about what kinds of environmental changes will make people more productive and cooperative. People still need their privacy and space--and the new building accommodates that--but we're also creating a lot of flexible open office space upstairs.

One of the main features of the CITRIS headquarters is the nanofabrication lab, which will replace the older facilities in Cory Hall. What can you tell us about that?

This is going to be a renowned facility, recognized around the world for its state-of-the-art fabrication tools and the synergy it has with the adjacent CITRIS building. We put a lot of extra dollars to keep this on campus, but we think it's critical to the success of CITRIS to do so because, as you can imagine, anything that's going to be developed in an electronic format to help society is going to have to have some kind of silicon-based chips operating or processing it. So having a nano-research and manufacturing facility right here where they can develop those chips in various quantities is a real benefit. One really great component of the design is a set of viewing windows, which will let people see what's going on inside the lab without having to gown up.

Is any CITRIS-developed technology being used in the building?

We hope to incorporate as many CITRIS-developed technologies in the building as possible. For example, one of our professors, Steve Glaser, has developed micro-sensors that are currently monitoring earth movement at many national treasures around the world. We hope to work with Professor Glaser to use his sensors to monitor our retaining walls during construction. This would help offset some of our weekly surveying costs. Already in place is a CITRIS-based project that enables you to manipulate the cameras monitoring the construction site from the Web. There's been a lot of talk about integrating CITRIS-developed "smart dust" sensors into the HVAC controls. As the building comes to fruition, people will look for ways to test and integrate CITRIS technology into it. That's why we've tried to make the space extremely flexible allowing the building to literarily become part of the research.

So what's next?

Our plan is to go to bid with the new plans by early September 2005. We've been on a fast track. This is the second time that we will have bid this project, and what took us two years the first time will take us only eight months the second time.

For more information:

View the construction live using Professor Kenneth Goldberg’s (IEOR) Co-Opticon camera, mounted on Cory Hall.

"Ground Breaks on Research Center" by Sonja Sharp (The Daily Californian, November 1, 2004)

"Robugs: Smart Dust has Legs” by David Pescovitz (Lab Notes, September 2003)