Campus celebrates opening of Hollenbeck Hall

As a striking symbol of the commitment of President Baird Tipson and his staff to prepare Wittenberg for a bold new century, Hollenbeck Hall was formally dedicated Jan. 28. The $13.5 million high-tech learning center was feted at a convocation in Weaver Chapel and at an open house in the Hollenbeck Hall atrium.

Hollenbeck celebrates two of Tipson’s most important initiatives, the Defining Moments Campaign, which is striving to keep Wittenberg up-to-date and competitive, and the embrace of the revolution in information technology.

During the convocation, a Wittenberg Medal of Honor was conferred on Jane Bayley Hollenbeck ’38, whose lead gift allowed construction of the building to begin. Hollenbeck Hall was also named in honor of her Springfield family. Principal architects Albert L. Filoni, AIA, and Alan F. Hohlfelder, RA, were also honored with honorary alumni awards.

President Tipson himself delivered the dedicatory address, asking “Can the Liberal Arts Survive the Onslaught of Technology?”

Technology poses serious challenges to higher education, Tipson noted, not the least of them the cost of keeping up with the apparent free fall in the acceleration of hardware and software innovation. But Tipson was more interested in exploring the challenge of adapting new tools to serve Wittenberg's mission instead of being changed by them.

Rob Baker, professor of political science, teaches students in his State and Local Government class to do comparative analyses of constitutions and regulatory requirements from different states, Tipson said. Gathering that information used to mean hunting for books in the documents section of one or more libraries, and a lot of manual effort taking notes.

With the Internet, Baker directs students to findlaw.com where they can more easily select any state to compare and print out the necessary information. Tammy Proctor, assistant professor of history, doesn't need to lecture to her Modern British History about the experiences of soldiers during World War I, Tipson continued.

“She can access the Web site of the British Library in her classroom and call up film clips of soldiers in the trenches — and not only film clips but their own voices, describing what it was like,” Tipson said.

Sophisticated tools for analyzing data, such as the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), are now common in Wittenberg classrooms. But not all the innovations are software-, or even computer-based, he noted. Hollenbeck’s document cameras have been embraced by faculty as an easy way to bring new materials in the classroom.

Tipson said he particularly liked how easy the camera made comparisons of different perspectives in map making in Proctor's World History class. “Students could then analyze and critique not only historical (maps) but also their own (maps of campus),” he said.

Even software advances don’t have to be revolutionary, Tipson said. Sometimes they can allow enhancements to venerable teaching methods. For instance, Tipson saw the Socratic method in the English department's use of the Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment, which interactively guides individual students through both the art and the craft of good writing by asking students questions.

“The program engages in dialogue with the student writer, and the act of responding to its prompts calls forth the writer's preconceived notions and then challenges her to develop them into arguments supported by evidence,” he said.

Bob Davis, professor of English, uses an advanced module of the Daedalus program called Interchange, in which students are connected in real time to respond to each other's insights, Tipson continued. “Two perennial teaching challenges are almost magically solved: the reticent participants — people who seldom speak in class — are drawn in as full partners, and no one has to choose between participating and taking notes because the computer stores the entire dialogue.”

In his conversation with Tipson, “Davis admitted that Interchange can be threatening to a teacher. He spoke of an ‘eradically decentered classroom,’ by which I think he meant that the students wrest control from the instructor. He observes the dialogue from the sidelines; the students themselves direct it,” Tipson said.

“Rob Baker talked about how the teaching process is changing his role. No longer is he the all-knowing Ph.D. who has mastered the information in his field. At the click of a mouse, students can bring to their computer screen information sources more complete and up-to-date than any single human mind could comprehend.

His role has become more the guide, the experienced problem-solver who can coach the students as they wrestle with the problems they have chosen to solve.

“If there is a common thread to all this, it would be that the technology allows the learner to move much more quickly through what I would call the ‘passive’ segment of the learning process.

By passive I mean what you have to take in before you are ready to take part in the conversation: mastering the vocabulary, the grammar, the syntax of a discipline so that he can spend the majority of his energy on active problem-solving.

E-mail is a modest advance that has powerful implications,” Tipson added. “Everyone spoke of e-mail communication between classes, allowing instructors and other students to respond directly to individual questions while the rest of the class ‘listens’ in. So the faculty mentor is active at every stage of the learning process but becomes increasingly indispensable toward its culmination.”

—Jim Dexter