a. Central Administrator: I believe that if you're going to make this happen you have to give people the tools and funding to make it happen. You just don't say, "Do it," and pretend it's going to happen.
b. Marco, Interviewer: Do you feel that Jeanette is supported in her attempt at using technology?
Lisa Seidman, Biotechnology Program Instructor: No, she's had a lot of trouble. But, again, I don't think that's because somebody's being malicious. I think it's because people are struggling right now. The institution has tried to put some money into it, but they do not have enough money for software support.
c. Central Administrator: We want to know in September that we need to set aside the right amount of funding, and not wait until the second semester to see if there's any of this money available. To do that we need to answer the questions, "What are we trying to do here? What are we trying to achieve?" We need these answers not to be controlling but to be more responsive and supportive.
d. Instructor: What a lot of the faculty don't understand is that there's a cost to developing instructional tools, and that is that the institution will claim the ownership over it. When it comes to developing new computer-enhanced activities, the question is "Who owns the product?" The institution would like to believe that they own everything that goes on between your two ears, but that's not been proven one way or the other in the courts. There are people in the institution who are writing CD-ROMs and, essentially, signing over ownership because they don't know any better. Or, they feel their job will be at stake if they don't do that, and they might not keep their job if they don't do this activity. And that's a problem.
If you want somebody to be creative, you'd better let them have ownership of whatever it is they're creating. They say they'll pay for it, but that's not all that's involved. If your name goes on it, there's a certain amount of pride associated with it. There's not going to be a lot of money in anything you do, but there are derivative rights. If they own it, they can take your name off it and change whatever they want. What might be worse is if they keep your name on it and change it whichever way they want. Your name could be associated with something that's pure trash. I just read a University of Illinois piece on distance education that said one of the most important things was ownership of the materials created. And the institutions, in general, across the country don't understand that. That's another reason why I haven't jumped at opportunities to develop things. I've got enough things to do, and that just looks to me like another headache.
e. Jeanette: Now we have computer labs that are up and running with the latest basic, fundamental software like Excel and Windows. But before I upgraded the Protein Lab software, I only had three computers for an entire class. I couldn't take enough class time to have them work through it with three computers. But now all I have to do is call the scheduling computer office and say I need a computer lab. So any time I want I can do a computer lab, and use all twenty computers in the lab.
f. Marco, Interviewer: Is your main access to computers here at the college?
Matt, student: Absolutely.
Marco, Interviewer: Would you go out in the halls, pop in the protein program and start going away?
Laurel, student: Yeah.
g. Lisa: You still have to check out a classroom, you have to have one available to you. You have to go up there, it has to be open, and it may or may not be.
Becky: When it gets to be the end of the semester, there are long waits for students to get onto computers. Believe it or not, if I want to use this computer classroom, I have to call the Culinary Arts Department. Don't ask me why, but for some reason they're in charge of the computer classroom that I use. The nice thing is that students are welcome to use any computer classroom that's not being used by a class, and that's been a positive thing. But, I wish that we had more computer classrooms.
h. Jeanette: The original computers had really a lot of glitches that they experienced with the actual software.
Matt, student: It's kind of hard because everyone's at a different skill level on the computers. And you kind of get frustrated when the computer freezes and you have no idea what to do. Everyone's somewhere else, and it's hard to keep up.
i. Jeanette: Before I upgraded the software to run on Windows 95 and 98, I had them all hover around the Windows 3.1 machines. There four people to a computer, and the [MATC tech support staff] didn't even support those computers. I was just happy to get them up and running. So that wasn't ideal at all. It was sort of like a demonstration, but they got something.
Lisa: We had very few computers in those days. So the students had to share the computers, which was a big problem.
j. Jeanette: It's absolutely no issue at all to run the protein software. You pull down a menu, pick a technique, put in a number and it gives you back data. If you understand what it's trying to do, it's extremely easy.
k. To download the software, go to http://www.booth1.demon.co.uk/archive.
l. Jeanette: Now I can rely on one of the school's computer labs, where they have 20 computers in a room. They just run the program from a disk. That makes it a lot easier to demo some things for them. I can go to one of those rooms where they have an overhead and they can follow along with the demonstration. When I click, they can click. So we can do it as a group.
And I think it will be way more valuable now that they can come back to it at will. If they have a disk in their hand at any time, I can make assignments. I can say, "your assignment today is to go purify number four." I can do all kinds of things that weren't possible for me to do before because of limited technology.
m. Jeanette: I had some initial problems when I was getting it on the web and I thought it was me, but I think it's really the way he's got it running on the web. There's a lot of places in the software where a beginner can get stuck.
Jeanette's students concur.
Luke, student: Each group was over there for about ten or fifteen minutes.
Matt, student: I wasn't satisfied with the amount of time I was allowed to doodle with it. So I sat down and started trying to find different techniques at random, even though I didn't know what they meant.
Sarah, student: I would have liked to have some more graphics in the program too.
Matt, student: Well, it's not that these were great computers.
Laurel, student: It might have been the fault of the computer, but it reminded me of old computers where you type some letters in and then letters come out at the end. That's nice but it's very uninteresting.
n. Marco, interviewer: Do the four of you get together and discuss things about technology? Do you have a regular meeting?
Lisa: Yeah, we meet Tuesday and Wednesday.
Flora, interviewer: Would you say [bringing technology into your classroom] is pretty collaborative?
Lisa: It's pretty collaborative.
Becky: I think it's easier if you're doing it together with someone. Jeanette and I always complain to each other about something not working.
o. Jeanette: Andrew Booth and I have e-mailed each other. So it has given me a new colleague.
p. DuFour and Eaker (1998) refer to this environment of mutual cooperation as a "Professional Learning Community."
