New architecture course features 'far-out' instructors

Dick Tracy's two-way wrist communicator doesn't have a thing on a new videoconferencing course at Mississippi State.

Since January, graduate students in a School of Architecture class have heard from guest speakers from around the world-all coming to campus live via televised broadcasts. Students are either art or architecture majors. The course, "History and Philosophy of Computational Design Technology," examines the brief history of digital media.

Among other things, digital technology provides a recording technique in which sounds and images are converted into groups of electronic bits and stored on a magnetic medium. The groups of bits then can be "read" by, say, a laser beam and reproduced electronically.

In addition to two-way, interactive lectures, the eight students in architecture professor Michael Fazio's class communicate individually with the lecturers by electronic mail.

"The course is conventional so far as instructors lecturing," said Fazio. "It is 'experimental' only because the lecturers are appearing over a television screen from remote sites."

Several "visiting" instructors come from around the United States, while others hail from as far away as Australia and Hong Kong.

This summer architecture students will create a World Wide Web page to be filled with information gleaned from the course-still images, videos and text. And, Fazio emphasized none of this would be possible without the assistance and expertise of Dan Brook of technology and education.

Fazio said he's not certain how all this data will be utilized eventually, but hopes to have the page ready by the fall semester to provide a distance learning tool for others interested in digital media. "We're planning to turn this into a web site course," he said.

"There is no center of the universe anymore," he added. "We're now all part of one big information system."