Seed’s students use technology in their study of the past

Seed’s students use technology in their study of the past

BY
B.J. ALMOND
Rice News Staff

“History
haters” with unpleasant memories of having to read
stacks and stacks of books might have become pals with the
past if they had studied under Patricia Seed.

A professor
of history, Seed takes advantage of technology to study
years gone by, and she encourages her students to do the
same.

“History
is conventionally thought of as a text-oriented discipline,
but it is actually an interdisciplinary subject that you
can communicate through more than just writing,” she
said. “Using technology is a very effective way to
get people to understand and be interested in the past.”

For her History
of Cartography and Navigation course, she gives students
the option of turning in images and maps as an alternative
to written reports. Earlier this year she was pleasantly
surprised by some students’ innovative use of technology
to report on how the world’s first people, the Aboriginals
of Australia, used the stars for navigation.

Instead of a
two- or three-page research paper, Christian Lockwood, Mathew
Ludwig and Ryan LeVasseur produced a three-minute QuickTime
movie, “Our Aboriginal Movie,” for the assignment.
They collected maps and other images from Aboriginal Web
sites and assembled them into an animated sequence, complete
with a soundtrack featuring an Australian instrument called
a didjeridoo.

QuickTime is
a computer program that can process video, sound, animation,
graphics, text and music. Making a QuickTime movie is a
very time-consuming process, Seed said. “You have to
arrange so many frames per second so that the eye will perceive
movement as being continuous from one scene to the next.”

She commended
the students for their initiative and creativity, noting
that they had to learn the QuickTime technology on their
own. And she was so impressed by their work that she showed
the movie to Rice faculty during a seminar on the use of
technology in the classroom this past fall.

Seed said the
students’ project “raised the bar for the rest
of the class,” motivating other students to seek new
ways to carry out their history assignments. Many have learned
how to use PowerPoint, a software program that can combine
slides and other graphics for presentations.

“If you’re
going into business or science education, you have to be
able to put together a PowerPoint presentation, so the students
might as well go ahead and learn how to do it now,” Seed said.

She said one
of the most impressive PowerPoint presentations in her class
was prepared by Thomas Ludwig, a student who reported on
the history of the Astrolabe, the first scientific instrument
used for navigation on the high seas. “This instrument
was abandoned at the end of the 1500s, so it’s hard
to find the history of it, but Tom managed to track down
a lot of information and slides and present everything in
an interesting and very professional-looking manner.”

Seed uses PowerPoint
for her lectures too, showing maps, constellations and other
images posted on her latitude Web site, <www.ruf.rice.edu/~feegi/>.
The site, which gets more than a 1.5 million hits a year,
was featured in the Dec. 1 issue of Science.

Examples of some of the short assignments turned in by students
in Seed’s History of Cartography and Navigation class
can be found at <www.owlnet.rice.edu/~hist424>.