Santa Clara University

            Expanded means of collaboration, research, teaching, and presentation are morphing the academic landscape for students and teachers. Online databases and the easy-to-use search-engines navigating them have made expanded research possible with only a few flicks of an index finger on a mouse. Impressive multimedia presentations often dazzle the technologically-inept professor; students are able to obscure the real effort it took to slap together the PowerPoint presentation the night before in twenty minutes. Blogs, Second-Life, and digital-storytelling have all made academic communication more accessible for students, but has this accessibility increased the academic quality of students and their work?

            Santa Clara University recently unveiled its own commitment to the new cyber-student (cydent) in the form of a virtual campus in Second-Life. The grand opening was filled with balloons, streamers, champagne and a replica of the soon-to-be completed digital commons and library. But aside from the art exhibits displaying student and faculty work, and the digital story-telling created by students and shown in the open-air amphitheatre, some peoples’ avatars, or characters, were running around naked and simulating sex-acts in the virtual DeSaissat Museum and the Mission. A few days after the grand-opening, not nearly as many avatars can be found on the digital Santa  Clara campus. However, interest still remains amongst some professors who want to use digital spaces for class projects and presentations. Are university expansions into the digital realm irrelevant or a gold mine of potential?

Virtual campuses are relatively new and time untested, but research technologies like databases and searches have been around for a while and are becoming more sophisticated and essential to student-life. From Google searches to in-class video presentations, students are learning differently. The expanded ease of research, made possible by powerful databases and the efforts by libraries and academic journals to offer material in digital format, has cut down the time students spend sifting through information; who even remembers card catalogs? Although students are able to benefit from computer-assisted research tools, are they becoming too reliant on them? If Google shut down tomorrow, how would you finish that upcoming term paper?

            Relying on a complex, cryptic technology to do the leg-work of research presents a few problems. First of all, the complex computer algorithms that scan documents for key-words are predisposed to return certain documents more often than others. Also, the frequently-accessed and often-cited start to outweigh the more obscure. In some sense this allows credible sources to float to the top, leaving the irrelevant and poor quality materials in digital limbo. However, students must realize that databases are subtly prioritizing and directing research projects by controlling the flow of information which students review.

            The nature of a tool creates expressionistic limitations. For example, students may think of their projects in the form of slides with neat bullets and accompanying images. The form of expression can begin to change the content. While an expanded, creative toolkit, including PowerPoint, allows a diversity of expression, other forms of expression (including old fashioned technology-less ones) are sometimes relegated to the garbage bin. Easier tools are not always best. Think of the difference in skills necessary for a PowerPoint presentation where a speaker stands to the side and directs attention to the screen, compared to a formal media-less presentation relying on the speaker’s engagement, facial expressions, and language. While media tools allow students to convey complex ideas in easy to understand and digestible formats, an over-reliance on them develops different qualities (and reliances) in students. Students should be wary to relegate themselves to the shadow of the PowerPoint, video, or any other multimedia presentation. The center stage was not meant for PowerPoint’s projection, but rather for students and their work.   

            While some are able to use technologies to enhance presentation, others are unfamiliar with these new tools. Most of Santa  Clara’s middle-class and affluent students have grown up using computers in-home, but the larger academic community should remember that many SCU students have not. Digital divides are replicating socioeconomic disparities. Students accustomed to harnessing the potential of databases, video-editing programs, and virtual worlds possess a huge advantage over students who did not grow up in families fortunate, or wealthy enough, to afford such a wide array of technologies. As universities increasingly rely on student technological aptitude, assuming familiarity with an array of technologies, those who didn’t use laptops in their cradle may find themselves increasingly isolated and disadvantaged. Or, for them, will a lack of reliance on technologies necessitate a personal development in non-technological students which others long ago transferred to their computers’ hard drives?