Professor tries his hand at distance teaching
Archived article from Oct 23, 1998
By Douglas Frank
High-school humanities teachers in Morris, Warren and Sussex counties are getting a taste of "The Civilization of the Renaissance" in a distance-learning seminar led by David Marsh, professor of Italian.
Sponsored by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities and funded by a grant from Bell Atlantic, the seminar considers the literary, artistic and technological innovations of 15th- and 16th-century Europe and includes an introduction to Renaissance resources available on the Internet.
Two sessions were broadcast last May focusing on the Renaissance as a period of technological advancement and on the impact of the Renaissance on today's society and culture.
In the remaining two sessions, Oct. 27 and Nov. 10, Marsh and guest speakers will discuss "Did Women Have a Renaissance?" and "The Whole Picture: Renaissance Images of the World."
Marsh visits one of four participating high schools where he meets face-to-face with a class of a dozen or so English, social studies, language, art and music teachers. The session is also beamed to the other three schools via interactive television.
The schools are Parsippany Hills and Montville high schools, Warren County School of Vocational Technology and Wallkill Valley Regional High School, which have been connected in an instructional television network for several years.
This is Marsh's first experience with distance learning, and he has had a few adjustments to make for television presentation.
First, he selects topics that have "strong visual support and are visually related." And "because time seems to go much faster in television," he condenses the material to meet the time constraints.
"Everything gets simplified. We're going to talk about one part of one thing by one person. If you try to talk about three or four chapters in a book, you're lost," Marsh observed.
"In television," he noted, "the time really flies."
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