News - The University of Montana

A new breed of students challenge professors, technology and conventional ways of teaching

Rick Hughes has sacrificed his golf game and many hours of sleep to keep up with technology—and his students. He grumbles, but a lower handicap and more sack time could never compete with the adrenaline rush he gets from the pursuit.

Hughes chairs UM’s fledgling undergraduate Media Arts program, which has grown to 93 majors since its inception two years ago. The program turns away more students than it accepts.

Graduate student Amber Bushnell and Professor Rick Hughes experiment with real-time artistic collaboration with Julia Lindquist, a UM student currently in Japan.

Hughes is an administrator, a mentor, and always an active partner with students in a collaborative learning process. In May, he and graduate student Amber Bushnell experimented with long-distance, peer-to-peer artistic collaboration. From an office in McGill Hall, Amber connected to UM students in New Zealand and Japan. Across oceans, using Apple’s iChat on a Mac and a high-speed network connection, the students worked together to create art on a shared digital canvas. They did it in real time using voice and video communication.

Hughes wants to engage other universities in similar peer-to-peer collaboration with his students, but he struggles to find faculty and administrators at other campuses willing to give it a try.

“This idea takes advantage of technology everybody already has,” Hughes says. “Everybody seems to be waiting for the next big thing, but we’re missing an opportunity to take advantage of technology that already exists. It doesn’t take a lot of money. It doesn’t take brilliant people. It just takes people willing to do it.”

It doesn’t take much to convince Amber of the benefits of collaboration. She has produced interactive art installations where viewers become participants in her art. The results always amaze her. Her graduate theses will focus on collaborative art, but on a global scale.

“We tested the technology with UM students in New Zealand and Japan and it worked great,” she says. “But the distance part isn’t what I’m interested in. It’s collaborating with people from different cultures artistically—using technology to bring cultural ideas together. When you have different mindsets, you learn so much from the other people you’re working with.”

Different mindsets

Hughes, age undisclosed, is driven to keep up with technology in part because of his daily interaction with digital natives—students who have no recollection of a world without the World Wide Web.

Charles Raffety is innately comfortable with technology. Heading into his senior year, Charles will be among the first to earn an undergraduate degree in Media Arts from UM.

“I came here as a Fine Arts major and discovered a whole new thing—the integration of art and technology,” he says. “I jumped right on the bandwagon.”

Charles grew up in Dillon where he had access to a computer lab at his elementary school. He didn’t have a computer at home until eighth grade, and his home Internet connection crawled, but he says, “I was excited enough to have patience with it.

“I had a sense that it was cool, but changing all the time,” he recalls of his online experiences. “Every year it got better. Faster.”

Charles admits that he has advantages over faculty who are a generation or two ahead of him.

“For those of us raised in this environment, it’s easier to assimilate to the Internet culture,” he says. “It’s not impossible for faculty, but I see a hesitancy to try new technologies. I think people get overwhelmed and they let that get to them before they sit down and try things.”

Amber, who teaches Media Arts classes to students of all ages, says her older students are definitely more reluctant to explore new technologies.

“For younger students,” she says, “things are automatic. Built-in. Second-nature. Older students do great in class, but early on they’re overwhelmed. I see resistance. They’re inhibited. I tell them to ‘just play around’ and that changes their mindset.”

Amber and Charles represent a wave of college students who will expect something different—something better—from their college education. They will increasingly reject one-way lectures from a podium in favor of cooperative learning that taps into the power of communities and collective intelligence.

“Collaborative learning is a much richer experience,” Charles says. “Learning to work with others and share viewpoints is important. You’re pushing the boundaries of your comfort zone, and you’re creating more advanced work.”

“Participation is what’s been missing,” Hughes says. “It’s what we’ve been trying to get to. There are so many opportunities to do truly impressive things with technology we already have.”

Media Arts in the Missoulian

Media Arts students Amber Bushnell, Charles Raffety and Lou Ghaddar were featured in a May 15 Missoulian article about an interactive holographic art installation they created.