“I used to use a lot of overhead transparencies and a lot more video,” Whittier says. “In some cases, I’ve been able to digitize video and put it on the computer. More often, it’s just as easy to use something I’ve found on the web or to capture material and put it into PowerPoint. Computing has made it easier to store, search and retrieve material than when I used a lot of slides and overheads.”

As director of the university’s Educational Media and Technology program, Whittier takes these techniques seriously as he trains the next generation of teachers.

“We are developing resources to help teachers help students learn better,” he says. “Computing and projectors are a crucial resource integrated and folded into the work that we do. It is a tremendous development in the history of education.

“The Sony projector’s networkable design opens up the next stage in that development,” he adds. “The newest frontier is databases. We’re just starting to teach teachers to develop their own web searchable databases. That brings the curriculum almost entirely into a computer-based format. In the future, the material won’t even start as books. It is so much faster and economical to develop and distribute content on computer networks. Teachers can move freely from classroom to classroom and have pinpoint access to material.”

Classroom display systems enhance teaching across the disciplines. For Raymond Levy, coordinator for emergency medical services in the Physical Education & Recreation Department, Sony’s projection technology allows him to connect with today’s students in a way that speaks to them.

“To reach these students from the MTV generation, you have to stimulate them visually,” Levy says. “They need to see what we’re talking about. This is especially important with emergency medical services. Pictures of wounds and patients reach them. Attention spans are getting shorter and this seems to hold onto their attention in class.”

Keeping students focused also means removing distractions like having to turn off the lights to make presentations visible.

With its exceptional 3500 ANSI lumens brightness, the VPL-FX50 projector allows educators to illuminate their points seamlessly. (ANSI lumens is a measuring method developed for the American National Standards Institute. Since there is no uniform method of reporting brightness, specifications will vary among manufacturers.)

“We can see images in a well lit classroom,” Levy says. “Since we don’t need to be in darkness to see the projector, students can take notes and review the textbook as needed.”

Some areas in academia have taken the lead in bringing multimedia presentations to the curriculum. Patricia Johnson, an assistant professor in Classical Studies at BU, has watched the new technology reshape her work.

“Technology has been a boon for classics generally and especially the kind of courses I teach,” says Johnson. “When I took these courses in college, the professors used slides. If we wanted to study them for exams, we might be able to look at them in the art library.”

This awkward arrangement limited the slides’ value.

“Typically, the visuals were an addition—an unnecessary addition to a course on Roman civilization,” Johnson adds. “Basically, it was a course on Roman history with some visuals to keep you awake during the long class hour. That’s about it.”

For Johnson, display technology has changed a frill into a fundamental element. “Now, we can fully integrate imagery into our course curriculum,” she says. “In my Roman civilization class, it has become part of the required material. After the images are shown in class, they go up on the web. Then we use the projector during the exams. For the first time, we’re really able to present visual material as an integral part of the material of classics, instead of it being a pretty addition.”

By integrating the visual, courses fit the subject better.

“Instead of being treated as a history course, it has become similar to an art history class,” Johnson says. “But we can show more than just art objects. My students know their way around Pompeii at the end of the term. That would have been unimaginable 10 or 20 years ago. We bring the ancient world into the classroom in a way that wasn’t possible before.” This is especially important given the other impressions students receive from outside school. “They all have seen films like Gladiator or Spartacus. They all know Hollywood’s reconstruction of the ancient world, of what Hollywood imagines it was like to be a gladiator in a gladiatorial school. What they haven’t seen is a reality. I show them the pictures of those places, cages in the Coliseum where gladiators were held before being sent upstairs to fight. They’re the size of a large dog cage. Students get the real picture, and not just what Hollywood has presented to them.”

Being able to bring online imagery into the curriculum is also key because of changes in scholastic publishing. Today, discoveries are available online years before they appear in book form. For some material, this is the only chance to get a glimpse into these lost worlds.

“Classical archeology has led the way because of the tremendous expense of publishing texts,” says Johnson. “Scholars have been great about putting their material on web pages. So for teaching, the web is the future for us.”