|
The American Journey, Interactive Edition
Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1998. CD-ROM for Macintosh and Windows.
Instruction booklet and combined edition of _The American Journey_ text.
$84.00, ISBN 0-130-211-516.
System requirements: Windows: 486DX\66 with Windows 3.1x or
Windows 95, 8 MB RAM (16 MB RAM recommended for Windows 95), Double
Speed CD-ROM Drive, 640 x 480 SVGA (Minimum 256 Colors), Mouse and
Sound Card, 3 MB of Hard Disk Space Required for QuickTime movie
viewer. Macintosh: 33 MHz 68040+ Macintosh System 7.5+, 10 MB RAM
(7 MB Free RAM Required), Double Speed CD-ROM Drive, 640 x 480 Color
Monitor (Minimum 256 Colors), Mouse and Sound Card, 3.8 MB of Hard
Disk Space Required for QuickTime movie viewer. Internet
connectivity is available via your Internet service provider and
requires either Microsoft Internet Explorer v.3.0+ or Netscape
Navigator v.3.0+.
Reviewed for H-Survey by James Homer Williams, Middle Tennessee State University
Interactive American History, or Old Wine in New Bottles?
As publishers increasingly seek to squeeze the most profit from the
market for college history survey textbooks with such tactics as
two-year cycles between editions, it should be no surprise that they
are also developing products to take advantage of the rush on many
college and university campuses to use the latest multimedia
technology in teaching. A leader in the development of CD-ROMs for
history surveys is Prentice-Hall, who, in cooperation with Zane
Publishing, currently offers CD-ROM versions of textbooks for
American, western, and world history survey courses.
The question remains, however, whether this first generation of
CD-ROMs will prove beneficial to students and teachers. _The
American Journey, Interactive Edition_ offers the user essentially
three products in one package: the printed version of _The American
Journey_, a study guide, and _Webster's New World College
Dictionary_. In the "Introduction to Power CD," to which the user
has to navigate specifically, this generic five-minute marketing
spiel declares, "The days of carrying a heavy load of books are
over. Everything you need is now on just one Power CD!" Teachers
will join me in scoffing at such a claim, since the CD-ROM lacks
such essential features for surveys as primary documents, extended
film clips, monographs, and other resources that students will
continue to find in college libraries and media centers, and,
perhaps, on the Internet.
Power CD titles offer several "modes," or functional areas. The
text mode, the introduction suggests, "is where you'll find things
like the Declaration of Independence, or the complete text of an
author's greatest work." _The American Journey_ paper edition does
indeed include the Declaration of Independence, the U.S.
Constitution, and the other standard tables of information found in
the appendices of American history textbooks. The interactive
version, however, omits these basic features. Text mode, in other
words, though promoted as a library, contains nothing more than the
chapters of the paper edition of the textbook. It is inexplicably
odd that the appendices were deleted for the CD-ROM edition, when
one would expect there to be more, rather than fewer, links to
documents in the interactive edition.
Will students find this CD-ROM an appealing supplement or
alternative to paper textbooks, study guides, and dictionaries?
Several factors, of course, may influence the answer to this
question. First, students must have access to a fairly low-end
computer with a CD-ROM drive. Second, they must be somewhat
familiar with CD-ROMs and computer navigation. _The American
Journey, Interactive Edition_ includes a "How to Use Manual" that
briefly explains the many features and modes of the software. There
are also brief tutorials and help screens to assist users. Most
students with basic computer literacy should be able to navigate
this CD-ROM. Third, some students will find the "interactive"
approach appealing, while undoubtedly others (such as most of my
students) would find the absence of an easily transported and read
paper textbook more an annoyance than a leap into
twenty-first-century learning. Finally, there is the issue of
selling their used CD-ROMs back to the bookstore once the semester
is over. While many music stores will purchase used music CDs for a
few dollars, I have yet to see a college bookstore that will buy
back used software for resale. This should be kept in mind by any
instructor who is concerned with the rising prices of textbooks and
with the students' ability to recycle used books (even at a fraction
of the new price) for the use of students in subsequent semesters.
Since the paper version of _The American Journey_ was reviewed in
H-Survey in March 1998 by Catherine Forslund and William R.
Wantland, and I agree substantially with their favorable evaluation
of the textbook itself, I will confine my coverage to the features
that are particular to the CD-ROM version. Readers should consult
the H-Survey archives for information about the content of the
textbook chapters, which are identical in the paper and interactive
editions.
With these preliminary issues and comments on the table, let me now
discuss the heart of the contents of this CD-ROM title as well as
some of the ways in which it could be potentially useful for
students and instructors alike. After inserting the CD into the
drive and commanding it to run, the user hears the beginning of a
musical soundtrack that soars and swoops as heroically as any
Hollywood film's score. Feature one is four minutes of music while
the screen shifts through the four chapter groups of the textbook. A
figurative map of North America accompanies each group, while moving
the pointer to a particular chapter title in that group causes a
corresponding section of the map to enlarge. (The user can stop,
resume, and move backward and forward as he or she pleases anytime
during the feature presentations.)
If one lets the program run along, it will take the reader to
Chapter One. This chapter begins, as do all the others, with
illustrations in the left column and a textual overview of the
chapter in the right column. Users can also select to move to the
quiz, section headings, or contents for that chapter. Meanwhile, a
pleasant female voice reads the textual overview over the background
soundtrack.
These "features," as they are called, last for about five to six
minutes each. One can read along with the text or follow the
illustrations as they change frame by frame with the text.
Highlighted words in the text, such as "Reformation," are linked to
the glossary. Some glitches appeared in Chapter Two, where "allies"
is highlighted in the context of Indian allies of French colonists.
Checking the glossary for "allies," however, retrieves the
definition of the Central Powers in World War I. In the same chapter
overview, "initiative" is highlighted in the sentence "English
colonization depended more on private enterprise than centralized
state initiative as in France and Spain." The definition retrieved
for "initiative," however, obviously refers to the Populist era:
"Procedure by which citizens can introduce a subject for
legislation, usually through a petition signed by a specific number
of voters." While providing a glossary for terms that may be
unfamiliar to students is a commendable feature of both the printed
and the CD-ROM versions of _The American Journey_, the mistakes need
to be corrected in the electronic edition.
The images in each overview are extremely traditional still photos,
at least in the first half of the textbook. Paintings of battles
and white men are in abundance. A more diverse picture emerges in
the second half of the book. Usually one or two of the dozen or so
images in each feature are film clips, lasting a few seconds. Using
QuickTime software, which can be downloaded from the CD-ROM, one can
view these clips. In Chapter One, for instance, one can see a
dramatized "fleet of Spanish ships land[ing] in the Americas" or
Frenchmen rowing a birch bark canoe as they "explore the new world."
This feature is unique to the CD-ROM version of _The American
Journey_, but its usefulness in the present form is limited. The
selections are too short (ten to twenty seconds), are often silent,
and are not introduced effectively. In Chapter Eight, for instance,
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor is shown commenting on federalism, but
she is never identified so that students will know why they should
value her opinion over anyone else's.
One would hope that students would not find this brief overview of
each chapter sufficient exposure to the chapters. From each
overview, one can click on one's choice of three boxes: chapter
quiz, chapter index, and chapter content. The chapter quiz is just
as it says, a set of multiple-choice questions that the user can
modify from a maximum of twenty questions and a twenty-minute time
limit. Students may also print the questions. After the quiz is
completed, it calculates a score and allows the quiz taker to return
to incorrect answers, where the student is coached toward the
correct answer and the section of the chapter from which the
question was drawn. Students and teachers alike should be aware
that the quiz tests only the most basic comprehension of chapter
content, such as dates, places, names of people and events, and so
on. The quizzes do not assess readers' comprehension of concepts. A
perfect score should be expected from any reader with modest reading
and comprehension skills.
Clicking the chapter index box takes the user to an alphabetized
list of the chapter sections. Users can then highlight a section
and move to it in the text. Oddly, this list is alphabetized rather
than presented in the order of the chapter, so that "additional
sources" almost always appears first, the introduction is somewhere
in the middle, and the substantive topics are jumbled out of
chronological or logical sequence. This list would probably be of
little use to most students, unless they knew exactly for what they
were looking in a particular chapter; it could potentially confuse
others if they tried to use the list to study for an exam, for
instance.
In a redesign of this CD-ROM, I would suggest eliminating the three
choices from the feature presentation for each chapter in favor of
an automatic advance to the third choice, the chapter contents.
This screen offers many choices and should really serve as the home
screen for each chapter. Possible selections are grouped into two
areas: multimedia study guide and resources.
Moving down the list in the multimedia study guide, one finds these
choices: multimedia overview, quiz, essay questions index, internet
online, and video clips index. The multimedia overview is the
introductory feature presentation for each chapter, already
described above. The quiz is the same quiz described above. The
essay questions index contains four essay questions for each
chapter. Each question gives the corresponding section of the
chapter for review. A question for Chapter One asks the student to
"Comment on the Colombian [sic] Exchange's impact on both 'old' and
'new' worlds." Similarly, in Chapter Twenty on industrialization
and urbanization, one of the essay questions is "Why did children
and women enter the work force?" To my mind, these essay questions
are much more useful than the multiple-choice quizzes, for they
force students to learn concepts and to write about them. I urge
the publishers to expand this section of the CD-ROM and to include
an area in which students could type their answers and then print
them to turn in, to use in studying, and so on.
Choosing the internet online feature from the multimedia study guide
takes one, using whatever web browser is installed on the computer
in use, to Prentice-Hall's companion web site, where users can
select from yet another list of features relating to _The American
Journey_ textbook. These include more quiz (multiple-choice and
true-false) and essay questions, document reviews, people and
events, a message board, and a chat area. In the people and events
area, one can select from a list to search the World Wide Web for
that particular person or event. (Of course, one can do this on
one's own with any web browser's search engine.) The message board
is described as "a virtual bulletin board about the text"; it
appears more for faculty than students. The chat area allows for
"virtual classroom discussion" either in impromptu chats with users
from around the world or in a local, private study group. The
usefulness of this web site will, I suspect, vary, since almost all
of the features are available elsewhere, such as a printed study
guide, web search engines, and campus listserv discussion groups.
The last selection from the multimedia study guide menu takes the
user to a list of the video clips for that chapter. This is just
another path to the same feature whose strengths and weaknesses I
have already discussed above.
There are three choices in the second group of
selections-resources-on the chapter contents screen: chapter
outline and introduction, chapter topics index, and figures, maps,
and tables. The first choice takes one to a list of the chapter
subheadings as they appear in the text, followed by the text of the
introduction to that chapter. The chapter topics index is the same
as the chapter index that one can reach through the introductory
feature presentation, and thus is flawed in the ways I have already
described. The third selection--figures, maps, and tables--takes
the user to a list of the figures, maps, and tables in that
particular chapter. In perhaps the most strikingly peculiar feature
of the CD-ROM edition of _The American Journey_, the figures and
maps are presented separately from their captions, which are several
mouse clicks away in separate files. Large maps, such as those in
Chapter One of North American Indian groups and of Africa, which
appear whole in the printed text, are split into two frames in the
electronic version. Obviously, students will find the figures,
maps, and tables less useful than they would otherwise be, since
they are divorced from the text to which they serve as
illustrations, since they are sometimes difficult to view in their
entirety, and since the captions are filed separately from the
figures, tables, and maps to which they refer. The last feature
that can be used any time during the operation of the CD-ROM is the
college dictionary. Every teacher wishes for students to build
vocabulary and to write and read with a dictionary close by. Perhaps
the ability to look up unfamiliar words with the click of a mouse
will encourage students to do so more than they otherwise do with
paper dictionaries, but I am not as sanguine as Power CD's
marketers, who declare, "No longer do you have to fumble with an
open dictionary on your desk; there's already one on your computer!"
But what if you do not have your computer and CD-ROM with you? Will
most readers not find the traditional versions of textbooks and
dictionaries more convenient to carry to and from class, to the
library, to home on weekends, or to the nearest spot of grass and
shade on a sunny day?
All in all, I found this initial foray into electronic American
history textbooks a disappointment. If the current product's design
should remain essentially the same, there is still much that can be
changed to improve the product. I have noted several glitches and
peculiar design features already. To those I will add that the
navigation through the CD-ROM is overly complex and can lead one
into inexplicable dead ends. Navigation should be streamlined to
simulate better the likely uses of a textbook. The added features,
such as links to the web, video clips, and glossary terms, should
appear seamlessly as one reads through the text. As it is, these
features, while potentially useful additions to a paper text, fall
short because they are inserted around the body of the textbook and
therefore appear as gimmicks rather than as integrated learning
tools. Does adding a soundtrack really help students learn?
If Prentice-Hall hopes to seize whatever market there is for CD-ROMs
in American history courses, it should return to the drawing board.
My own preference would be for a product that does more than bundle
currently available paper products into one electronic product.
This, indeed, is old wine in new bottles. For my own survey
courses, in which I demand that students read many primary
documents, explore web sites such as the Valley of the Shadow
project on the Civil War and the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in
New York City, and write several essays, a CD-ROM would be most
useful if it supplemented, rather than mimicked, an existing
textbook. Such a product would include primary documents and web
sites linked to relevant sections in the texts, interactive map
exercises (such as I once used with the text _A People and a
Nation_), longer video clips and more images, and lessons that ask
students to tie together their knowledge using the text, documents,
web links, and other resources in the preparation of a written
essay, a class presentation, or a group project such as a debate.
Most of all, I would want the CD-ROM to help me teach my students
how to do history. This first edition of _The American Journey,
Interactive Edition_ is not really interactive. With a few
exceptions, it is an electronic presentation of printed texts. All
survey courses should be interactive, but one need not have
computers to interact with students, and one need not adopt, as
eager as one might be to do so, CD-ROMs for American history surveys
until this emerging technology truly offers an integrated,
interactive approach to learning how to interpret the past. Perhaps
that product already exists, but it is not _The American Journey,
Interactive Edition_.
Copyright (c) 1998 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work
may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the list.
|