David G. Brown, as Provost of Wake Forest, put his university at the forefront of the national movement sometimes called (in a term invented by Brown, I believe) "ubiquitous computing." Every entering WFU freshman had a laptop, faculty equipment and university networking were dramatically upgraded, and a great deal of attention, including faculty development, went into seeing that teaching and learning exploited the capacities of the new technologies. Since leaving the provost's office in 1998 he has been the Dean of the International Center for Computer-Enhanced Learning.

He is a true believer. He is sure, as he writes in his new book Teaching With Technology, that "more computers equal more learning." The most wired campuses are doing the best job helping their students to maximize learning. The new book is a sort of companion volume to another he edited this year, called Interactive Learning: Vignettes from America's Most Wired Campuses (also Anker 2000). Like that one, this book begins with some chapters of theory and sane but strenuous exhortation, followed by vignettes of how 75 faculty members are using computers to improve teaching and learning.

The professors are from the eight universities making up the Learning Technology Consortium: the Universities of Delaware, Florida and Georgia, Pittsburgh, Notre Dame, Indiana, Virginia Tech, and Wake Forest. There is a brief chapter on each university, describing its computing environment, and, as one would expect, they report a level of support that many readers of this review may not enjoy. But they are selected not as average institutions but as exemplary ones.

The vignettes are the heart of the book and they are well chosen to illustrate a wide variety of disciplines and teaching situations as well as many different uses of technology. Few readers, probably, will want to read them all, straight through. I looked for someone whose teaching is like mine. The book is well constructed for browsing, as it has indexes arranged by author's name, by institution, by discipline, by "educational belief" (for instance, collaborative learning, prompt feedback), and by computer tool or technology. These lead to the chapters in which are discussed such topics as using email and internet discussion groups.

Among the vignettes are some extremely useful things. I appreciated the chapter on an internet course for nursing graduate students which provided the results of surveys in the form of rewards and pitfalls of the course, as reported both by faculty and by students. While both students and faculty appreciated some things about the course, the faculty members complained of the time demands of creating the course and lack of support and the students missed the face-to-face classroom encounter. One said, "I feel cheated by not having met the instructor."

This is an example of the candor by which the vignettes are characterized. They are generally clear and helpful. Reading them will give any instructor ideas about how to teach differently.

One implied promise that seems to me still unkept has to do with assessment. The assertion that more computers equal more learning, though the book hardly stands or falls on it, is an important one. Yet the chapter designed to back it up has only one reference--to the other collection of vignettes by David G. Brown--and the evidence is sometimes circular (one should not be surprised that the faculty members chosen to provide vignettes for such a book believe that technology increases learning) and sometimes very soft. "When asked for measured results," the author reports, almost three-fourths of the essayists cite high scores on student evaluations of teaching, high rates of student satisfaction with the computer-enhanced portions of their courses, and their own observations about the positive impact of computers.

It is immediately clear that none of these is a measure of student learning.

But people who don't already believe, or at least suspect, that computer-enhanced instruction contributes something to student learning are unlikely to be reading this book anyway. It isn't primarily a work of theory or of nuanced pedagogical argument, but a collection of suggestions, illustrations, and demonstrations, and as such it should be in the teaching centers and IT centers of American colleges and universities.

Merritt Moseley,
UNC Asheville