Getting Computers Out of the Classroom?

“When Computers Leave Classrooms, So Does Boredom,” by Jeffrey R. Young, The Chronicle of Higher Education (July 20, 2009).

This article deals with the boredom generated by overuse and uncreative use of PowerPoint or other technology that can become a crutch for professors. Students tune out (and perhaps tune in to distractions on their own laptop computers and other devices). In a survey at a university in England, students “gave low marks not just to Power Point, but also to all kinds of computer-assisted classroom activities, even interactive exercises in computer labs.” Teaching methods that rated higher were seminars, practical sessions, and group discussions. “In other words, tech-free classrooms were the most engaging. At Southern Methodist University, the new dean of the arts school removed from his 20 classrooms their 2 computers (a Mac and a PC in each room), DVD player, VCR, tape deck, and “those complicated control panels where you need a Ph.D. to figure it out.” Finances in part drove this change, because the computers were old enough to need replacing. He saved yet more money by eliminating one computer technician position for responding to calls from professors in classrooms. He left the projectors in place, gave laptops to professors who lacked them and “set up support so they could create their own podcasts and videos.” Class time then could be devoted not so much to conveying content as to engaging that content collectively and more intensely. Resistance did occur, but it was from students who preferred passivity in learning—in some cases because that was all they ever knew.

Typing Greek and Hebrew Using Unicode Fonts

It used to be that when you wanted to type Greek or Hebrew characters that you had to select special fonts in your word processor that substituted Greek or Hebrew glyphs in place of Latin ones. For example, with one of those fonts selected whenever you typed a “w” it might show up as an omega (ω). However, as far as the computer was concerned you were still typing a “w” and it stored it as such—it was just that the assigned font was being tricky by making all the w’s look like omegas.

This certainly worked, but what happened if you tried to open your document on a computer that didn’t have the particular special font that you had used? All your Greek and/or Hebrew text suddenly looked like gibberish as the computer rendered exactly what you typed according to the underlying Latin characters.

The ultimate issue is that computers used to have such limited amounts of memory that they could only handle a limited number of different characters at a time. The original method of encoding text was limited to 128 characters (26 lowercase letters, 26 uppercase letters, 10 numerals, and a variety of common punctuation), although it was later expanded to 256 (adding selected accented and special characters). Today, however, computers have lots more memory and so a new, more extensive means of encoding text has been created called Unicode. Unicode, which is supported (more or less) by all current computer systems, allows computers to handle hundreds of thousands of different characters at a time. Thus, fonts can be created that contain glyphs for for Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Cyrillic, Chinese, and most of the world’s other alphabets, as well as accented characters, symbols, and other special characters.

In order to take advantage of all these characters, instead of changing your font, you change your keyboard layout. Thus, when you switch to a Greek keyboard layout, the “w” key on your North American English keyboard may become an omega key, and when you press it, not only does the character on the screen look like an omega, but the computer actually stores it as as an omega. In short, by using Unicode technology your w’s are w’s and your omegas are omegas. Therefore, when you open your document on another computer your Greek and Hebrew text will remain intact and will display as intended (assuming the computer has a Unicode font with the necessary glyphs).

To learn how to enable other keyboard layouts and switch between them, check out some of these tutorials:

• Windows XP
• Windows Vista
• Mac OS X

If the fonts that you have on your computer don’t render Greek or Hebrew characters as you like (e.g. using modern letter forms instead of ancient ones) or if they have incomplete character sets lacking special accented forms (e.g. an upsilon with a rough breathing mark and a circumflex accent), then here are some Unicode fonts that you may wish to install. All of them work on either Windows or Mac.

• SBL Biblical Fonts
• Gentium
• Cardo