By Margot Krouwer

“I no longer fear [technology]. It is no longer the big monster.”

So says B.J. Masson, a Bryn Mawr McBride scholar at an educational technology conference that took place on Thursday, October 2. Masson is one of many students and faculty who have expressed concern about his or her lack of technological savvy in the face of a rapidly progressing college and world.

But Janet Scannell, founder of the Summer Multi-Media Development Institute, known as SMDI, says she is here to help.
Scannell founded SMDI after visiting a presentation about a similar program at Wellesley College. Scannell was inspired by the idea of students and faculty working together to build technological and pedagogical goals and decided to start a similar project of her own at Bryn Mawr.

“[The primary goal of the program is] to find a way for students and faculty to develop their skills, to use technology to support teaching, and for students to learn how to learn about technology,” said Scannell.

“People should not use technology for technology’s sake but with a goal in mind,” said successful SMDI user Kelly Soudachanh ’10, articulating one of the central tenents of the program.

Scannell claims that the program not only teaches you how to use technology successfully but how to understand and implement new technology in the future. The goal, she says, is self-sufficiency.

“The hope is that students that use the program will learn the confidence and techniques to help them [implement] technology in the future,” Scannell said.

Jennifer Spohrer, a member of the faculty at Bryn Mawr, says, “Students aren’t as technologically savvy as they think they are, they don’t have as much of an idea of the technology behind the software.”

Kelly Soudachanh, agrees.

“Kids are confident in things like [Microsoft] Word and Facebook, because they use it on a daily basis,” said Soudachanh.

However, Soudachanh does not think that such familiarity makes students any more a technological expert than she. There is a general consensus throughout the SMDI group that younger students have developed a misconception that technology is easy because they are familiar with a small fraction of it, but if they were greeted with the unfamiliar, they would be as lost as most older adults.

SMDI wants to teach both faculty and students how to better integrate and accept technology in the classroom. This means not only the conventional technology that most people on campus understand, such as programs like Word, but also more radical technology such as electronic notebooks, Dreamweaver, and smart-boards.

But not only is new technology expensive, it’s complex.

Dr. Krynn Lakacs, Senior Laboratory Lecturer in the Chemistry Department, expresses frustration at not being able to find budgeting for electronic notebooks to support her chemistry class, while her student, BJ Masson, expresses the same frustration at being unable to understand how to use them properly. While SMDI is taking steps to educate the greater Bryn Mawr community about technology, it is clear they still have a long road, one along the ever-changing technology highway, ahead of them.

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