"BODYWORKS"

Perhaps no one had a better reason to embrace this new technology than Bernadette Wegenstein, Ph.D., visiting professor of comparative literature at UB. As a visiting scholar at Stanford University, she had planned to co-teach "Bodyworks," a groundbreaking course about how technology has altered perceptions of the human body, with Timothy Lenoir, Ph.D., a professor of the history of science at Stanford who developed the course.

But last fall, just as Wegenstein was anticipating the birth of her first child, her husband, William Egginton, also a humanities professor, accepted a position with UB. Wegenstein wondered if there was a way she could still co-teach the course in the spring semester from Buffalo using the Web.

She approached staff members at Millard Fillmore College, which administers UB's distance learning programs. They, in turn, contacted their Stanford counterparts.

At first, no one was thinking about using Internet 2.

"When we first started talking with Stanford, the plan was to use the regular Internet with a video link," recalls Stephens. "That gives you a connection, but the images are pretty choppy and low-quality. Then while we were talking about it, one of the people at Stanford said: 'You know, I've been trying to work on this H.323 (Internet videoconferencing) stuff' and I just burst out laughing. I told them they had just fallen into a hotbed of people working on this stuff.'"

According to Stephens, Whitlock and his colleagues had been experimenting with this technology for years before other institutions became interested.

"Had we not been positioned by Jim's earlier efforts, we could not have taken advantage of this technology for 'Bodyworks,'" Stephens explained. "We just bruised our knuckles on this before a lot of other people did."

In addition to the live, interactive nature of the classes, Internet videoconferencing for distance learning at UB also involves extensive online discussion groups, Web-based resources and curriculum materials and digitized video clips.

For "Bodyworks," in particular, there was an extensive amount of such material developed by Lenoir at Stanford.

But the biggest hurdle remained connecting the two classes and keeping them connected through the semester.

The technical staffs at the two universities started working together immediately to make the course a reality.

"What made this so exciting was that it was bicoastal," said Stephens, "and the quality of the connection allowed students and instructors to engage in spontaneous conversation. The bandwidth available on Internet 2 is what makes this possible."

Despite the fact that such a grand experiment was in a lot of ways just that -- an experiment -- the two universities pulled it off. While new technical difficulties frequently surfaced, they only caused one cancellation of the class.

"Bodyworks" was an especially interesting course to do this way, Wegenstein explained.

"The presence of the medium that we were actually analyzing benefited the students," she explained, "because we were looking at issues of reality and virtuality."

In addition to the kind of almost awe-inspiring sense of connection students in the two classes felt, Wegenstein noted that the experience allowed them to come to a new way of understanding the Web and its possibilities.

"There was a kind of concretization of the Internet itself," she noted. "Usually Internet experiences are ones you have while you are sitting by yourself at your computer. But here, it suddenly became a social medium."