Virtual Teaching Tool Developed By UB Professor Attracts Attention Of Apple Computer

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The work of a faculty member in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University at Buffalo to create a virtual teaching tool has attracted the attention of Apple Computer, Inc.

The project, developed by Wassim Jabi, assistant professor of architecture, involves cataloging the school's slide collection -- which consists of roughly 30,000 slides -- through a digital system that Jabi says makes the images more accessible to students.

Jabi says a team of faculty and staff members has been scanning the slides into a computer and storing them on the digital system. The system, he says, makes it possible for anyone in the school to search for slides and place the desired images into a virtual slide tray using nothing more than a Web browser.

"Then you can go to the slide sorter and sort your slides, like you sort a PowerPoint presentation," says Jabi, explaining that as in PowerPoint, through which the user can sort and organize thumbnails of images, "you can sort slides, you can remove a slide that you don't want or you can read it later on. You can go back and do an additional search and add slides."

Jabi used Apple's WebObjects Application Server to create the virtual slide system. The work was discovered by Apple, and featured on the computer company's Web site in the Fall 1999 issue of its University Arts magazine in an article titled "The future of the past" located at http://www.apple.com/education/hed/aua0202/sunybuffalo/.

"Apparently, Apple got my name from a discussion list, and it progressed from there. They are interested in promoting this software to academics," he says. For Apple, the project "is a success story of WebObjects."

Jabi says the system allows someone teaching a history of architecture class, for example, to sort and save the images as a presentation. Working in an educational-technology classroom, the instructor can "go to the Web and call it up and it's ready to go" for class, he says.

Jabi notes that his virtual slide project -- for which he has received no funding and which he produced on his own time -- has three goals.

The first is to preserve the thousands of slides in the school's collection; the second goal is to make the slides more accessible. The final goal, he says, is to "use them as a true teaching tool."

Jabi says faculty members have responded well to the idea of using the system as a learning tool.

"They said it would be really nice to enable the students to interactively hide and show (a slide's) caption, so this can become almost like a flashcard system. You can use it as a study guide," he says.

The program, which Jabi says is still in the prototype stage, only is accessible at the UB School of Architecture and Planning. He hopes it eventually will be available to the entire university community.

The project ties into the goals of the school's new Center for Virtual Architecture, a venture of Jabi and Jean Lamarche, also an assistant professor of architecture.

"The mission of the center is to digitally analyze and explore physical architecture, and also look at the intersection of real and virtual architecture," Jabi says.

He says he'd like the center's activities to delve deeper into space -- cyberspace, that is.

"For instance, there's a whole line of architecture that looks at augmented spaces. (In) combining real and virtual spaces, you can have a fuller experience in understanding the space."

The center, he says, is interested in pursuing what has been coined by architect Peter Anders as "cybrid" space -- a cyber hybrid.

"You can walk into a physical library, for example, and at a certain point, cross a blurred line into virtual space. The challenge is to make the integration seamless.

"Right now, virtual space is locked into the computer," Jabi says. Once that space is projected out onto the physical space itself, he says, the line between the two is blurred.

Jabi notes the computer is "too segregating from cyberspace," and envisions as part of the cybrid space "full-scale video walls, anything that will immerse you in a virtual space."

Overcoming the limitations of the computer, for Jabi at least, seems virtually…possible.

"We're trying to take (the space) out of the computer," he says.