By Meghan Huber

Guest Writer

Last week on March 19 through 21, Calvin held its first ``webinar,'' or web seminar, sponsored by the Council of Christian Colleagues and Universities (CCCU), which signifies Calvin's increased use of the Internet as a communications medium for academics and administration.

According to Rob Bobeldyk, Teaching and Learning Team Leader for Calvin Information Technology, the seminar was supposed to be a lecture by Dr. Van Weigel of Eastern College on the topic of deepening the experience of learning using technology, and how technology has transformed teaching in the last ten years, which used both audio and visuals.

However, there turned out to be a misunderstanding on CIT's part as to what the lecture was to be about. Whereas CIT anticipated a teaching seminar, they received a training seminar, fit more exclusively for professors rather than students.

Although no students and only a few faculty actually participated in this first seminar, the vision for the use of the CCCU seminars still remains.

This vision, which includes not just learning about the tools that technology hands to us, but learning and integrating into our lives how to use the tools that we have at our fingertips, remains for many people at CIT. CIT hopes that this vision, though delayed, will allow students, faculty, and staff alike to see more web seminars offered in the future at Calvin.

Bringing a web-based seminar to campus might seem like a simple ordeal. However, it is in fact a very selective process. The hard part for CIT faculty is filtering out a worthwhile seminar from the wide selection they receive through public advertisements.

These public advertisements feature everything from corporate pushes for the usefulness of new Apple Computer software to seminars advising us how to perceive technology in the classroom.

Several of Calvin's CIT faculty view one or two web seminars per week. However, it is hard to find strategies to implement these modern, technology-laden workshops on Calvin's campus, because they involve a lot of researching, planning, and publicizing.

CIT strives to ensure both that the topics pertain to what students are learning, and also so that the seminars can spark an interest in the students to explore deeper into what technology has to offer.

In the near future, CIT members say that Calvin can expect to see more advertisements for these seminars that will help us see new perspectives on how we perceive and learn technology in our modern age.

Participating in future web seminars that will be offered to faculty and students will help individuals discover the pedagogical piece of technology, as well as what's behind it, which is something the tools of technology themselves often blur.

``The tools are there,'' Bobeldyk said. ``People are pushing the tools, but they're missing the big picture.''