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The Plain Dealer

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October 25, 1999 Monday, FINAL / ALL

SECTION: METRO; Pg. 1B

LENGTH: 574 words

HEADLINE: LOW-TECH TOOL IS PRIDE OF WOOSTER

BYLINE: By AFI-ODELIA E. SCRUGGS; PLAIN DEALER REPORTER

BODY:

The College of Wooster's newly renovated chemistry building, Severance Hall, has lots of great stuff.

Each seat in the lecture hall features a computer port. And, for safety's sake, emergency showers are present in every organic chemistry laboratory in case of a chemical accident.

The building has a computer graphics lab, so students can get a three-dimensional view of complex molecules like DNA and proteins.

But, best of all, Severance Hall has blackboards.

They are slate blackboards at that, solid and heavy as a rock because they are rock.

They are also smooth, so the chalk doesn't squeak. When the professors are finished, the blackboards are merely wiped clean.

No powering down or rebooting is involved. The boards never crash, plus they are Y2K compliant.

No need to upgrade them, either. They work as well now as they did when they were installed 97 years ago.

That's why the chemistry department faculty decided to keep them.

Instead of discarding the boards during the building's renovation, workers reframed and rehung them.

It wasn't an exercise in nostalgia. Faculty members say the boards are simply the best piece of equipment for the job.

"Suppose a student asks an unanticipated question," department Chairman David Powell posited.

With a blackboard at his disposal, he can address it immediately and perhaps pursue a related topic.

Then when he's finished, the information can remain in place, so students can study it a bit longer. Or it can be deleted - oops, erased - leaving a clean slate for the next class.

The instructor doesn't have to worry about overloading a hard drive or accidentally locking up the monitor by pressing the wrong keys.

And the work doesn't have to be saved periodically. It's saved as soon as it is written on the board.

Of course, the problem of chalk dust isn't so easily solved. It gets all over the writers' hands and settles on the floor.

"Now and then our noses drip," Powell said. "We use a lot of Kleenex."

That's why the faculty considered switching to whiteboards, the large plasticized tablets that demand multicolored felt-tipped markers. The whiteboards, however, never get completely clean.

In the end, there was no justification for replacing the old with the new.

"Especially if the old is better," Powell said.

In other words, age doesn't guarantee obsolescence.

Think about that for a minute.

For many of us facing the alleged end of the millennium - there is still some argument over the exact date of that momentous event - high technology has become synonymous with progress, innovation, Truth, Justice and the American Way.

Whatever our problem, we are convinced the computer can solve it, with a little help from the Internet and the World Wide Web.

But the chemistry professors at the College of Wooster are fighting the tide.

They stood firm when other universities, indeed other departments within their university, switched to synthetic blackboards back in the'50s and'60s.

Now the trend is toward white boards and magic markers, or overhead projectors and laser pointers.

"We've got overheads and power pointers and laptops," Powell said.

And e-mail and the Internet.

And the slate boards, which are hanging in Severance Hall, just like they have since their original installation.

That was a couple of years after the last turn of the century.

With a little luck and care, they could last through the turn of the next one.

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

COLUMN: AFI-ODELIA E. SCRUGGS

LOAD-DATE: October 26, 1999