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The School of Interdisciplinary Studies has made rapid advances in the area of instructional computing since Dr. Wolfe took on the responsibilities of Director of Quantitative Reasoning and Instructional Computing. Dr. Wolfe wrote "A Plan for Instructional Computing in the Western College Program," a proposal that was endorsed unanimously by the SIS faculty in the spring of 1990. That plan served as the blueprint for creating the School of Interdisciplinary Studies Center for Computer Assisted Learning (SISCCAL) and provided a pedagogical approach to integrating instructional computing throughout the program curriculum. SISCCAL is a multipurpose microcomputer center and classroom designed especially for the Western College Program. It was created with the aid of Academic Challenge Funds and the continuing support of the Western College Alumni Association. In 1990, Dr. Wolfe successfully solicited an additional equipment donation of five Macintosh computers from Apple Computer.

SISCCAL has a deep commitment to student peer tutoring, and generally has a staff of ten capable undergraduate students. Dr. Wolfe has created a model of "distributed knowledge and teaching" whereby pairs of students gain expertise with specific computer applications and other technologies, and share their knowledge with the rest of the group. The system works by pairing a student who has more expertise in a particular area with a relative novice. The pair has responsibility for learning about a specific computer program, such as Statview (or hardware such as video editing equipment). The pair then has the responsibility for teaching a class on their particular topic. Thus, over the course of a semester, the entire group learns about a number of important applications, each student gains a degree of expertise in three or four areas, and SISCCAL always has a few "resident experts" on each topic. In addition to teaching technical topics, Dr. Wolfe teaches students about the art of peer tutoring, and relevant theory.

The Center presently consists of sixteen networked Macintosh computers with color monitors, and a range of peripheral devices including cartridge and CD drives, printers, bit pads, scanners, and library of sophisticated courseware and applications. SISCCAL is the basis of a local area network serving 23 faculty and staff offices in two buildings, and WCP faculty now employ this facility in teaching their courses and in research.

Since the opening of SISCCAL in 1990, Western faculty and students have become increasingly sophisticated in their use of computers. Western now has a faculty that is developing new proficiencies with communications and computing. Several Western courses have used courseware and sophisticated applications in educating students. For example, Dr. Nicholson makes extensive use of fractal generating software in her courses on Chaos theory. Dr. Cummins and Dr. Myers found that students benefited from their use of astronomy software. Students have developed integrated "hypermedia" projects that interactively present images, sound, text, and computer-generated animation sequences (e.g. Peanimation sequences. Students have also created "hypertexts" (Wolfe, in press), performed "on-line" experiments (Wolfe, 1992), analyzed data, and produced demographic maps (Wolfe presentation, 1992). Since SISCCAL opened, WCP students have taken a more active role in computer- assisted innovations, and now WCP students are in positions of leadership across the Miami campus. For example, a large number of WCP students were involved in the creation of Miami's acclaimed interactive videos on issues of race and gender. WCP students are æalso well represented among the ranks of computer-consultants at Miami's microcomputer laboratories.

Dr. Wolfe recently redesigned SISCCAL to facilitate individual and group work, and looks forward to opening the new Center when the Western Program returns to Peabody Hall. In the near future, Dr. Wolfe hopes to implement several proposals which are in the hands of the development office, but have not yet been funded. Two of these are the Proposal for the Implementation of Wider Area Networking in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at Miami University (originally developed in 1990) and the Digital Studio and Laboratory (originally developed in 1993). The wide-area communications network has the purpose of integrating computing technology into the curriculum and broadening the educational opportunities of students. It calls for the networking of computers in students' residence hall rooms, classrooms, faculty and administrative offices, the Writing Center, and SISCCAL to extend the boundaries of the classroom. The Digital Studio and Laboratory is proposed as a multimedia development facility for the Western Program. It would enable students and faculty to create, manipulate, and analyze pictures, music, and video sequences. It would be used to create interactive multimedia presentations, educational software, audio tapes, videos and Quicktime movies. Students and faculty would also use the facility to conduct scientific analyses of visual data.