International projectionist (Jan 1959-Dec 1960)

A-V Education: A New Era Dawns The second and concluding installment of excerpts from the address by Maurice B. Mitchell to the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers on the occasion of their Fall (1958) Convention at Detroit. Informative and provocative, this exposition provides much mental food to the, at present, sadly undernourished workers in the A-V area. Mr. Mitchell is president of Encyclopedia Brittanica Films, Inc., and has actively strong ties with Massachusetts Institute of Technology. LET us describe the classroom of tomorrow as it will be equipped for audiovisual education. It will be set up so the room can be effectively darkened. It will have no projector; it will use no film. There will be a sheet of glass in the front of the room, a part of the blackboard, on which the instructor can write in chalk. Next to it will be the telephone dial, and from the dial will hang a telephone book, and in that book a catalog of every audio-visual device, film and film strip that has been made. The instructor will look up the number of the film he wants, and dial it. The picture will appear instantly on the screen, flown through space by microwave relay to the saucer on the roof, and a stream of electrons will paint it on the screen. The things I am describing are in the present state of the art. No inventions, no breakthroughs are required. We could do it now. All we need is the profound conviction that it is this kind of teaching tool we want the nation's classrooms to have. Correlated Programs The right film, the right place, the right time. . . ! Institutions where effective and advanced use of films is now made include the huge library in Georgia which has the largest single collection of educational motion pictures in the United States. It sends out 200,000 classroom films a year to Georgia schools, postage paid both ways. A library in the Province of Ontario had classroom audiences running to 10,300,000 students last year. The Morton Township High School in Cicero, Ilk, uses 60 sound motion pictures a day. The Soviet Accomplishment I have sketched some implications in the communications revolution for education. Wc are only on the starting line. Many things we have come to accept as routine will change radically. Douglas Johnston of the London County Council, which runs the schools in the capital city of Great Britain, took a team of British teachers for a hard look at the schools behind the Iron Curtain. He described the average Russian classroom in a school of 562 students. The teacher stands at the front of the room. In front of him is a control panel of switches. He darkens the room by remote control. He activates a projector threaded with films from his own private film library assigned to his subject area and kept in his school building. Wide Procedural Choice He can start and stop the projector. He can run it back and start over. He can knock out the soundtrack and let a student narrate the film to demonstrate his understanding of the concepts. If he wishes, he can project, simultaneously on the same screen, film strips from a separate film-strip projector. He also has an overhead projector. What was found in the science classrooms was also found in the geography and history classrooms. There is tremendous use made of the tape recorder in the Soviet Union for the study of languages. I am told there are 43,000 teachers of English in the Soviet Union. I am further told that not a single institution of higher learning in Ohio teaches Russian. And I am told at M.I.T. that 10 years from today a student in the sciences who has Russian and English at his command will hold the key to 80% of the scientific literature of his time. Have We Any Option? Technological and communications revolutions have a way of destroying the options of those who live through them. The businessman in the buggywhip business had no option. He adapted to the technology of his times, or he was dead. Perhaps in education the same holds true. What option do we have to ignore the products of our communications revolution? If we do, what price will lit iibmortam HARRY SHERMAN MARCH 3, 1952 we pay? What will be the outcome of the desperate struggle for men's minds? Is all this just news of damnation — or can it be, if we will make it so, the good news of damnation? This is the challenge. It comes at a difficult time. We haven't the money to build the buildings, to train and pay the new teachers we need to absorb the flood of population pouring into our schools. How we solve these problems may determine how we live a generation or two from now. [ED.'S NOTE: The above is a severe abridgement of Mr. Mitchell's substantial address. Full details and supporting argument have been published by Fenn College. 1 BOOK REVIEW LIGHT, by Alexander Efron, E. E., Ph. D. Published by John Rider, Inc., 116 West 14th St., New York City 11. One of the Basic Science Series. 128 pages, profusely illustrated. Price: $2.25. As is typical of the series, this book gives an excellent account of the subject in a mature, well thought-out presentation. The text will prove invaluable to anyone who owns a camera, uses a magnifier or microscope, or who is concerned with home or office lighting. Students of physics will find the discussion is much broader and more thorough than usually found in an intermediate-level text. After a discussion of various beliefs about light and descriptions of methods used to determine the velocity of light, the book considers behavior from the viewpoint of light rays. Later, the wavetheory of light behavior is covered, and reflection and refraction are re-examined from this outlook. The use of full-color illustrations at the appropriate place in the analysis of the spectrum is of great help in understanding the topic. The section on optical instruments, including the eye itself, and how these instruments function is fascinating. The final chapter deals with sources of light, the energy of light and recent developments in the field of illumination. — J.J.F. Chicago L. 110 Election A special election of officers for IA Local 110, Chicago Moving Picture Operators Union, had the following results: president, Howard Blackwood; secretarytreasurer, Ralph Mooney; business manager, Clarence Jalas, and trustee, Arnold Swanson. These officials, excepting Jalas, were elected for unexpired terms ending in 1960; the term of Jalas, former secretarytreasurer for many years, runs until 1963. 14 INTERNATIONAL PROJECTIONIST MARCH 1959