Making UW-Madison manageable for first-year students

Katie Dalessandro of Richmond, Ill., likes the idea of studying computer science, but she isn’t completely sure exactly what it will entail.

To sound out the major, she’ll use a new UW–Madison learning program, Digital Divides and Differences, one of 16 First-Year Interest Groups (FIGs) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. FIGs operate as mini-learning communities built around a particular theme, with up to 20 students per FIG signed up for a set of three classes.

“In high school, I was good at math, and I like it, but I think studying computer science in college will be very different,” Dalessandro says. “The FIG will give me the opportunity to see what computer science is all about.”

The program also will provide Dalessandro’s first real whiff of college culture. “I’ll be able to see what it’s like to learn in college, ways of knowing what I’ll need to know,” she says.

Digital Divides will examine who has access to the newer technologies, who doesn’t, and why or why not. In addition to this “anchor” course, Digital Divides will include a basic computer programming class, plus an introduction to cultural anthropology and human diversity.

The concept of an anchor class makes UW–Madison’s FIG program unique, according to director Greg Smith. “The professor of that central or synthesizing course will be integrating content from the other two classes into the synthesizing course,” Smith says.

Conceived as a component of the university’s diversity-strengthening Madison Plan 2008, FIGs break the massive campus into bite-sized sections for new students. FIGs also integrate higher learning into a meaningful whole, a mission that translates into a good deal of extra planning and preparation for the “lead” professor. In the case of Digital Divides, it is Greg Downey, assistant professor in the schools of Library and Information Studies, and Journalism and Mass Communication.

Downey has taught versions of a digital divides class to graduate students. For the new FIG, “I’ve reorganized the entire course structure and revamped the reading list,” he says. “This FIG course will be substantially improved — I’ll focus more on freshman-level concepts and skills at the beginning of the semester, and get into more and more details as time goes on.”

Downey says he is looking forward to the academic bonuses his FIG promises. While he doesn’t intend to track the content of the other two courses week by week, he does intend for his students to think through links between his class and what they’re learning elsewhere, in the FIG courses and others.

“I’ll use writing assignments to push students to make those connections,” he says. “Ultimately, I’m hoping that some of the material from my seminar will find its way into assignments the students are writing for other classes.”

The popularity of FIGs has quadrupled since UW–Madison’s College of Letters and Science introduced the program last year. In those 12 months the program has grown from four to 16 FIGs, serving close to 260 students, up from the original 76.

Matthew Fourness of Appleton, settling into Downey’s Digital Divides FIG, explains the explosive popularity in terms of logistics.

“I was able to get classes that will count toward my graduation requirements without the hassle of scheduling them individually,” he says. “I’m also hoping the FIG classes will give me a jump on my major,” perhaps computer science. At this point, he’s aiming at a career in software development.

In addition to their promise of more content cohesion, FIGs provide social-adjustment benefits, according to Timothy Walsh. Currently, the director of the UW–Madison Cross-College Advising Service, Walsh oversaw the FIG program’s inauguration as its acting director last year. He’s says he’s convinced that a good deal of the FIG appeal is the interplay between academics and camaraderie.

“FIGs provide first-year students with an instant community of other freshmen. The students bond in a remarkably short time and help each other through the transition from high school to college,” Walsh says. “As a result, FIG students are able to focus quickly and fully on their classes so that these students can make the most of their undergraduate experience.”

Dalessandro agrees. “My FIG has two smaller classes and a large lecture, so I’ll know people even in the big class,” she says.

While getting to know people will be a big help, Greg Flygt of Madison is relying on the Digital Divides FIG to help him sound out new intellectual territory.

“I was a math-and-science type of person in high school, but I’m really starting to get into the humanities — they help you know more about the world. I’m really interested in knowing more for the sake of knowing more,” he says.

Flygt comes to the class with more than enough computer dexterity, having built his own computer from scratch, ordering individual parts on the Internet. Upon graduation he had planned on designing computer games but says he’s now having second thoughts, and may pursue marine biology instead.

UW–Madison’s FIGs are the university’s most recent incarnation of its tradition of incorporating learning into the very fabric of day-to-day life, beginning in 1927 with the Experimental College. Ex-College undergraduates and faculty together explored the liberal arts in the classroom, residences in Adams Hall, and other venues. Some 20 years later, the Integrated Liberal Studies program helped freshmen and sophomores make sense of basic graduation requirements through a series of related classes.

These older concepts have come full circle with the advent of learning communities in the 1990s with Chadbourne Residential College, opened in fall 1997. Elizabeth Waters’ Women in Science floor, Global Village in Merit Hall, the Bradley Hall Learning Community for freshmen and the International Learning Community in the old Ex-College venue of Adams Hall are also on UW–Madison’s roster of learning communities.

FIG director Greg Smith says the program also includes a FIG for students living in private residence halls like the Statesider and the Towers. “That FIG — Beyond Myth and Cruelty: An Overview of Serious Mental Illness — is an experiment, part of a pilot this fall. We hope that we’ll be able to build on this relationship with the private residence halls,” he says.

Not surprisingly, Smith foresees additional growth for the FIG program. “I’d like to see at least 20 FIGs in 2003, and perhaps up to 30 the following year,” he says. “As we develop the program, we may include more FIG clusters of interest to students already focused on specific majors. For example, some FIG clusters might help students meet prerequisites for majors in education, business or engineering.”

Smith hopes to broaden faculty participation as well as student involvement. “Right now, FIG courses are taught primarily by L&S faculty. As the program continues to develop a strong record of student achievement and retention, other colleges, schools and departments may be interested in participating and sponsoring FIG courses,” he says.

The FIG lineup for fall ’02 includes: Communication, Culture and Disability; Cross-Cultural Economics of the Global Food System; Environmental Justice; Language, Race and Identity; Mass Media and Cultural Diversity; Diversity of Human Livelihood Strategies: Where Economics, Cultures and Environments Meet; Multi-Racial America; Origins of Human Diversity; Population Health: Combining Physical and Social Science; Science and the Stage; Socio-Economic Inequality and Career Choices; Three Perspectives on Race and Gender in American Culture; Transforming Earth: Place-Making, Casuality and Free Will; and Understanding Human-Environment Relationships.

For more information, contact Smith, (608) 263-6504.