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- Dr. Louis Bowers
College of Education Faculty Oral Histories
Dr. Louis Bowers
AH: When were those made?
LB: These were made over a three-year period from 1980 to 1983.
AH: It’s impressive that twenty years later…
LB: Sometimes it worries me, but I check them once in a while. Fortunately, the information is still correct. The clothes styles and the haircuts are no longer in vogue, but if they can get past that, I think they are still useful. We gave the Brazilian government permission to convert the narration into Portuguese. I was invited down to visit five of the universities to present to their faculty how to use the videotapes. Of course, they’re translating my English into Portuguese and back to me because I don’t speak Portuguese. I spent a week there and went to five different universities helping them use our videotapes and print materials. They were just starting their teacher preparation program in adaptive physical education at that time.
AH: We have five minutes left. We should probably just keep going onto another tape. I’m sure you have more to talk about. We’ve talked about the research that you’ve done. We talked about two of the big ones. What are some of the other things you’ve been engaged in?
LB: With Dr. Klesius, I did an interactive videodisc project. We got an additional grant from the Office of Special Education and help from IBM to produce an eight-hour course that would allow teachers or perspective teachers the opportunity to analyze the basic skills of running, jumping, throwing, and kicking. We used a touch-screen approach where the videodisc would show the child performing a skill and the student was asked then to identify correct and incorrect performance of the individual. They could play it back in slow motion. They could stop action. They had full control over the playback. When they gave ninety percent correct answers they moved onto another practice. Once they were successful in reaching 90 percent correct in their practices they took a test to move onto the next skill. On average, it would take about eight hours to finish the course. I did a study and found that indeed, undergraduate students who used this were able to successfully learn how to analyze running, jumping, throwing, and kicking skills. We distributed about 200 sets of the large videodisc, as you may remember them.
The unfortunate part of this research project, in terms of distribution, is that IBM, shortly after that, quit making the equipment and moved onto the next stage of CD-ROMs and later to Digital Video Disks. We took our experience from that, however, and we decided to look at producing a DVD, which was our last project, Physical Activity for All DVDs. The disk has some twenty-five hours of instruction on a DVD disk that’s used by teachers in presentations for adaptive physical education, or an individual teacher can go to a menu and find out and see in action a child with certain types of disabilities and what kind of activities would be appropriate for that child. It’s a real rich database of short video clips and still pictures all with narration for teachers. We distributed some 2,000 copies of that to the physical education population. Now it’s being sold by a publisher. That was a five-year project.
All of these productions we did with WUSF television, through a subcontract with Bill Buxton, the station manager to produce the “I’m Special” videotapes, the material on the interactive video disc, and the digital videodisc. As the technology has advanced we’ve tried to stay ahead of the curve with our instructional materials that we’re producing. Both Steve and I ended our career with the Physical Activity for All DVD.
AH: It sounds like perhaps it was a good thing that the video disc went out because you had to make a newer, more complete version. It sounds like this next project really superseded the last in its thoroughness.
LB: Yes, very much. In fact, we put some of the throwing, catching, kicking skill material on the DVD just so we would have those images to work with, but not the programming that went with the first interactive laser disc that we had. I still have hopes of taking the material that we had from the laser disc and somehow transferring it to a DVD along with the programming. It’s a very viable way to learn if you have the equipment to get the feedback.
AH: Should we take a quick break here?