I thought of Marlowe Froke the other day, when I bought the
latest Tony Bennett “Duets” CD. A
few months before he died, Marlowe and I had lunch together, and I gave him the
first “Duets” CD. He had told me
earlier how much he liked Bennett and not newer music. I thought this would be a neat way for
him to bridge the generation gap.
I
first met Marlowe when he was 41 and General Manager of WPSX-TV, the public
television station at Penn State University. It was 1968, and I was a 20-year-old undergraduate student
lucky to have gotten a part-time job as a Production Assistant in the TV
studio. A year and a half
later, in spring 1970, I became a full-time staff member, first in production
and, later in programming and public information. I didn’t realize it at the time, but over the 19 years that
I worked in public broadcasting, Marlowe would become the only person who I
could rightly say was a mentor to me.
WPSX
had been on the air only three years when I first signed on as a part-time
camera operator. There was a
palpable sense of family among the staff, who were all young and excited about
being in at the beginning of an exciting new, creative venture. We knew we were innovating
and, within the university, operating a bit on the radical edge. It was a great time to be starting out.
In
those days, “public” television was “educational” television. Throughout his career, Marlowe
emphasized the educational nature of our work. In our programming logs, general audience programs were
“general education” (series like Pennsylvania
Magazine and Second Chair, for
which I produced interviews with visiting authors like Jorge Amado and Anthony
Burgess). We produced programs for
the K-12 classroom on science (example: Science
for the Seventies, which in the 1980s became ISEE: Investigative Science for Elementary Education), art, and
current affairs (What’s in the News,
which eventually went national), working under the guidance of top Penn State
education faculty. And, led
initially by Executive Producer Lou Florimonte and later by Diana Dean and
George Thurman, we produced adult
education programs like Parenting, Food$en$e, and a series of
interdisciplinary courses on Science, Technology, and Society with titles like The Behavioral Revolution and The Finite Earth. At the other end of the educational
spectrum, we produced how-to shows on everything from wood carving to playing bluegrass
music. A Public Affairs unit, led
by the late P.J. O’Connell, documented the institutions of small town
Pennsylvania life—“The Spirit” of
Punxsutawney (about a small town newspaper) and documentaries on life in a
hospital, a volunteer fire department, and a local smelting company, as
examples. James DeVinney headed a
unit that produced programs on the arts, often featuring Penn State music
groups—the Thalia Trio and the Alard String Quartet. And, of course, there were daily informational programs like
Farm, Home, and Garden from the
Cooperative Extension Service and The State
of the Weather/The Shape of the World from the College of Earth and Mineral
Sciences.
All
of this was in the spirit of using technology to extend access to
education. That was Marlowe’s
personal vision, and it became, during his tenure, the hallmark of WPSX-TV,
which declared on its station ID’s that it operated as a “continuing education
and public service.” In fact, one of
Marlowe’s first accomplishments in 1965 was to create a consortium of school
districts in our 29-county service area and to dedicate the daytime schedule to
programs broadcast for use in school classrooms.
Marlowe
had been a journalism professor.
When I moved into the Public Information position at WPSX-TV, one of my
jobs was to write three press releases per week promoting new programs. I had been an English major and knew
how to write, but I didn’t know how to write press releases. For the first few weeks, Marlowe would
send every press release back with detailed edits. Eventually, I learned how to write and how to embody his
idea that even a press release was an attempt to create a more educated viewer.
Over
time, my role at WPSX-TV evolved from simply public information to what we
called “Viewer Services.” The unit
covered several different ways in which we could engage viewers in broadcasts,
from creating informed viewers (from press releases to feature stories in our
program guide to sending Penn State faculty members out to libraries to talk
about the context of programs (for instance, sending a historian out to talk
about “I, Claudius” on Masterpiece
Theatre) to organizing viewers groups in communities to discuss programs to
formal credit and noncredit courses. During this time, I was able to participate in two of Marlowe’s experiments in
using technology to extend access to education. One, in the
late 1970s, was to help create Pennarama, a statewide educational cable TV
channel, one of the first networked cable channels. Around that same time, he affiliated WPSX with the
Appalachian Educational Satellite Program, which used an experimental ATS-6
communications satellite to deliver teacher education and nursing education
programs to schools and hospitals in the Appalachian Region. Using technology to extend access to
education.
In
1981, WPSX-TV and the on-campus media service unit—the University Division of
Instructional Services—were merged under Marlowe’s leadership into a group
called Media and Learning Resources.
I became Director of Instructional Media in this new unit, responsible
for developing instructional video materials for both on-campus and external
delivery. Now, my main job was to
use technology to extend access to education across multiple delivery
formats: broadcast, cable,
satellite, and new technologies like videodisc. Marlowe’s vision had become my career. Together, we got involved in
several national and international initiatives, including the National
University Teleconference Network, the International University Consortium for
Telecommunications in Teaching (IUC), and Glenn Jones’ Mind Extension
University. Just as it had been in
the 1960s, it was wonderful to be actively involved in the distance education
innovations of the 1980s.
Suddenly, without really planning on it, I had become a distance
education leader in this new environment, thanks to Marlowe’s mentorship and
his vision: using technology to
increase access to education.
I
left Penn State in 1987. Marlowe
had passed me over for one of the few promotions that I thought I would be able
to get at Penn State: Station Manager.
Later, he told me that the decision had been one of his hardest and that
he felt I could make a better contribution in the instructional area. Turns out he was right. I moved to Maryland and became
Executive Director of the IUC and Associate Vice President for Program
Development at the University of Maryland University College.
Seven
years later, Marlowe called me.
Penn State had decided to hire an Assistant Vice President for Distance
Education, and he encouraged me to apply.
He also worked with his new Vice President to arrange for us to meet at
a conference. Marlowe
retired before I was hired and returned to Penn State. His vision, which he honored for four
decades at Penn State, had prepared the way for the World Campus, the
university’s online campus. Using
technology to extend access to education.
Many
of today’s leaders in online learning do not have a long history of using other
technologies before the Internet.
The field has been informed by a lot of new thinking, as a result. Some of us, though, have been through
the other changes and understand that, one of these days, a new technology will
come along that will revolutionize distance education, just as television and
cable and satellite and the Internet did. Marlowe’s message for this new generation might well
be: Don’t identify yourself with a
particular technology itself, but with how you use whatever technology is
available to extend education for those who otherwise would not have access.
Thanks,
again, Marlowe.
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