Chronicle of Higher Education ONLINE
Copyright 1992, The Chronicle of Higher Education, all rights reserved. _____________________________________________________________________________

July 15, 1992 (Volume 38, Issue 45) pg. a18, 124 lines.

Information Technology

Rochester, New York

Norman R. Coombs is a man with a mission. He has just turned 60, an age when most people are starting to plan for their retirement, but Mr. Coombs says he is working harder and more productively than ever before.

The history professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology has been energized by his discovery of the use of the computer as a teaching tool.

Mr. Coombs, who is blind, says: "The computer is one of the most liberating and empowering technologies to come along in a long time for people with a variety of handicaps."

Six years ago, Mr. Coombs says, he first examined a desktop computer, "basically just to shut up a friend of mine."

"He kept telling me how great computers were, and I wasn't interested."

But Mr. Coombs soon discovered that a computer equipped with a speech synthesizer could actually speak each word on the computer screen. Soon, he says, he was requiring his students to submit papers to him in electronic form. His life, he says, was completely altered at that point. Until he started using the computer, he was forced to rely on other people to read things to him.

"Before I got a computer, I didn't really think about how dependent I was on other people," says Mr. Coombs, whose specialty is black history. "But I must have been conscious of it on a certain level, because there were these sudden emotions when I started doing things on my own." Just the memory of those emotions seems to trigger deep feelings in Mr. Coombs, normally a man who laughs and tells jokes frequently. Now, he dabs at his eyes.

Dependent on Others

He earned his doctorate in history from the University of Wisconsin in 1961, relying entirely on people who were paid 55 cents an hour by the state to read textbooks and other printed material aloud. For the next three decades, he depended on family members, friends, and paid readers to communicate printed information to him.

"Either you're paying someone, or it's a friend who wants to be helpful, or it's somebody who feels like they can't say No," he says. "You always feel like you're bothering somebody else, imposing on

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Chronicle of Higher Education ONLINE Copyright 1992, The Chronicle of Higher Education, all rights reserved. _____________________________________________________________________________

people, and so you try to do it when it's not too inconvenient for the other person."

With the computer, he says, "I can suddenly do things when I want to do them. Nobody else has to be involved." Using a scanning device, he can load the computer with any printed material and hear it read aloud.

With a modem, Mr. Coombs can tap into the vast resources of the Internet, a network of computer networks. He can read some newspapers on the day they come out now. "The Braille edition of _The New York Times_," he says, "comes more than a week after the printed version." Mr. Coombs says he is particularly fond of the news briefs that he can read in _USA Today._

He keeps accumulating new powers. "Two years ago, I used an encyclopedia on my own for the first time in my life," he says. When the campus library recently put its card catalog on line, he immediately searched for the citation of his own book. When the speech synthesizer mechanically intoned, "Coombs, Norman, _Black Experience in America,"_ Mr. Coombs says, his first thought was, "My God, I'm a real author."

Shaking his head, Mr. Coombs says, "I mean I knew I was an author, but being able to go into the library yourself and look up your own book -- it's something people take for granted. For me it was extraordinary."

Mr. Coombs says that while the computer changed his life in fundamental ways, it still took him some time to realize that disabled students could benefit from its use in classes.

He began using the computer in some continuing-education courses to replace classroom discussions. The classes had no meeting times, and students communicated with each other and Mr. Coombs by exchanging computer messages.

"Then a deaf student enrolled in one of these classes," he says. Nearly 1,100 deaf students study at Rochester, home of the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. "This young woman told me that this class, which was conducted entirely over computers, with no classroom discussion, was the first time in her entire life that she'd been able to talk directly with her professor and classmates without some sort of interpreter. She said it was the most valuable course she'd ever taken because she could take part in class discussions so easily. No one needed to know she was deaf unless she told them."

Student Confessions

Mr. Coombs discovered that class discussions on computers were also different for students who had no disabilities. "Race, gender, appearance, all the things that influence your evaluation of what

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Chronicle of Higher Education ONLINE Copyright 1992, The Chronicle of Higher Education, all rights reserved. _____________________________________________________________________________

someone is saying don't exist in computer-assisted communication," he says.

Students were sharing intimacies on line that they would never announce in class, he says. "One woman told us that she was on welfare. I can't imagine standing up in front of your peers and saying that," Mr. Coombs says. "Students confessed their prejudices and asked other students for forgiveness. Sometimes I was almost frightened at how honest the students were in this medium. I saw things I had never seen in my previous three decades of teaching."

Last fall Mr. Coombs taught a course in black history that enrolled students at Rochester and at Gallaudet University, an institution for the deaf hundreds of miles to the south, in Washington. All classroom discussions took place over computers linked through the Internet. Many of the students in the class were deaf.

Preaching the Gospel

Now Mr. Coombs spends a great deal of his time traveling around the world, preaching the gospel of computer-assisted teaching to audiences that hang on his every word.

In 1990 he was named New York State Teacher of the Year by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, an award he credits in large part to the change in his life that was wrought by the computer.

"A buddy of mine said to me six months ago, `You're a different person than you were six years ago,' before I got the computer," Mr. Coombs says. "I've got much more poise and self-confidence, even though I was in my late 50's and had been teaching for some 30 years and was fairly comfortable and confident in the classroom."

Mr. Coombs has been a long-time sculptor, but his new passion for computer-assisted communication and more frequent travels have limited the time he spends on that avocation.

"Suddenly there's this whole new world that I can seize," he says, "and I guess part of what I'm interested in doing is trying to show other handicapped people and non-handicapped people what a person can do in spite of a handicap."

He adds: "It makes me wish I were 30 years younger, when I think of all the opportunities that are starting to unfold."

Photo: Norman R. Coombs, with one of his sculptures: "The computer is one of the most liberating and empowering technologies to come along in a long time for people with a variety of handicaps." (Chris Hildreth for _The Chronicle_)