About the Venture Fund
The goal of the Computing Technology Venture Fund is to explore and develop ways of applying computer technology in direct support of Dartmouth's curriculum. The Fund encourages curricular projects based on original and innovative concepts or on a wide range of scope and applicability. Venture Fund projects serve as explorations as well as a foundation for future directions in academic computing at Dartmouth.
The Venture Fund has had a significant impact on the curriculum at Dartmouth. As might be expected, the Fund's impact has been most visible in the curricular projects it has supported. Since its inception in 1993, the Fund has conducted annual rounds of competitively awarded grants. Altogether the Fund has supported well over two dozen projects. These include projects in Art History, Biology, Chemistry, Classics, English, German, Government, Music, Spanish & Portuguese, Speech, Studio Art and the Hood Museum. A number of these projects have taken root and become a permanent part of Dartmouth's curriculum.
The Venture Fund has had other tangible impacts at Dartmouth. One example: one of the very first Venture Fund projects, carried out by a professor in physics, was for a "multimedia podium," a cart that enabled the showing of resources in digital and laser disk format. This podium served as a prototype for the Classroom Subcommittee's smart classroom program, which commenced a year after this Venture Fund project was completed.
The success of the Venture Fund has provided the basis for and encouragement of continued discussion of the role of computing as enabling innovation in the curriculum. The importance of this issue for the campus was emphasized in the self-study conducted in connection with Dartmouth's 1999 reaccreditation effort.
I invite you to tour this web site and examine first hand some of the Venture Fund's leading projects. If you have any questions or comments, I invite you to contact me.
Malcolm Brown
Director of Academic Computing
malcolm.b.brown@dartmouth.edu
603 646-1349
About the images
The revolving banner graphic features images from past Venture Fund projects including the Milton, ChemLab, Composition Center, Classic Panos, and Modulos Culturales Web sites, and the Artemesia project.
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