THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, June 10, 1996 TAG: 9606100046
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ADAM BERNSTEIN, CAMPUS CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE LENGTH: 125 lines
University of Virginia psychology Professor Micahel Kubovy is reinventing Psych 101.
Since inheriting the course in January 1994, Kubovy has been on a hunt, scouting for manufacturers to produce a small, hand-held device he designed that would cement his vision of an interactive classroom.
A bald, sizable man of sandy complexion, Kubovy, 55, has been on leave while he perfects his contraption. Two U.Va. grants support his efforts.
Kubovy's device, an electronic-response system, is best likened to the sort of hand-held gizmo used on game shows by audience members who goad the contestant into choosing behind which door the grand prize awaits. Similarly, with the device, all 400 students in Psych 101 can respond, in real time, to stimuli projected on a screen, and the professor could instantaneously gauge the response.
``At other universities, people have developed technology that is similar in the sense that it allows students to give responses, but they've done it in a very expensive and clumsy way by laying wires to which you hook up either a personal computer or a hand-held calculator,'' Kubovy said.
With class sizes on the rise, Kubovy may be on to something big.
``The obvious application is in the sciences, where the cumulative nature of a lecture is crucial,'' Kubovy said.
But his dream stretches miles beyond the classroom.
``Imagine a situation where a politician does real-time polling,'' he said. ``That is, during the talk, the politician says, `OK, if you make less than $20,000 a year for your family, press one.' He gets the demographics of his audience right away.
``The potential for this is huge.''
But what else would you expect from a man who knows seven languages, served in the Israel infantry during the Six-Day War and in his spare time studies Renaissance art?
In a way, he has always been a man of the world.
When he was born June 14, 1940, Kubovy was not 300 miles from Paris the day the Nazis invaded the city. His parents, Belgian Jews, were fleeing arrest by Hitler's SS, the notorious secret police. The Kubovys made their way to Lisbon, and from there to New York.
From 1941 to 1948, Kubovy's father served as secretary-general of the World Jewish Congress. Young Kubovy spent his formative years speaking English in the mornings and learning Hebrew in the afternoons.
When Israel became a sovereign nation in 1948, Kubovy's father became Israeli ambassador to Czechoslovakia, Poland and later to Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Chile.
During his teenage years in Argentina, an interest in aerospace burgeoned. After graduating from high school in 1957, he spent two years at the Israel Institute of Technology before dropping out.
``I hated how little possibility for discussion there was,'' he said. ``Everything was known. I got no sense I was exploring everything. As I was getting disenchanted with engineering, I became more and more interested in art and in the arts.''
After brief service as a military draftsman, designing rockets, Kubovy went Bohemian, even starting an avant-garde literary magazine that had a life span of one issue and included a few ``not very good'' poems.
In 1961, Kubovy applied to Hebrew University in Jerusalem to study philosophy and psychology. Ironically for Kubovy, psychology was an afterthought, chosen only because the school required students to have two majors.
Kubovy ``became enamored of perception,'' the thrill of seeing and experiencing patterns. He stayed at Hebrew University for his master's and doctoral degrees, graduating in 1971.
During his time in Jerusalem, Kubovy married and had a son, Itamar, now 28 and a theater director in Europe. In 1967, the year Itamar was born, Israel and Egypt were engaged in the fierce but brief Six-Day War.
Kubovy, like many students, was called to defend Israel.
Stationed in Jerusalem, Kubovy saw one day of action, but it was enough to imprint a haunting memory of that day. He carried a bazooka on the roof of a fortified building in downtown. Kubovy was instructed to take out Jordanian snipers hiding in the building across the street.
What was it like to be caught in the heat of battle?
``As far as Israeli politics go, I am a dove,'' he said. ``It started as an act of aggression on the part of the Egyptians and continued as an act of aggression with the Jordanians. Things were done by the Israelis I don't approve of. I have fairly complicated feelings about this, but right there and then I had no doubt. It was pure self-defense.''
Kubovy returned to the United States for post-doctoral work in 1973. He spent seven years at Yale University and joined the faculty at Rutgers University in 1980.
At Rutgers, Kubovy co-wrote and co-edited his first book, ``Perceptual Organization.'' That book became a groundbreaking series of essays that showed that perception was not a mystical process.
In 1986, Cambridge University Press published ``The Psychology of Perspective and Renaissance,'' in which he analyzed perception in terms of Renaissance art.
Despite those publications, Kubovy was glad to leave Rutgers when U.Va. made him an offer in 1987. ``It was a very difficult time because my marriage was not going well at that point and culminated in divorce in 1983,'' he said.
Since coming to Charlottesville, Kubovy remarried (to music department chairwoman Judith Shatin in 1993) and continued to research perception. His plans were changed slightly when in 1994 Raymond C. Bice Jr., who had taught Psych 101 for 47 years, stepped down from his teaching post. Psychology department chairman Richard McCarty asked Kubovy to pick up Bice's reigns.
Wrestling with how to put a new wrinkle on an introductory course that had become one of U.Va.'s most popular classes, Kubovy came upon the idea of the electronic device.
The kinks have been worked out, and now a prototype of Kubovy's interactive device sits in a small work station one flight below Maite Brandt-Pearce's spacious office in U.Va.'s engineering school.
Brandt-Pearce, a 31-year-old assistant electrical engineering professor, is handling the technical aspects of creating the device.
``He seems to me to be very much a go-getter, very interested in many different fields,'' she said. ``He's interested in the details of technical design, intrigued even.''
Brandt-Pearce is working to de-bug the prototype. Kubovy would like to have it manufactured over the summer so it would be ready for use by the fall semester.
The problem is finding a manufacturer to produce the device for about $50 a unit. Set-up costs, Kubovy said, are a bargain. The new projector for the classroom would cost about $35,000 yet yields fewer benefits.
``Nationally, he's setting the standard for the use of technology in the classroom,'' McCarty said. ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO BY STEPHANIE GROSS
U.Va. psychology Professor Micahel Kubovy has been on leave while he
perfects a device that would help instantaneously gauge the response
of students to stimuli projected on a screen. ``The potential for
this is huge,'' he says.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE by CNB