Proteopedia is a 3D, interactive encyclopedia of proteins, RNA, DNA and other molecules. Want to know what hemoglobin looks like? You’ve seen DNA, now take it out for a spin. Learn more about molecules, and rotate and zoom in on 3D representations of molecules.  See how drugs interact; below, you can see HIV-1 protease (in green and blue), which is crucial for HIV’s ability to infect.  Saquinavir, a protease inhibitor (shown in purple), slows the progress of HIV infections by binding to HIV-1 protease.  Click on the picture to go to Proteopedia to spin the molecules to see the interaction.

Proteopedia is very much like Wikipedia; everyone can edit pages. This site is useful for scientists and students; educators can teach from the pages, and students can learn from, contribute or create their own pages as class assignments. Enter the page of the year competition and win an iPod Touch!

For even more chemistry, explore the elements that make up molecules with the periodic table of videos.  This series of videos shows the pure form of each element, and includes stories about how we use the element.  Sometimes, there are explosions.

Get student feedback quickly using the Blackboard survey tool. Create polls to find student interests and opinions, create evaluations of materials or teaching approaches that you try, and gauge student comprehension of course material when anonymity is important. Surveys do not have correct answers or point values and all information is anonymous. Check out the link above to learn how to create a survey, make your survey available for your students, and view your survey results.

To explore and discover additional Blackboard features, see the Blackboard support website. If you need a tutorial for the Blackboard survey tool, request an office visit and we will come to you.

The Chronicle of Higher Eduation has a commentary this week on viewing teaching as passing on traditions.  The piece also looks at how two instructors of Irish tin whistle at Fordham University use short videos posted on YouTube and a blog to reinforce what students are learning in class and as a quick reference they can use for practice.

You can read the commentary, “The Living Tradition”, here.

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently posted an article about the University of Richmond’s Voting America project, which features interactive animation and commentary dealing with US political data from 1840-2008.

While both an interesting tool for personal or reference use, Voting America’s interactive features mostly rely on nicely prepared video presentations of the data. Several other interactive data visualization tools and websites also provide new ways to make thinking about politics, history and the election season at least a bit more interesting and compelling.

For example, how about the visualization below, posted on the data visualization blog Eager Eyes, called “The Traveling Presidential Candidate Map” (much more detail and larger format PDFs available on the Eager Eyes site). This illustrates the shortest routes a candidate would need to travel to reach every zipcode.

Want more interactive elements? Here’s an example of a treemap from IBM’s Many Eyes visualization site:

What does this tell us? You’d be better off looking at the original, interactive graphic that trying to understand this picture…but in a nutshell, it illustrates and compares the links of both Obama’s and McCain’s YouTube videos. Sites like Many Eyes, and to a similar degree, Swivel, can be used rather easily to crunch datasets into visualizations in a short amount of time.

How about something simpler, but just as interesting? What about a ‘Wordle‘ visualization of Michelle Obama’s speech from the Democratic National Convention? (HINT: click the visualization below – you can interact with it right within this blog post).

Speaking of Many Eyes, the team behind the visualization tools and website wrote an interesting blog post back in 2007 called Democratizing VIsualization, which – while focused on new mapping visualizations, really sums up many of these new approaches:

“…the election maps got progressively more sophisticated as people tried to understand voting results. They also illustrated the fact that there are multiple ways of telling the same story. The maps became an essential part of a national debate on politics, a divided country, and what it means to represent complex data.”

The Orwell Prize, which sponsors a British prize for political writing, is publishing George Orwell’s diaries as a blog, with each entry appearing on the site exactly seventy years after it was written.  The entries will appear from August, 2008 through October 2012 and cover the pre-War and early World War II period.

Beyond reproducing the diaries, the site also uses tags on each entry to find related entries, includes background information and comments from users of the site.  You can view the diaries at http://orwelldiaries.wordpress.com/.

The Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) is now indexed in PubMed, the first video-journal to have that acceptance. “This is a major milestone for JoVE and also for new methods of science communication in general,” states the journal’s official blog.

JoVE is a peer reviewed, open access, online journal devoted to the publication of biological research in a video format. According to the journal’s website, it was established as a new open-access tool in life science publication and communication, with participation of scientists from leading research institutions. JoVE takes advantage of video technology to capture and transmit the multiple facets and intricacies of life science research.

Videos currently featured on the site range from “Proper Care and Cleaning of the Microscope” to “Paradigms for Pharmacological Characterization of C. elegans Synaptic Transmission Mutants.”

This news is especially interesting in light of the focus in this year’s Duke Digital Initiative on video as an enabling technology for teaching and learning.

This invitation came to Duke CIT, so I’d like share it with the rest of campus.

Collaborations: Humanities, Arts & Technology
a state-wide digital arts and humanities festival
in February 2010

Join us, faculty, staff and graduate students! The UNC Institute for the Arts and Humanities (IAH) will host a series of planning sessions to begin shaping collaborative projects that will be showcased at the CHAT festival. The festival is designed to jump start movement into digital arts and humanities by commissioning work from faculty, staff and graduate students at UNC, Duke University, North Carolina Central University and North Carolina State University. If you’re interested in working on a digital humanities or arts project, come explore the possibilities for collaboration and support.

****** Participate ****** Engage ****** Experiment ****** Create ******

Opening Conversation
August 22 / Friday / 2-4 p.m. at Hyde Hall Incubator (2nd Floor)
> Find out about resources and schedules, and meet potential collaborators
> Bring your ideas, questions and interests

Working Sessions
September 5 / Friday / 12-3 p.m. at Hyde Hall Incubator (2nd Floor)
September 6 / Saturday / 10a.m.-1 p.m. at Hyde Hall Incubator (2nd Floor)
> Share ideas, resources and skills
> Start to collaborate with people who share a common interest
> Lunch provided by the IAH

If you will attend, please RSVP and indicate which events you plan to attend: chat@unc.edu.
The participating units in planning and staging CHAT include the UNC College of Arts and Sciences, The Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI), Carolina Performing Arts, the Ackland Art Museum, The Morehead Planetarium and Science Center, the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS), the UNC Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Economic Development, Wilson Library, UNC Information Technology Services (ITS), and the UNC Office of Arts and Sciences Information Services (OASIS).
Can’t make it to any of these events? Don’t worry–we’ll continue to host events and provide opportunities for collaborations in the coming months. To stay informed, visit www.iah.unc.edu, where we’ll post festival updates and announce the launch of the CHAT festival Web site.
Directions to Hyde Hall are available on the IAH Web site: http://iah.unc.edu/about/reserve-hyde-hall/contact/directions/directions

CIT is offering grants to faculty to support instructional innovations with technology, tied to Duke’s strategic plan “Making a Difference.”  In particular, Chapter 4 of the plan “Academic Goals and Strategies to Build Distinction” (pdf, html) focuses on academic and instructionally-related goals which CIT would like to support, such as interdisciplinarity, student engagement in real-world issues, providing engaging and challenging learning experiences for students, transforming the arts, supporting our graduate students, and innovation in creation and delivery of scholarly resources.

Part 1 of the grant application is due Monday, September 22, 2008.