This upgrade is to ensure that Blackboard, Inc. will continue to provide support for our system.

There are many ways to get help.

• Blackboard help pages now include short video tutorials.
• Call the help desk 919-684-2200.
• Contact CIT to arrange for training for a group of instructors.
• Contact CIT to request a personal office visit.
• Read more about the changes to the Grade Center, emailing announcements, and what students think of the new version.
• Attend a workshop (schedule coming soon). Check our calendar for details.

The initial purpose of this mapping toolkit is for Duke Engage students in partnership with WISER (Women’s Institute of Secondary Education and Research) to produce useful maps to facilitate the planning of community facilities and ways to impact gender disparities in health and education in Muhuru Bay, Kenya.

Students produced a helpful website:

The mission of ISISmapping.org is to help you map your world. We believe that maps are power, a power that should be shared by everyone.

During this course, students investigated mapping technology and devices, and decided which ones should go to Kenya as part of the toolkit, based on the needs of the project and the conditions in Kenya. They produced documentation and worked out best practices for mapping, in consultation with researchers in Kenya. The recommendations and documentation they produced can be used by anyone who’d like to map their world.

Watch Victoria Szabo, Sherryl Broverman and students in the course talk about the project.

At the final presentation of the project, students were asked about the challenges they faced when exploring the technology and creating the project. They described the challenges of coming together as a team, keeping up with rapidly changing technology to determine the best way to map, and creating a way for people in Kenya to make maps with their data despite intermittent electricity and rare access to the internet.

iPhone and iPod Touch users can browse and search twenty collections that range from advertisements and documentary photography to sheet music. You can save and download images to an album, and access all descriptive information.

Making digital image collections viewable on mobile devices is part of the library’s ongoing efforts to make its resources available whenever and wherever researchers need them.

DukeMobile, introduced in March 2009, currently serves about 50,000 users, providing mobile access to the campus directory, sports scores, interactive maps, event listings, the course catalog, and Duke videos on YouTube.

Talk with Julie Reynolds about using video to teach writing, Julie Perco about teaching with Second Life, Len White or Lucy Haagen about mobile devices, Victoria Szabo or Alex Glass or Peter Haff about using mapping in your course and student Jennifer Kim about effective blog assignments.

Talk with people who have been teaching in the Link (Liliana Paredes, Laura Florand, Sandra Valnes Quammen, Hugh Crumley, Susan Wynn and Deb Reisinger) and find out how to use the flexible spaces.

Learn how your colleagues have used VoiceThread or iTunesU (or find out what these are).  And more!

Register now to reserve your space.

Register now.

Tuesday, 17 March, 2-3pm, Bostock Library room 023

Sophie – http://www.sophieproject.org/

Sophie is a multimedia authoring tool: “software for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment.” People who have used it, including high school students, describe Sophie as very easy to use. Sophie is currently being rewritten in Java, and with emphasis on collaboration tools. The project’s website provides illustrations of how Sophie is being used. For example, Sol Gaitan of the Dalton School in New York developed a multimedia book for her AP Spanish students so that they could explore the direct influence of particular flamenco music styles on Lorca’s poetry. Gaitan presents both the songs and the poems they inspired, and annotates the poems from pages 11 to 43; with the students expected to follow her lead by annotating the poems in the remainder of the book. Take a look: http://www.sophieproject.org/demobooks

VUE – http://vue.tufts.edu/

VUE provides a flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information. VUE lets you look for relationships across images, define relationships, compare images, etc. As such, it is a research tool as well as a presentation tool. The VUE website has a short video (http://vue.tufts.edu/screencast/QT_hiRes.cfm) that gives an overview of its functions and how it can be used.

Zotero – http://www.zotero.org/

Zotera is free, easy-to-use Firefox extensions to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. Some of us are familiar with Zotero as a citation management tool. The developers as well as other project leaders at the RIT meeting see Zotero as having additional functionality through its connections with other tools. For example, the planned redesign of the Sakai course management system may have ways for instructors to upload lists of their publications, and then, via Zotero, find other scholars with whom they might want to connect.

eComma – http://ecomma.cwrl.utexas.edu/e392k/

The eCommentary Machine web application (“eComma”) will enable groups of students, scholars, or general readers to build collaborative commentaries on a text and to search, display, and share those commentaries online.

Sakai 3- http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/DOC/Sakai+3.0

A completely re-architected version of Sakai is planned for summer of 2010. This version will move away from the cookie-cutter view of course sites and instead connect with 3^rd party tools (such as WordPress) and utilize gadgets and widgets that allow a site to look more like a Google personal homepage. The idea is to reflect the look and feel of tools that are already popular. You can see a demo of creating a Sakai 3 site here: http://www.sakaiproject.org/portal/site/sakai-home/page/89473b2c-31dd-4261-9823-c31a79e55532

Participants at the RIT meeting also talked about people “curating their own arts experiences,” a reflection of growing expectation for web 2.0 type functionality. As an example, someone mentioned Sonic Living, (http://sonicliving.com/) which is not an open source product, but is a relevant example. It scans your hard drive, looks at your iTunes and then suggests live music in your area that matches the interests it found. It also lets you know what concerts your friends are attending. The arts and museum community is looking for ways to get information about their organizations, performances, etc. into the workflows people already have rather than expecting them to come to a website to find information about upcoming events.

Students are responsible for producing professional looking materials in whatever size and format that is appropriate to their exhibit as long as it fits on this wall. The materials must be suitable for hanging in this space either backed with a solid material (such as foam core) or placed in frames. Students will be responsible for mounting and taking down the exhibits with help from the library exhibits coordinator. Material will be displayed for a minimum of 3 weeks.

For more information or to schedule a display, contact the exhibits coordinator, Meg Brown.

• Use a blog to post notes from guest speakers, librarians, or add resources from your lecture
• Require students to post to a course blog and comment on each others posts
• Post supplemental material for the course (links to multimedia and more information)
• Use a wiki to organize course material
• Use a wiki for student to student communication (for collaborative projects)
• Connect class material to the world by connecting to relevant headlines and news stories
• Construct an assignment where students are required to find relevant headlines and post, connect to the course material and create a concept map within a course wiki
• Students can blog course notes, after they have edited and reviewed the material (example and discussion by Lou FCD, who participated in this discussion)
• Students can use their term papers as blog posts
• Students blog during a field trip, perhaps with video; this increases student focus on the trip as they know they must blog, and can see posts made by other students (example from Duke’s Marine Conservation Biology field trip).  The blog may be mined in the future for data on changes over time.
• Build up a resource for field trips that revisit sites by adding notes to a wiki
• Use blogs with relevant content as a resource for exploring a subject
• Use a blog to run course discussions as a supplement for in class discussions, to encourage all students to participate
• Use a blog for group project to keep track of what worked during the project
• Use a blog or wiki to share links, possibly making it competitive (who can find the best links)
• Create a space on the web to discuss controversial course topics
• Connect students from different universities
• Have students read and summarize papers in a blog, perhaps contribute to ResearchBlogging.org
• Keep a research notebook or field journal online
• Have students use a blog to create a website, like an online science fair project

One student who was homeschooled and found blogs useful for exploring topics of interest to him pointed out that it can be difficult to stay focused on the web.  He shared some tips:  monitor yourself to make sure you are on task, and take frequent breaks to refocus (take a walk, eat some fruit).

One of the participants who uses a blog to post his course notes, wrote about his own ideas from the session, in his blog, Crowded head, cozy bed.

If you are at Duke, call us at the Center for Instructional Technology for ideas and help incorporating any of these ideas in your course.

Update:

Kevin Zelnio participated in this session and wrote about it in his blog, Deep Sea News .

Mason Posner teaches anatomy and physiology and marine biology, and is experimenting with blogs in his senior capstone biology course.  You can follow his experiment at their central course blog.

http://www.smarthistory.org/

The site was founded by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker of the Fashion Institute of Technology at the State University of New York.  The work is an outgrowth of multimedia materials and blogs they were already creating for their courses.

“For years we have been dissatisfied with the large expensive art history textbook. We found that they were difficult for many students, contained too many images, and just were not particularly engaging. In addition, we had found the web resources developed by publishers to be woefully uncreative. We had developed quite a bit of content for our online Western art history courses and we had also created many podcasts, and a few screencasts for our smARThistory blog. So, it finally occurred to us, why not use the personal voice that we use when we teach online, along with the multimedia we had already created for our blog and for our courses, to create a more engaging “web-book” that could be used in conjunction with art history survey courses. We are also committed to joining the growing number of teachers who make their content freely available on the web.”

The New Media Consortium’s 2009 Horizon Report, which looks at trends in uses of technology in teaching in higher education, cited smARThistory as an example of the “Personal Web”, a set of technologies that allow faculty, students and experts to easily build rich multimedia websites, e-books, and other resources.