3D modeling software allows users to create or view 3D objects or environments. There are a wide range of uses of this software, from special effects for films to illustrating books or graphic novels. In education, the software is typically used for students to view and manipulate scientific models or environments for building and manipulating models or prototypes. By building and exploring 3D models, students can gain insight into how reconstructed historical spaces might have been used, explore how spaces have changed over time, or investigate how objects or spaces are constructed.

One of the emerging tools used at Duke for engaging students in the process of creating and exploring 3D models is Google SketchUp. Available for Windows and Mac, the software is a powerful, easy to use program that allows you to create 3D objects and environments. Items can be exported in a variety of ways and even used in other programs. Google also offers an online library, 3D Warehouse, where SketchUp users can upload and share objects created in SketchUp. SketchUp is available in a free downloadable version suitable for many classroom uses and a “pro” version that adds some enhanced features for more in-depth work.

Some faculty are also using Autodesk Maya at Duke with courses. Maya is a professional level commercial software package that has been used for computer aided design and 3D work for several years. ISIS, for example, has offered courses where students can explore representations of spaces and data using Maya and the software is used for constructing spaces for use in the Duke immersive Virtual Environment (DiVE).

Through building 3D objects, students can gain “real world” experience in a wide range of fields where 3D is used for building and prototyping. Architects and urban planners are using SketchUp and other 3d software to design buildings and structures, engineers for designing facilities and products, and historians recreate and explore spaces and structures.

If you are new to using 3D software, SketchUp is an easy way to get started. You can download the software and view some basic tutorials on Google’s website. Explore the Google 3D Warehouse to view a wide range of models and objects, developed by users of the software, that may be useful in your courses. Some that might be of interest include:

• Bridges (149 models)
• Museums (168 models)
• Frank Lloyd Wright (39 models)
• Egyptian monuments (7 models)
• Places of worship (259 models)
• Thessaloniki, Greece (22 models)

Students in Victoria Szabo and Richard Lucic’s capstone course ISIS 200 have produced a “mapping toolkit” that includes a list of devices, directions for using the devices to collect mappable data, directions for creating maps with Google Earth, and a website to organize this material.

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.

How is our relationship to physical space changing as space becomes “virtual”? What do virtual spaces reveal about the people and circumstances that create them? Those are questions asked by Annabel Wharton, Professor in Art, Art History & Visual Studies, in her research on Medieval and Modern Architecture.

Over the past few months, Wharton has explored Second Life, an immersive world inhabited by several million avatars representing real life humans, as well as Assassin’s Creed, a popular video game set in thirteenth century Palestine and Syria. She is examining the effects of digital architectures on those who navigate those virtual realms. In Fall 2009, she plans to teach a course on Jerusalem in which students will join her in investigating the power of architecture in these new media.

For the past four years, Wharton has been studying “pathological architectures,” seeking to understand and describe the ways that “sick” buildings affect the people who occupy them. More broadly, she is interested in how architectures act as agents in modifying the way humans live. Her work in exploring architectures in Second Life and video games is preparation for the last chapter of her book.

“It’s impossible to understand space conventionally any longer; digital worlds and immersive spaces play too large part in our economy and culture to ignore,” Wharton said.

“I expected myself to be a kind of tourist in Second Life and in video games. But the space is invasive; it doesn’t allow you to be simply an objective observer. I have become subjectively engaged, in a way that surprised me. ”

Wharton also noted that, in Second Life, the spaces are created by the avatars themselves; both shaping and acting is an expression of their producers. As opposed to “real” life, objects retain reference to those who made them. A chair or a house in real life is anonymous; a chair or a house in Second Life, with a click of the mouse, reveals its creator. Search engines allow you to invite those makers to talk to you about their work.

For example, during the recent presidential campaign, Wharton explored the Second Life spaces created by Democrats and Republicans. Democratic spaces were functional, open, modern, information-centered. Republican sites were architecturally elaborate with classicizing buildings and the intimacy of Main Street. She drew from her observations conclusions about the working of the “public sphere” in immersive worlds.

For faculty thinking about integrating Google Earth, Second Life or video games into a course, Wharton suggests becoming familiar with the technology first. She compares it to learning a new language or visiting a new city with its own culture and conventions. Each technology may take several weeks of learning its mechanisms and exploring its the territory to feel “at home”.

With Second Life, Wharton recommends having students to visit a variety of spaces, some connected directly with the course contents and some not, in order to accustom themselves to navigating the space and interacting with other residents. But finally students can construct the historical sites they are studying in three dimensions so that they and other avatars may walk through them.

Most residents of Second Life are “in world” for social purposes or for entertainment—from soft-porn to “dancing for Jesus.” But groups engaged in politics, education, art and music are also active there. Avatars can walk around the Sistine Chapel and the Temple at Karnak or they can attend discussions of Obama’s Cairo speech with Egyptians, Turks, Iranians and other Muslims from around the real world. The first brief piece that Wharton wrote about Second Life described her first visit during the Gaza War to the newly opened Palestine Holocaust Museum (article at iReport).

“It is really worth investigating digital technologies,” Wharton says, “They give you a new means of rethinking your old assumptions—a central concern of education.”

At our recent Instructional Technology Showcase, we created a presentation to celebrate CIT’s ten year anniversary using a new web-based presentation tool called Prezi. Prezi allows users to create a presentation with several levels of magnification – so instead of moving from one slide to the next, you can zoom into areas of the presentation for more info. In contrast to a standard PowerPoint presentation, a Prezi provides opportunities to create a more interactive, contextual and dynamic presentation.

I’ve embedded a YouTube video of the CIT Prezi below.

You can watch the Prezi in full screen by visiting our presentation here. NOTE: After it loads, click the right pointing arrow to move through the presentation. Holding down the right arrow will open options to automatically move through the slides (if we can truly call each zone of a Prezi a ’slide’) at intervals of 2, 10 or 20 seconds a slide. To start the presentation over, hold down the left pointing arrow and choose the looping arrow icon.

Creating the CIT 10th Anniversary Prezi

For a quick overview of the process involved with building a Prezi, I’ll walk through the steps we went through to create the CIT 10th Anniversary presentation.

(more…)

Caroline Bruzelius, Sheila Dillon, Mark Olson, Rachael Brady, and Raquel Salvatella will discuss their experiences from this spring in teaching the course “Wired: New Representation Technologies for Historical Materials” and how the course model can be extended for future courses or programs.

The presentation will be held at 4:00 p.m. on Wednesday, April 29 at the Smith Warehouse, 2nd floor Bay 11, (enter through Bay 12).

You can find more information about their course at their website.  The course also received funding from the CIT as part of our 2009 Strategic Initiative Grant program and was profiled on the CIT’s Project Examples blog.

Join us on Friday, April 24th 2009  to meet colleagues and share stories at the Center for Instructional Technology showcase.

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.

If you’ve looked at the new Recovery.gov site recently, you’ve probably noticed an interesting interactive element at the bottom of the main page.

This timeline is a good, simple example of the SIMILE Timeline tool created by MIT Libraries, and MIT CSAIL.

SIMILE Timeline tool general info:

Original project homepage: http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/
New, Google-hosted homepage: http://code.google.com/p/simile-widgets/
Getting Started guide: http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Timeline#Getting_Started
See examples here: http://simile.mit.edu/wiki/Category:Example_timeline

Though creating the timeline does require someone to actually edit code, the code for the timeline is not much more complex or daunting than the average HTML website. Here’s an example of a process that might be employed as an assignment wherein students would collaboratively build a timeline.

I. SIMILE uses two files to work properly. First, there’s an .html file (I’m calling this file ‘timeline.html’) that presents the application and includes several tweakable parameters. The .xml file (which I’m calling ‘events.xml’) is the code representing the times, dates, headings, description and image links for the specific event.

II. Download and/or reuse these files:

1. events.xml – this file lists all the events. Copy/paste more events after </event> tag for previous events. Events don’t need to appear in any particular order.

2. timeline.html – This is the file that includes the modifiable code for the SIMILE timeline. This is also the file that you would link to for viewing the timeline.

3. Use Lifehacker’s XML generator script to quickly create xml form data
http://www.lifehacker.com/assets/resources/2006/10/eventmaker.html
OR download/save eventmaker.html and upload it to your own webspace.

III. Possible student process

1. Students collect different event detail, images, etc. Perhaps groups of students work together collecting events based on particular themes or chunks of time, etc.

2. Creating a ‘wiki’ tool in the course Blackboard pages for each group may help them collaboratively work out the event details and images before they run them through the xml generator.

3. Once the final details are set (image URLs are prepared, dates verified, titles and descriptions set), the student(s) can go to the eventmaker.html page and generate the xml code snippet for their event.

4. Students can post this code on another Bb wiki representing the entire xml code for the timeline. The faculty member, a TA, and/or a student would then grab this code either periodically, or toward the end of the semester, and upload it to the Duke WebFiles space as the new events.xml file.

Still too complex? Well, Google has you covered. The timeline can now be created as a ‘widget’ when using Google Spreadsheets.

A webpage written by David Huynh explains the whole process. Suffice it to say that this process only requires a class to create and share a single Google Spreadsheet file, and then simply edit the content cells to work. Enjoy.

Have your students produced work you’d like to show the world? Display it on the Student Wall in Perkins Library. The Student Wall, on the first floor of Perkins Library, is available for exhibits of work created by students for classes, research or internships and for displays by student organizations related to their projects. Displays will highlight civic engagement, social issues, and experiences closely related to formal coursework.

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.

Duke students Marcel Yang and David McMullen (pictured) produced a three dimensional visualization for teaching pharmacology as an independent study project with Rochelle Schwartz-Bloom and Rachael Brady.  They have tested the impact of their visualization on student learning in Duke’s Immersive Virtual Environment (DiVE) as well as on computer screens. They are currently preparing their visualization  to be entered in the NSF Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.

This project is partially supported by a Center for Instructional Technology Visualization Grant.

See their presentation at the Visualization Forum.

Read more at the Duke Research Blog on Science Education Goes Virtual.

Google Earth has exciting new features.  Download the new version and explore underwater as you have explored land.

1. Google Ocean – the sea floor is now mapped, and data, pictures, videos, user-generated content are all now available (for example, you can check the the water temperature in the Florida Keys ( 71 F)).  Here’s a video with Sylvia Earle exploring the new features.
Duke’s Pat Halpin contributed to Google Ocean and participated in the launch.

2. Sharing Tours to share content, you can create, narrate and share tours that others can open in Google Earth 5.0.  The tour will run just as you recorded it, but it can be interrupted by the user to look around.  It does not make a video, but is an easier way to share information. Here’s how, and even more help.

3. Historical information Google Earth has incorporated old images, like from San Francisco in the 1940s.  Read about the historical imagery in Google’s Lat Long blog.

4. Google Mars Yes, you can explore Mars, too.

Watch Frank Taylor explore Google Mars.

More information:

Google Earth blog video showcase

Google Earth blog descriptions of updates

Still not sure?  Take a tour.