Robert Duvall, Lecturer, Computer Science
Project Description:
Dr. Duvall will redesign his computer science course with the help of course alumni who are now employed in the computer industry. With the advice of alumni, he will incorporate new projects relevant to current practices. The alumni will offer advice to students via web conferencing throughout the semester.
Project start date: 7/31/2008
Funding awarded: $2,800
Melinda Box, Instructor, Chemistry
Project Description:
Melinda Box and Anne Langley (Chemistry Librarian and Adjunct Professor of Chemistry) work together to instruct students taking chemistry courses in successful use of chemistry information technology. They will be creating short videos demonstrating how to use various online resources. These videos will be made available in Blackboard for student and teaching assistant use. The video demonstrations will free the instructors from having to do the exact same demonstrations for each laboratory section, while providing information that students can refer to later, and will allow the instructors to provide more personalized attention to students.
Project start date: 6/18/2008
Funding awarded: $450
Alex Glass, Instructor, Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences
Project Description:
To engage students in a large lecture class, Alex Glass will create a hands-on exercise mapping a potential
oil field indicated by stations on Duke campus. Students will use GPS units to find and mark stations consisting of models constructed from wooden boards that provide information about the three-dimensional orientation of the virtual rock layers at each locality. Students will use data collected from stations marked by GPS coordinates across campus to reconstruct the virtual local structural geology and stratigraphy.
Project start date: 7/1/2008
Funding awarded: $1950
Constance Johnson, Assistant Professor, School of Nursing
Project description
The purpose of this project is to establish and pilot a Second Life (SL) learning environment for faculty and students in the Duke School of Nursing (DUSON). Constance Johnson and her colleagues will explore student perceptions of learning using three different environments; build a virtual classroom structure on the DUSON’s parcel on the Duke University SL Island. In addition to building a virtual classroom they also seek to identify, collate, and develop orientation resources and procedures that could be provided to students and faculty for DUSON and SL community. They plan to develop and test with the students policies and procedures that could serve as suggested ground rules for DUSON to adopt in their SL learning activities, to ensure that students are able to focus on the educational components of the activities, rather than the novelty of the application and the overwhelming social aspects of SL.
The short-term outcomes of this project are development of a DUSON infrastructure for faculty and student participation in SL, and the participation of students from at least two different nursing specialty areas and programs to assist with evaluation and tailoring of the infrastructure.
The expected long-term outcomes of this project are facilitated participation of faculty and students from across DUSON, the University, and practice, service, and educational partners with DUSON, in innovative, 3D learning activities.
Project start date: 6/16/2008
Funding awarded: $2,000
Additional information
There is a short overview on the Duke School of Nursing’s website about the work Constance Johnson is doing in Second Life.
Lucy Haagen, Lecturer, Program in Education
Project Description:
In Spring 2008, Lucy Haagen used cellphones to help shape learning communities that connected Duke students with Durham high school students. Haagen and the students used cellphones both as traditional devices (as telephones) and as capturing (audio) and advanced communication (text messaging) tools.
Haagen plans to expand on the success of this pilot through the use of ’smartphones’ in Hanoi, Vietnam. Working with several Duke students participating in Duke Engage, Haagen will use smartphones to assist with ESL activities in the rural Hanoi environment. In addition to using the phones to connect Duke students with students from Vietnam, the phones’ multimedia capabilities will allow students to connect through video, audio and text-based messages. Students will also be able to document teaching and learning moments with built-in video capabilities, as well as use internet connectivity to acquire and provide additional content.
Project start date: 5/07/2008
Funding awarded: $5,630
Alexandra Cooper, Associate Director, Education and Training, Social Science Research Institute
Lorna Hicks, Associate Director, Office of Research Support
Project Description:
As Duke works to ensure that its students develop into active learners and involved citizens, an
increasing number of undergraduates will undertake independent research. Mentoring these apprentice
investigators, while worthwhile and rewarding, will increase demands on Duke faculty. Engaging students as competent and ethically aware researchers is necessarily time-intensive, as students require careful and ongoing advice to effectively plan, implement, and complete research.
With this in mind, this project will develop a series of multimedia modules to aid faculty in efforts to educate students about ethical conduct in researching human subjects. Several modules will be tailored to meet needs as identified by faculty, such as: cultural sensitivity, private versus public information, subject rights, risks and information consent, and vulnerable subjects. The modules will also emphasize the global reach of students’ activities and draw attention to the need to craft research protocols so that they are appropriate for the particular cultural context in which they will be undertaken.
Project start date: 4/21/2008
Funding awarded: $$19,860
Linda Goodwin, Associate Professor, School of Nursing
Project description
This project will provide geographically dispersed online Duke nursing informatics graduate students with collaborative tools that will help them acquire, critique, summarize, and disseminate available HIT studies and evidence reports. Linda Goodwin will utilize informatics experts, mobile technologies, and remote (virtual) teamwork that enable both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration to compile HIT evaluation resources, critique them for level of evidence, and make them available to a world-wide audience. The project will be focused on immersing students, both Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) Program and Master of Science in Nursing (MSN) in real-world informatics issues and projects in health care.
Linda Goodwin and her students will experiment with different types of mobile tools and web-based citation tools, explore whether mobile technologies that permit student access to synchronous teamwork tools from anywhere they can gain wireless Internet access will improve both the process and the products of remote online teamwork.
Project start date: 6/2/2008
Funding awarded: $7,500
Julie A. Reynolds, Mellon Instructor in Writing and Biology
Project summary
Julie has found that students with very little prior knowledge of science can participate in authentic scientific research, can be trained to collect meaningful scientific data, and can develop a better understanding of ecological processes and the interconnectedness of nature through these experiences. Building on this success, she is expanding a current project to engage members of the community in an authentic scientific study. She is developing educational activities around invasive species 
at the Eno River State Park, and training the public to be involved in monitoring these species. She plans to include the general public as well as service groups at high schools, colleges, and in the community (such as through botanical societies) that would encourage sustained participation in scientific research.
The goals of this project are to:
Visitors to the Eno River State Park will be trained to monitor invasive plants using GPS and gathering data in Google Earth. This project at the Eno River could serve as a pilot to be adopted throughout North Carolina.
See Julie’s Citizen Scientist website for more.
This project is funded by Duke Center for Science Education.
Alyssa Perz-Edwards, Lecturing Fellow, Department of Biology
Project Description:
Alyssa Perz-Edwards uses her class time in Cell Biology to work with students on critical thinking and problem solving skills, while the students learn terms and facts outside of class. She motivates students from a wide variety of backgrounds to quickly learn a large amount of complex information, and to apply this information, by using Team Based Learning and a tablet PC. Students come to class prepared for tests taken individually and then repeated as a team. The tests are graded immediately, so that Alyssa can use her tablet PC for just-in-time teaching to address student misconceptions revealed by the tests. The tablet PC allows her to sketch and label during class, so that she can immediately address student requests for more explanation and context during class. The students work in teams for rest of class time to apply their new knowledge to solve problems in Cell Biology using skills they will need if they are to be successful in medical school.
Alyssa teaches cell biology in a six-week summer academic enrichment program that offers freshman and sophomore college students intensive and personalized medical school preparation in the Summer Medical and Dental Summer Program at Duke University School of Medicine.
Merrill Shatzman; Associate Professor of the Practice; Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies
Project Description:
Merrill Shatzman is in the early stages of creating a new course, “Personal Geographics: Mapping Self Identity”, that will be taught in Spring or Fall 2009. The course, based on traditional printmaking techniques, will focus on combining digital techniques with printmaking and involve faculty from other science and social science disciplines to encourage students to consider new ways that data visualization and mapping are used in personal inquiry and expression.
CIT Strategic Grant funding has been awarded to Shatzman to assist with development of the course. The funding will be used for a student assistant and other expenses to help Shatzman learn more advanced methods with digital graphics tools such as Photoshop and InDesign and to develop help materials, such as short video screen captures, that can be used for reference by students as they use computer graphics and visualization tools in conjunction with more traditional printmaking techniques.
Project start date: 5/22/2008
Funding awarded: $1,800
