Brenda Neece, Adjunct Assistant Professor and Curator of the Duke University Musical Instrument Collection
Department of Music

Project Description:

Brenda Neece, Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Music, is testing the use of MemoryMiner in her Spring 2010 course Western Music Instruments, MUS150S.  She has been awarded a CIT Jump Start grant for software licenses and is obtaining a set of loaner iPod Touch devices through the Duke Digital Initiative for the assignment.

Building on her experience in the 2008-09 CIT Video Fellows program, Neece is having her students explore the use of MemoryMiner to create web-based interactive museum tours containing text, images, sound and video.  The tours can be browsed using mobile devices and the students will create tours that include organs in Duke Chapel and instruments in the Duke Musical Instrument Collections.

Neece is using the assignment to have her students become more familiar with digital storytelling with video, Google Maps and other technologies.  Neece hopes that the students, using multimedia and location information technologies in their assignments, will be able to make connections between different types of media, maps and other facets of the history of the instruments.

The students will be critiquing the work of their peers as they take interactive tours created in the course and Neece will examine the overall content and quality of their work and the usefulness of MemoryMiner for these types of interactive multimedia tours.

CIT funding for the project is being used to purchase a set of licenses for the MemoryMiner software so that the students may be able to use it in OIT’s Multimedia Project Studio labs during the Spring semester.

Project start date:  2/1/2010
Funding awarded:  $340

Project Summary:

During the 2008-2009 academic year, Satendra Khanna, Associate Professor of the Practice, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, participated in the CIT’s Student Video Fellows program. This Fellows program offered a group of faculty from a range of disciplines the opportunity to investigate how to effectively design student video assignments, assess video work in the courses, and provided streamlined access to technology and support options available at Duke for them and their students.

The focus of Professor Khanna’s class in Poetic Cinema (AMES 139) is principally on the psychological experiences induced by films. The course content consisted of 13 “dense, intense poetic films” from 6 countries. Students were encouraged to dwell on the suggestive, evocative possibilities of film. The goal of the class was to make students aware of the inner process activated by films. The emphasis in class assignments was not on the subject of the student films, but on the emotions stirred by the films or on the quality of intent observation induced by their films.

Students completed three types of film assignments in the course:

• Students presented a video response to each class film, based on a moment of in the film which keenly pulled their attention. Students were encouraged to use Flip video cameras to shoot their video responses, to keep the process unintimidating.
• Students completed specific short (one- to two-minute) film assignments, designed to allow them to practice with course concepts and get comfortable with some filming and editing techniques. Students had the option of completing these assignments either as a page of text or in a short video. Most turned in a paper the first week; by the end of the class most submitted a video on Blackboard which all the class members looked at each week. Examples of these short assignments were to create a one-minute video evoking the “presence” of a person at work, or to recreate the effect of time passing.
• A final video project was a to create a four-minute film whose object was to induce a distinct overall emotion in the viewer. This was an experiment to see how well the students were able to edit, vary and include contrast, so that the outcome is a single dominant emotion.

Assessment:

Khanna’s objective was not to have the students produce quality videos but to help them understand the role of camera angle, lighting, shot duration and editing rhythm in the design of psychologically dynamic films. He wanted to encourage experimentation with video so he paid more attention to the conception of a project rather than its execution.

“One of the things I learned was the potential for repeating the short assignments so that students could improve on their understanding of ways of presenting subjects and backgrounds in profile and half-light, in fragments and slivers.”

Khanna also emphasized the use of economy in evoking a situation, suggesting soft-hitting (“low redundancy”) rather than hard-hitting presentation. In assessing student work, Khanna attempted to address his comments to the overall emotional intensity of a piece of student work. He writes “The difficulty lay in being encouraging while at the same time suggesting that students pare down.”

On a practical level, Khanna discovered that students in the class were not uniformly familiar with Flip cameras or with iMovie editing; a one-time iMovie editing workshop would have been useful. In addition, repeated short assignments helped students understand varied ways to present their subject matter. Khanna describes some other “lessons learned” in the video clip below.

Project Summary:

During the 2008-2009 academic year, Sandra Valnes Quammen, Senior Lecturing Fellow in the department of Romance Studies, participated in CIT’s Student Video Fellows Program.  This Fellows track offered a group of faculty from a range of disciplines the opportunity to investigate how to effectively design student video assignments, assess video work in the courses, and provided access to technology and support options available at Duke for them and their students.

Valnes Quammen integrated her fellowship into her third-semester French 63 course to develop a video journal assignment in which students engaged with authentic French-language source materials, which included video clips of news reports, newspaper articles, and blogs related to specific themes.  Students then honed their listening, comprehension and oral expression skills to record a series of unscripted short video responses to these materials, based on specific discussion questions posed by the instructor.  As part of their assignment, students then also recorded video responses to each other’s work.

The project took place in three installments over the course of the semester and revolved around three themes: school and education, transportation, and cinema and television. During each phase, students created video responses through the use of webcams and VoiceThread, a web collaboration tool that allows users to create image and video presentations, and then invite other users to create embedded audio and video commentary on these presentations.

Valnes Quammen wanted her students to have an easy-to-use video and audio interaction technology which would allow them to be exposed to authentic French-language source materials, and would improve their listening, comprehension and oral skills in a real authentic way outside of the class period.  She felt this was accomplished with VoiceThread.  While the students embraced and adopted the technology with enthusiasm, the emphasis of the course was focused on the pedagogical development of French comprehension and speaking skills, rather than technology skills.

Upon reviewing the series of video responses from each student over the course of the semester, Valnes Quammen noted that there was a marked improvement in the clarity of the ideas expressed by the students, a higher accuracy and complexity of spoken French and more natural and fluid speech.  In end-of-semester surveys, the students themselves reported being very satisfied with the work they were able to do, and with the improvements they were able to see with both, their comprehension and their speaking skills.  As for the technology, students reported having very few technical problems with the web cams and the VoiceThread tool.  As a result, Valnes Quammen plans to continue to implement the same model in later semesters of French 63, and possibly in her other French courses.

The first thing to think about is whether or not video adds to the course in a meaningful way or whether video is simply a fun thing to do.  And if video allows you to do a project that you otherwise would not be able to do, then it’s a very good use of the technology.  The other thing that I would suggest is really researching your options far ahead of time so you know exactly what is and what isn’t available to you, and you can get an idea of potential problems that you might run into before you even start working with the students.

Click on the video player to hear Valnes Quammen’s thoughts and recommendations on the use of video technologies for a course.

International Journal of Nursing Education Scholarship, a leading journal in its field has recently listed a featured article written by the CIT nursing fellows.

The article published in 2008, “A Rubric for Improving the Quality of Online Courses” (by Jane Blood-Siegfried, Nancy Short, Carla Gene Rapp, Elizabeth Hill, Steve Talbert, John Skinner, Amy Campbell, and Linda Goodwin) describes an evaluation rubric to measure quality in the graduate online curriculum, offering a useful tool for online course development.

Dr. Short and Dr. Blood-Siegfried are happy to know people found this rubric was useful, “Over 1000 downloads have occurred for the first release so I guess they decided to feature it again… It (the rubric) certainly is important for our own programs. I am pleased to see that it has finally been featured. We did a lot of good work that year with our CIT partners.”

The full text of the article is available for download.

About the Fellowship:

Six Nursing faculty and one graduate student participated in a CIT Fellows Program to develop methods evaluate the quality of the School’s online courses. The group created an evaluation rubric, applied it to their courses, and conducted student focus groups to provide feedback about online course quality. The group also performed a curriculum analysis to locate gaps in content coverage in their series of core courses. Visit the Fellows Program archive page to know more about the fellowship participants, activities, outcomes, and student focus group feedback, etc.

Students enrolled in Dr. Julie Reynolds’ Writing in Biology (Bio299), are writing honors theses. To graduate with distinctions in biology, they need signatures from three additional readers: their research supervisor, their faculty reader, and the Director of Undergraduate Studies. Therefore, the work produced is more public than most college courses. Student often get conflicting feedback and feel torn between competing authorities. One way to address this dilemma is to make the feedback that the students receive visible to all parties, and to encourage students to explain their writing choices in response to that feedback. Dr. Reynolds used Voicethread to make readers comments and students writing choices visible.

In this course, Dr. Reynolds also used Jing to see if it is an efficient and effective approach to communicating both faculty and peer feedback. Here’s an example of a student commenting on another student’s project:

The third part of this project used video to help students gain a better understanding of how scientists read scientific papers. Students interviewed their faculty and recorded these interviews using FlipVideo. The videos were shown in class so students could see the range of expectations that readers have when they read scientific papers.   Here’s an example:

In Dr. Julie Reynolds‘ Biodiversity course, students used Flip video cameras to create a video for public audiences in their community to explain the value of local biodiversity. Students were required to identify their audience, investigate the audience’s assumptions about biodiversity, and created a compelling argument for why that audience should care about local biodiversity. The videos were peer reviewed. Students were able to make more compelling arguments when their work had an authentic audience.  Here’s an example of a student produced video about Lemurs and biodiversity:

Brenda Neece
Curator, Duke University Musical Instrument Collections

During the 2008-2009 academic year, Brenda Neece, title, participated in the CIT’s Student Video Fellows program.  This Fellows track offered a group of faculty from a range of disciplines the opportunity to investigate how to effectively design student video assignments, assess video work in the courses, and technology and support options available at Duke for them and their students.  Neece developed two assignments for her course.

The first video assignment, a Video Musical Instrument Dictionary Definition, was designed to get students familiar with the process of making and video and to become more familiar with the history and function of particular instruments.  Students chose one instrument and produced a short video that defined the instrument, how the instrument is used in contemporary music, and how the instrument works – parts of the instrument, its range, and so on.  They turned in a written draft script before shooting the video and their grade was based on the quality of their definition.  The videos allowed the students to use multimedia to show how the instruments sounds and how it is played – key aspects in their understanding of the course materials.

Neece was pleased with the results.  The students were able to either demonstrate the instruments themselves or find someone in the local community to play the instrument and became familiar with using the technology to present stories and information.  In addition, the students had a session with a librarian and learned how to cite video and audio excerpts in the work they produced.  In the video clip below, Neece discusses the results of the assignment in depth.

The second assignment, a group activity, was creating a video tour of their ideal musical instrument museum.  In the past, this museum tour was done as a written piece with illustrations.  With this new approach, using video for the students’s work, they were able to bring in interviews, demonstrations, outside sources into a compelling piece that mirrors a “virtual” exhibit or informational video they might be called on to produce when working in a museum.  Students were given clear guidelines and steps for producing the video and how it would be assessed.  In this video, Neece discusses how the assignment was constructed and graded.

Neece plans to continue using video assignments in the course in the future.  The assignments did have some glitches – an online video editing service she planned on using was taken down during the course and, with consulting from the CIT, came up with alternative for the students to use to complete their work.  So, she plans on being better prepared with specific software for the students to use when she teaches the course again.

Neece believes that video and multimedia are important in the student experience – the technology is allowing scholars to communicate in new ways and students need to be prepared to use this way of presenting their work and lets faculty and students bring the work of experts into the classroom.

Annabel Wharton, William B. Hamilton Professor
Art, Art History & Visual Studies

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.”

Peter Haff, Professor of Geology and Civil and Environmental Engineering, Nicholas School of the Environment, Earth & Ocean Sciences

Project Description:

Dr. Peter Haff’s class used Google Earth for their final project in the American Southwest (EOS 181S.01). They took a field trip to the Mojave Desert in October to study geologic features, including volcanism, tectonics, soils and weathering, paleo-lakes, wind-blown sand and dust, landslides, and alluvial fans. Prior to the field trip, the students selected biological, geological and astronomical topics to prepare for presentations in the field. At the end of the semester, students took the Earth and Ocean Sciences department (and me) on a virtual tour of their field trip using Google Earth. We followed the track of the trip to see the geological features and embedded photos and information supplied by the students. The students took turns explaining the features illustrated in Google Earth and their photos, including dunes, granite outcrops, vegetation zoning, desert pavement, dry lakes, badlands, bighorn sheep, craters, fault scarps, petroglyphs, a borax mine, relic shorelines, lava tubes and alien fresh jerky.

The students and Dr. Haff collaborated to create the Google Earth file, pooling their pictures and information. The students found that using Google Earth enhanced their learning because it provided:

• a sense of scale
• the ability to make measurements
• an overview of the area
• context for what they were seeing
• orientation.

Read more about this course in Duke Magazine.

More information, examples and tutorials about Google Earth can be found on their website; or, contact CIT for help incorporating Google Earth into your course.

Project start date: 8/25/2008

Nancy M. Short
Associate Clinical Professor, Duke School of Nursing

Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) students engaged in a unique active learning experience in Spring 2009 as they tackled Nursing 652 Transforming The Nation’s Health at the Duke School of Nursing.  Dr. Nancy M. Short regularly challenged students to push far beyond their level of comfort.  One assignment required students to prepare a script, plan interviews and settings and “shoot” a health policy advocacy video.  Students checked out Flip camcorders at the Link and participated in a custom hand-on training workshop provided by CIT. Within a three-week time window, the students used Flip camcorders to film the scenes and edited “draft videos” with the built-in FlipShare software.  After the instructor’s review and approval, eleven of the 23 videos have been launched on the DUSON YouTube Channel and can be seen under the playlist of the Influencing Health Policy.

In addition to the digital video assignment, students in N652 presented oral advocacy presentations to a panel of lobbyists and elected officials, developed a 1 page advocacy fact sheet for a policymaker, and wrote a health issue analysis paper.

Click the image below to watch all of the 11 video clips.

Additional Information

Dr. Short is an alumna of the RWJF Health Policy Fellowship and spent 2005 as a health legislative aide in the office of the U.S. Senate Majority Leader, Senator Bill Frist.