Trudi Abel, History, Arts & Sciences

Project Description

CIT is providing Trudi Abel with funding and student support to create and integrate several historical maps of Durham into a set of Google Earth files that will increase the integration of real-world research into her courses. Additional development will be done on Google Earth files to prepare them for students to add audio pieces (collected via iPods, many of which have already been created as a result of a DDI project) and create geotagged photography with standard GPS equipment, digital cameras, and geotagging software.

Abel also plans to incorporate the resulting developments into the Digital Durham website/project, Ultimately, Abel would like to see several old maps of Durham (including several fire maps) located in Google Earth and presented in a timeline/tour to illustrate the changes/changing of Durham. For more on Digital Durham, see this Duke article.

Project Started: May 4, 2007
Funding: $1650

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Susan Thorne, Associate Professor, History, Arts & Sciences

Students in the new course “Preparing the Portfolio for Preliminary Certification” author and publish web based electronic portfolios. This course supports an innovation in the history department’s approach to preliminary certification of PhD candidates. In place of the conventional written or oral exam, students are required to submit portfolios of work that display the student’s engagement with their three or four fields of specialization as well as their teaching expertise; the portfolio is modeled on the tenure dossier. This course is optional in this, its first year, but it will be required of all graduate students in either their second or third year. The objectives for the course are for students to:

• learn how to write a dissertation prospectus and/or grant proposal
• learn how to revise papers produced in classes and independent studies for publication in peer-reviewed journals.
• learn how to display their work in a web-based portfolio format

A CIT consultant worked closely with Thorne to develop a portfolio template and to provide training for students in web authoring.

Project start date: 5/10/2006
Funding awarded: $5,000

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Sucheta Mazumdar, Associate Professor, History

Project Description

Mazumdar created a rich set of course materials, including images and film clips, to complement the lectures and readings for the courses (History 172B, China and the West, and History 172C, China from Antiquity to 1400). The project also explored evaluation tools as a method to gauge student background knowledge about China at the beginning of the course, how much they learned during the semester, and ways in which the course affected their perceptions of China at the end.

Project start date: 05/01/04
Funding awarded: $1,250

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