Project Description:

Vicki Russell, Director of the University Writing Program, is investigating innovative ways that tutors can work with students on writing assignments, and students can collaborate on writing projects. Russell, using 3d virtual worlds software such as Second Life as a model, is seeking to create a virtual Writing Studio - an online, 3d “space” where students, faculty and writing tutors can collaborate in real time.

Promoting a larger “culture of writing” on the Duke campus, the resource will include spaces for exploring writing resources in non-linear ways to help students during the writing process. The online presence will be a meeting place where writing tutors can assist students with writing assignments and spaces where student organizations can collaborate on writing projects for publication.

Russell has been awarded a CIT Strategic Initiative Grant to facilitate the early stages of her project. Working with Writing Studio tutors and graduate students Richard Musselwhite and Jen Walsh, Russell will use funding from the CIT grant to learn more about Second Life and other virtual worlds applications, investigate virtual worlds tools such as Second Life, Croquet and Protosphere to determine technical suitability for the project, survey students about current and potential virtual worlds interest and use, and develop a plan and paper-prototype that can be used as a blueprint for implementing the future development of a virtual Writing Studio.

The goals of the project are to use the extensive resources for writers available on the Writing Studio Web site as a foundation for creating an interactive virtual learning environment, demonstrating for writers that writing is a dynamic rather than static process. Allowing access to these resources during a tutoring session with students in a real-time virtual environment will provide interactive ways to facilitate writing as recursive rather than linear process. In addition, by creating a virtual environment space for collaborative writing that is expandable and reproducible for other units at Duke, the project will focus on helping writers improve individual written texts and become more self-reflective better writers and provide faculty with tools to help their students become more effective writers and critical thinkers.

Project start date: 5/13/2008
Funding awarded: $4,000

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Project Description

Julie Reynolds and research associate David Shiffman have compared ArcGIS and Google Earth for undergraduate research projects. ArcGIS is a powerful program, but is very expensive and difficult to learn. Google Earth has fewer analytical tools, but is free and very user friendly. Using data generated by student research projects, David compared the capabilities of both programs.

ArcGIS is undeniably a more powerful tool, but it has several drawbacks. The expense and difficulty of learning ArcGIS makes it impractical for short-term, small-scale projects. Google Earth, in contrast, is powerful enough for small-scale projects such as undergraduate research projects and large mapping project that do not require quantitative analysis.

These results are being prepared for publication, and will be used to guide future undergraduate research projects.

Below, left image was created in ArcGIS, image on the right is the same data in Google Earth.

Project start date: 4/1/2008
Funding awarded: $1800

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Project Description

Cary Moskovitz has been using the concept of “think aloud” responses in his writing courses, getting professionals in various fields at Duke to record comments and feedback on student papers. Students gain valuable insight from a reader familiar with the subject area of the paper and gain a better sense of ownership of their writing in a “real world” situation.

To build on the success of this approach in his own courses, Moskovitz is now cooperating with the Duke Alumni Association to introduce this method into Writing in the Disciplines courses, by locating Duke alumni residing around the United States to serve as readers in three classes in Economics, History and Chemistry in Spring 2008.

During Fall 2007, Moskovitz will use CIT funding to explore the technologies which will be used to implement the full project in Spring 2008. Readers will use a webcam-assisted teleconference to virtually “meet” with their student partners, and web-based audio recording software to record a “think aloud” response on a student paper in the course. Students will be able to use the readers’ feedback to edit and improve their writing based on this professional input. The CIT is consulting on technology approaches, documentation for the volunteer readers and students, and evaluation of the project.

Project Started: 8/15/2007
Funding: $1,000 (Fall 2007)

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The riveting half-hour interview with DeAngelis, captured on the women’s iPods, was part of a class project to examine how major events are remembered by various social groups and how cultural texts such as newspaper articles might influence or reflect such group memories. (Baumgartner grew up in Boulder, Co., a town near Columbine, and, based on advice from a family friend, arranged for the interview.)

The project for Professor Michele Strano’s Writing 20 course “Social Minds: Memory as Collective Practice” asked students, in groups of three or four, to conduct a dozen-or-so interviews about an event and then compare the responses to news articles about it. In addition to the Columbine shooting, students examined memories of the Apollo 11 mission, Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, Y2K, first Gulf War, O.J. Simpson trial, Apollo 13 mission and Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster.

After writing essays about the interviews and the articles, the groups gave class presentations on how the news reports and the accounts given in the interviews may be related. The students were required to play clips from their interviews to support their points. The clips were incorporated into the students’ PowerPoint presentations as digital audio files that were played through a classroom sound system. Baumgartner and April Edwards, along with teammates Dean Chiang and Matt Edwards, concluded in their presentation that both the people they interviewed and the news stories they read interpreted the Columbine shootings through the lens of themes, or what they termed “myths.” The four students cited three prevalent myths: “end of innocence,” “perpetrators as victims,” and “personal responsibility.”

“If we could pinpoint one thing — if I could tell you the reason that [the student killers] Harris and Klebold committed this crime was because of A, B and C, then people can say, ‘Well, we’ll make sure that other students do not do A, B and C.’” DeAngelis said in a clip the students played. “But we can’t. We don’t know what the cause was. They took that to their grave with them.” Listen to DeAngelis’ remark about blame. Including audio excerpts in the presentations reinforces a key principle of writing, Strano says. “One thing we emphasize about academic writing is that researchers are expected to move beyond speculation and support their claims with some form of evidence,” she says. “You make a claim, and then you give data to support that claim. Incorporating the sound files made that expectation clear.”

Freshman Rita Baumgartner conducts a phone interview with Columbine High School Principal Frank DeAngelis, while April Edwards, also a freshman, takes notes. The two recorded the interview with their iPods.

“They started thinking of the voice files and the news articles on the same level,” she says. “Through their analyses of the interviews — which they recognized as raw, subjective data from the beginning — they began to realize that the news coverage was also data about how an event is framed.”

Strano has taught other writing courses with interview assignments, but she says, with the iPods, she was better able to guide students through the process of interpreting interviews because the students could easily send her the audio files of the interviews. “I kept all 84 interviews [done by the students] on my iPod,” she says. “It gave me access to the raw data in a way that allowed me to better evaluate how they interpreted it.”

Students said that recording the interviews with iPods and including clips in the presentation made the project more engaging.

“It helps us make our points better,” Matt Edwards says. “But it was a hassle getting all the [audio excerpts] to length.”

“[The assignment] seems more practical because it’s a real world application,” says April Edwards, who called the interview with DeAngelis “eye opening.”

Listen to the beginning of the interview.



Listen to reflections from Columbine High School Principal Frank DeAngelis

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