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.”

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

Project Description:

Currently, archiving of dance performance for study by students is done on an ad-hoc basis with limited impact.  While video has been used to some extent, a two dimensional representation of dance has limited value when multiple performers are involved or when the views recorded do not provide essential information for students to study certain types of movement.

This project will create the initial stage of a prototype archive of basic ballet vocabulary using 3-D dance recording and archiving.  RFID tags, accelerometers, infrared emitters, and stereo video are among the technologies that will be explored for recording.  The use of virtual reality environments for archive access will be investigated, along with conversion to formal dance notation.

Tyler Walters, using advanced students in Dance at Duke, will collaborate with undergraduate students of Martin Brooke in the ECE undergraduate project class ECE 51, where the students will assemble the basic technologies for capturing and generating the dance data.  The initial prototype of the archive, first using video and later 3d representations, will be used as a teaching aid for Ballet Fundamentals, Ballet I, and Ballet II.

The Center for Instructional Technology is providing funding for the project in addition to loaning four high definition hard drive camcorders that will be used in the dance data capture process.

Project start date: 1/12/2009

Funding awarded:  $6,300

Caroline Bruzelius and faculty colleagues Mark Olson, Rachael Brady, Raquel Salvatella de Prada, and Sheila Dillon have developed a new gateway course, “Wired!”, that will integrate new technologies into the teaching of historical disciplines to prepare advanced undergraduates and graduate students to actively engage with and create new media in their scholarly work.  Students in the course will collaborate with faculty at Duke in Computer Science, Engineering and historical disciplines, as well as staff at the Nasher Museum and partners at an archaeological site in Italy to create projects that integrate scholarly research with multimedia documentation and presentation of their work.  The course will be taught for the first time in Spring 2009, with plans to make the course a regular part of the Visual Studies curriculum.

As part of the Strategic Initiative grants program, the Center for Instructional Technology is providing funding to purchase licenses for Strata Foto 3d software for use in the course.  In addition, the CIT is loaning the instructors a professional level SLR digital camera for the class.

Project start date:  1/12/2009

Funding awarded: $1,826

Richard Lucic, Associate Department Chair and Associate Professor of the Practice, Computer Science, Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS) Curriculum Director

Project Description:

ISIS students explored handheld devices for collecting data to create annotated maps. Students investigated GPS-enabled camera technologies and tracking software to determine the best tools and practices to create maps for a remote community. They created a toolkit, with a variety of devices and documentation, and an associated website, ISISmapping.  This toolkit will be used in DukeEngage project in Muhuru Bay, Kenya in the summer of 2009. 

The ultimate goal of this project is to create information-rich maps to be used in school and community center planning, fund raising, outreach, and education, in collaborate with DukeEngage, WISER, and members of the local Kenyan community.

Victoria Szabo and Sherryl Broverman will present this project at the 2009 Educause conference.

Project start date: 12/3/2008

Funding awarded: $10,040

Using FlipCams, students produced short video interviews and pieces that showed artworks around campus, asking questions that centered around how important art is at the university, potential spaces for artworks and how students in the campus community create and experience art.

The videos were uploaded to a public blog for the course; most of the student videos can be seen in the November postings of the blog.

ARTSVIS 54 Blog:  http://artsvis54.blogspot.com/

Connel teaches ECON 51D, Economic Principles, a very large class held in Griffith Theater in the Bryan Center.  Connel uses a tablet PC so that he can sketch and create notes while he is lecturing.  By creating lecture notes dynamically, he is able to quickly respond to student concerns and be interactive. After his lecture, students can download the notes as PDF documents from the Blackboard course site. The image below shows a portion of these notes.  In addition, both the notes and his lecture are saved using DukeCapture, which produces both streaming and downloadable files with audio and video for his students to review.  Students can select the media that best suits their needs.

Connel wondered whether posting these recordings & annotated slides would impact attendance in the class; attendance has not decreased and he is no longer concerned about this issue.  Students have responded very favorably; some have said that they watch after lecture even if they attend because they’re so busy taking notes they miss side comments which end up being important. Others have said that they find being in lectures distracting and are better able to focus on the content outside of the large lecture setting.  DukeCapture reports that lectures have 100 hits each.

Connel enjoys using a tablet PC in his teaching.  He prefers the slate-type, without a keyboard, because it is light and easy to set up. He likes using Windows Journal, because he can use a range of ink colors (and create his own for best projection), and the graph paper background assists him in drawing legible graphs during class. He uses Windows Journal on the tablet PC to produce grading rubrics for his TAs, and to quickly create sample solutions for TAs to grade student work.

see a short video from Connel’s class

Connel began by borrowing a tablet PC from the Duke Digital Initiative, and now his infectious enthusiasm has encouraged other instructors in Economics to teach with tablet PCs.

Watch a demonstration of Windows Journal on YouTube

Project Description:

Melinda Box and Anne Langley (Chemistry Librarian and Adjunct Professor of Chemistry) are working together to instruct chemistry students how to effectively find chemistry information on the internet (a chemistry scavenger hunt). They have created a video using Camtasia, a screen capture program, demonstrating how to use various online resources.  This video was used in the chemistry sections by the teaching assistants so that Anne does not have to visit all 38 lab sections to repeat the demonstration in person.  In addition, the lab sections do not have to be scheduled in a computer lab.  The video is available in Blackboard for student and teaching assistant use.

Anne says the final video is about 30 minutes long, 22 Mb in size.  She reports:

“I spent between 45 and 50 hours making a 30 minute video for the Chemical Scavenger hunt lab for General Chemistry laboratory. This includes the time I spent learning Camtasia and practicing with it. Next time it won’t take me so long cause I have had practice writing scripts, working the controls, handling the microphone etc. Steep learning curve, but then there is a plateau!”

Videos created for the second semester help present more thorough, uniform, and re-watchable instruction, which was previously presented exclusively by TAs without the help of the librarian.  Videos give students the opportunity to re-watch all or part of either presentation.

The video demonstrations have freed the instructors from having to do the exact same demonstrations for each laboratory section, while providing information that students can refer to later, and allow the instructors to provide more personalized attention to students.

Project start date: 6/18/2008

Funding awarded: $450

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.

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