Sandra Valnes Quammen has students in her French classes watch video clips relevant to the course topic and then respond orally to question prompts to improve their French speaking skills. In the past, this course assignment was accomplished primarily using Audacity for audio recording and editing, followed by upload to Blackboard. This year, Valnes Quammen used Wimba Voice Tools (online audio recording built into Blackboard) instead, which streamlined this course assignment considerably.

Project Description

For Brenda Neece’s course on Musicology, a requirement of all incoming PhD candidates in the Music Department, Neece and her students experimented with the use of small form factor Ultra Mobile PCs (UMPCs) for field research. Neece, during her own research, used a handheld Psion in her work to take notes, dictation, keep track of sources and even make sketches as she travelled in many locations researching musical instruments. With this project, Neece introduced the students to new methods of integrating technology with field research.

The UMPC is a new form factor computer – essentially a small tablet PC – giving the students access to a full Windows Vista computer in a small package. The project allowed the CIT to gain an understanding of ways that students and faculty might use this novel new portable computer.

The CIT loaned Neece and her two students Sony UMPCs during the Fall semester. The UMPCs have a stylus and could be used much like a tablet to create quick sketches and music notation. The computer includes a built-in webcam and digital still/video camera, as well as wireless capabilities, built-in microphone and other features. The computers were pre-loaded with productivity software, such as MS Office, and Endnote for creating and using citations. The Music Department provided licenses for the music notation software Sibelius for use on the computers during the project.

Neece and her students used the UMPC’s for common tasks, such as web browsing and editing of Word documents, but focused primarily on using the devices for research.  They used library electronic resources using WiFi access, made notes using the writing input-based Windows Journal, created and edited short musical examples with the stylus in Sibelius, and used the built-in camera to take quick images of sheet music or instruments for reference.

Despite some technical problems due to the emerging nature of the UMPC platform, the reaction was positive.  “It is fantastic to have the power of a full computer in one’s pocket,” Neece said at the end of the project.  “This is exactly what I would have loved to have had when I did all of my fieldwork and library research for my doctorate instead of my little Psion.”

Project Started: 8/30/2007
Funding: $5,400

“There’s this whole chunk of cultural history that’s been forgotten,” Foster said about the Golden Age of Radio covered in his course. “So much of what we have [today] of TV and film is so indebted to radio.”

One example Foster gave was from “Three Skeleton Key,” a 1949 episode of the CBS show “Escape.” In it, three men in a lighthouse on the coast of French Guyana see a menacing ship approaching as Richard Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman” plays in the background (listen to the clip). In class, Foster pointed out the dramatic elements — pauses, voice inflections, sound effects and the musical score — as well as the cultural significance of introducing Wagner’s nineteenth-century classical music to a popular radio audience.

“The way that many Americans come to… high cultural commodities like Wagner and Bach is through popular media like radio,” he said, and now TV and movies. For example, he said, “We know [Wagner’s] ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ because of [the film] ‘Apocalypse Now.’”

After listening to the classic radio dramas, students did their own productions of the shows, which are then made available on The mp3ater Project Web site.

As students get a sense of the old time radio dramas, Foster asked them to pick a script of one show and produce their own version of it. The students broke into groups and use iPods to record their parts. They then used audio editing software to mix in sound effects.

Sophomore Tiffany Chen chose to do a solo production of a radio version of the short story “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell — a story she remembers from high school as “unusual.” In it, a hunter named Rainsford falls off a boat and ends up on an isolated island where he becomes the game for another hunter.

“He starts as a man in control. But he slowly loses control as the story proceeds,” Chen explains. To capture that mounting tension, Chen employed techniques from class — mood music, voice inflection and sound effects she made as well as ones she found online. Recording herself with an iPod or a microphone attached to her computer, she used the audio editing software to alter her voice for the male parts.

At the end of the semester, the students’ productions were posted on a Web site Foster created called The mp3ater Project.

iPods are a good fit for the course because students use them in both the listening and producing aspects of the course, Foster said. “Pedagogically it killed a lot of birds with one stone.”

Listen to a clip of “The Flying Dutchman”



Listen to the beginning of Chen’s version of “The Most Dangerous Game”

This project created video series that demonstrate a specific adult physical examination taught in N332 Physical Assessment. The various formats of the videos were integrated to online courses posted in Blackboard, to self-paced web tutorials for online learning and to video iPods for mobile learning.

This demo session of the physical examination was taught each year to about 150-200 students in N332 Physical Assessment and Diagnostic Reasoning at Duke University School of Nursing. Faculty, actors, models who were involved in this demo had to repeat the same live demo to show many different sections of students before doing a laboratory practice.

This shift to ‘in house material’ videos and the subsequent movement of the clips to iPOD has changed instructors’ teaching in a major way. Because instructors not longer have to use live demo or non Duke specific video material the content drift for the course is much reduced. It has also very significantly affected the teaching style of at least 7 faculty and their respective courses. In addition, after instructors were able to fully utilize the videos this semester, the students have been so enthusiastic that they are moving ahead with this resource and influencing and enhancing their applications.

“The huge student enthusiasm for this product has convinced me that convenience and portability is very valuable to our students…likely to others…The university could do more to support these initiatives. They are time and resource intensive to start but the payoff is very good.” Dr. Susan Denman, the project primary investigator said when she evaluated this project.

Project start date: 4/20/2006
Funding awarded: $ 3,250

Additional Information

Center for Instructional Technology showcase poster on this project

Duke University Media Services was funded by CIT for field production

Project description

Russian isn’t more difficult to study than French or Spanish, it just takes longer. Beginning Russian students face the challenge of learning about 1,000 words, most of which do not resemble any word they have heard before. These realities form the background of Prof. Van Tuyl’s project to create “Audio flash cards” to speed up and significantly strengthen students’ mastery of basic Russian vocabulary. In this project, each vocabulary word or phrase is recorded in its own audio file which students can include in their own playlists for parts of speech, words from the same chapter, or according to the student’s personal “rating” of difficulty level. Vocabulary files can also be accompanied by a relevant video file, or photo.

With their exposure to Russian no longer limited to classroom time and textbook reading, students have the ability to hear and practice the language while riding the bus, lying in bed or doing their laundry. Prof. Van Tuyl has found that, by increasing their exposure to spoken Russian with iPods and audio flashcards, students gain basic Russian lexical proficiency more quickly and with less stress than was possible before.

Project start date: August 1, 2005