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.

In language learning, opportunities to practice in the target language are of primary importance. In Angela Porcarelli’s Italian courses, Wimba Voice Tools (audio recording built into Blackboard) are used to provide extra time outside the classroom for students to practice their Italian listening and speaking skills. Wimba allows the students to easily re-record their assignments before submitting to the instructor, until the student is comfortable with their response. By practicing with Wimba throughout the semester, students were more comfortable with their end-of-semester oral presentations, and produced higher-quality final assignments.

Julie and Vicki have published a research report on using audio feedback for peer review on student writing.  They used iPods distributed as part of the Duke Digital Initiative, to test if audio feedback is an effective way for students to offer high-quality comments to each other on their writing.   Their report “Can you hear us now?: A comparison of peer review quality when students give audio versus written feedback” (pdf) is published in the annual 2008 edition of The WAC Journal, a national peer-reviewed journal on writing across the curriculum.

Julie and Vicki noticed that when they gave students feedback on their writing, audio feedback was more time-efficient and seemed to be of higher quality than written comments.  They designed a study to find out if students would experience the same efficiency and effectiveness using audio feedback for peer review.  Students in their classes gave and received peer reviews using both audio and written comments.  Students were surveyed about their preferences and perceptions at the end of the semester.  In addition, Julie and Vicki assessed the quality of the peer reviews using defined criteria and two raters for each review.

They found that audio peer reviews contained more specific and higher order comments than written peer reviews.  They conclude that audio feedback significantly improves the quality of peer reviews.  The paper finishes with concrete suggestions based on their results and experiences with students for effectively using audio feedback in the classroom.

This paper is a great example of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning; Vicki and Julie have carefully researched “what works” in teaching using audio peer reviews, and offered suggestions for others based on their results.

Project description

This project will develop a series of short video lectures taped via a desk-top, Flip-video on a tiny tripod. A “Video Workbook” will be created for the N220: Nursing Care of the Childbearing Family, upon finishing all recordings.

These recordings will be uploaded to Blackboard, iTunes U, or other media for students to view and download to their iPods. Students will receive a designed workbook with objectives, lecture highlights and worksheets and directed to the lectures which will be numbered on Bb, iTunes U, or other media. Students then can load the lecture on a video iPod for mobile studying, or view the lecture online. This will accompany the regular course materials. But instead of the course coordinator lecturing via PP slides, class room time can be spent processing critical nursing content as it relates to nursing care of the childbearing family.

Helen Gordon foresees how the project makes different: “I spend HOURS lecturing on small segments of content that consume valuable class time. Now students will spend this time, hearing me and seeing me via video mini-lectures. They will have the satisfaction of receiving the content they want….and I will have the class time back to focus on nursing actions of the material… This format will appeal to the audio learning styles of many of the students. The organization and creation of the workbook will be a key shift in how I have taught this before.”

By the end of the summer 2008 semester, Helen Gordon will randomly select about 7 representative students from her over 60 students to form a focus group for evaluating the project.

Project start date: 2/1/2008
Funding awarded: $ 500

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 cooperated 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 used CIT funding to explore the technologies which will be used to implement the full project in Spring 2008. From fifty alumni applicants, twenty were paired with Duke students.  Readers used 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 used the readers’ feedback to edit and improve their writing based on this professional input. The CIT consulted on technology approaches, documentation for the volunteer readers and students, and evaluation of the project.

The main challenges encountered during the project were recruitment of alumni readers with expertise that matched the student papers and with technology problems encountered by some users.  Using Wimba for recording of responses was successful, but some users had difficulty configuring and setting up the webcams or Skype account for the project.  Reactions to use of video for the project were mixed, with some users finding it more efficient to talk with students by phone and others reporting that it added a meaningful dimension to their interactions with the students.

• Moskovitz’s full report on the project (PDF)
• Duke Today feature article about the project

Project Started: 8/15/2007
Funding: $5,000 total (Fall 2007, Spring 2008)

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”

In order to capture and carry forward class discussions begun by guest lecturers, Lucic records those classes with an iPod; then he posts the recordings on a class Web site for students to download and review on their computers or iPods.

Sophomore Ryan Sparrow got the assignment of leading a class discussion to further explore issues raised in two guest lectures, by Duke art history professor Anya Belkina, on her use of computer software to create video animations as works of art.

Sparrow explained one way he prepared for his presentation. “I downloaded the lectures from the [class Web site] and I put them on my iPod,” he said. “One of them I listened to while I was at work at the Provost’s office. I was upstairs in the attic doing some filing and I got to just listen to the lecture and take some notes.” (The recording from Belkina’s first lecture was particularly helpful for Sparrow, who had missed that class after staying up late to complete an engineering project.)

Listening to the recordings, Sparrow homed in on issues he thought would spark further discussion, such as Belkina’s thoughts about the potentially ephemeral nature of digital art and the transition from using a paintbrush to a computer .

Professor Anya Belkina gave two guest lectures on using computer software to create artistic animations to a class in Duke’s Information Science and Information Studies certificate program. Listen to a portion of her first talk recorded with an iPod for students to review.

In his class presentation, Sparrow gave examples of technology intersecting with art — such as 3-D printers that “print” sculptures and animation software used to design movies like “Finding Nemo” — then posed his discussion questions. (Some students use their iPods to transport large multimedia files for their presentations, but Sparrow did not.)

Remarks from his peers ranged from how Japanese animé has created stars out of voiceover artists to the notion that computer programs themselves can be works of art.

Lucic said he plans to use audio segments of guest lectures to promote his course, which is part of Duke’s Information Science and Information Studies certificate program.

iPods were also a topic of class discussion later in the semester.

“They’re going to hear Bach-style [music] the way they hear their own music,” Kelley says about integrating the iPods into his course. “You sing along to the radio, why don’t you sing along to Bach?”

Absorbing Bach’s musical style, particularly his chorales and “Saint Matthew Passion,” is the foundation for the course, in which students learn to recognize, sing and emulate his compositions.

Junior Geoff Lorenz says Bach’s music is “so well textured” with many layers of melodic lines.

“If you take [Bach music] around and listen to it constantly then eventually you’re going to hear all the different layers,” he says.

Kelley says when he plays musical phrases in class that depart from Bach’s style, his students are often quick to notice the incongruity. “I’ve never seen a class so sensitive to error detection,” he says, although it is hard to determine how much of the class’s proficiency to attribute to introducing the iPods.

The next step the class is taking with digital music technology is to a kind of eighteenth-century karaoke.

The students are asked to input the notes for all four parts of a Bach chorale into a musical notation software program. Then, each student is supposed to remove the part — bass, tenor, alto or soprano — that he sings. With this missing-voice version of the song loaded on their iPods, the students have an assignment: play the song and practice singing your part, karaoke style.

“I want you on the bus singing with your iPod,” Kelley told the class. “I want you over Thanksgiving with turkey in your mouth, singing with your iPod.”

At one class, with a CBS News TV crew filming for a story about iPods, freshman Stephen Clark won a class competition to best sing one part in a Bach chorale. Clark sang his part, tenor, as the other three parts played off his iPod, which was attached to the classroom stereo system. Clark says he practices his part, listening to his iPod, mostly on the bus — “humming, not singing loudly, but humming.”

Not everyone has taken to the digital music technology as readily as Clark.

For an hour the students — Katie Tiedemann, Dana Edelstein and Sarah Weber — observed committee members, a city councilman and staff from the Durham Department of Housing and Community Development stumble through the meeting. The students recorded the conversation on a couple iPod devices equipped with microphone attachments.

“That was the most inefficient meeting I’ve ever been to,” Weber said after the students stepped out of the meeting.

To turn the unfocused hour into a newspaper story, each student researched the stipulations of the development grant, reviewed the notes they took during the meeting and listened to the recordings they made.

In their articles, all three homed in on comments by the same committee member. Weber recounts the scene in her paper: “‘We don’t necessarily have a prescribed goal or mission at this point,’ said committee member Aaron Cain between bites of a grilled cheese sandwich. ‘I’ve been coming since June, and it seems to me that every meeting we have a long discussion about why we’re supposed to be here, and nobody’s really sure.’”

Students in Ken Rogerson’s “Newspaper Journalism” course use their iPods to listen to examples of radio journalism and to record interviews for their own stories. Three students covered a wandering local committee meeting. Listen to a portion of the meeting.

For this “Newspaper Journalism” course, the iPods are “glorified tape recorders,” says instructor Ken Rogerson, Ph.D. But, he says, the iPods are a step up from tape recorders because the iPods allow students to more easily retrieve quotes and store their interviews. The iPods also support another assignment he gives: listening to radio segments, such as a National Public Radio show on interviewing techniques. Rogerson gets permission to distribute the segments through his class Web site. The students can then download the segments and listen to them on their iPods.

Rogerson says about two thirds of the students use their iPods as recorders for the short newspaper stories he assigns each week. Compared with previous classes that didn’t use iPods, he says, “the number of sources and variety of sources [in students’ stories] have increased, and that’s been really nice.”

Listen to a portion of the meeting.



Listen to the Cain’s remark