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

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

Project Description

In Gereffi’s Marketing and Management capstone course, undergraduate students collect and analyze data involving several key North Carolina industries, helping Gereffi and his team (the Center on Globalization, Governance and Competitiveness) create visualizations like value chains and maps for the public and highly-visible North Carolina and the Global Economy website.

CIT provided funding and support to help Gereffi and his team develop interactive visualizations for the project. These visualizations included representations of value chains using tools like Adobe Flash, and an exploration of the use of mapping tools like Google Earth to rethink the way industry data can be presented visually in a more global context.

Re-visualizing Value Chains

Gereffi and his team consulted with CIT on several possible approaches to creating more interactive and visually appealing value chain diagrams. Key challenges included considering uniform color schemes and layouts (to create a common visual language between all value chains), and finding a solution for presenting data and textual content in context within the diagram, yet without cluttering the visual representation.

Making mappable data more accessible

Google Maps and Google Earth have made it much easier to publish and share mappable data. Since much of the data collected by the Gereffi’s research team included location data, CIT worked with the team to use Google’s mapping tools to create clickable, interactive maps that could be included directly in context within  webpages on the NCGE site. The team created custom icons with colors that corresponded to the colors of different aspects of the value chain.

The same mappable data used to create the Google Maps was also used to create Google Earth files. The Google Earth “virtual globe” browser allows users more flexibility to view, sort and zoom into locations. By providing the data as Google Earth files, users in the community and industry also have greater access to the data.

The following video is an excerpt from the presentation “Everybody’s Doing It: Web-based Visualizations and Mashups in the Social Sciences” which CIT consultant Shawn Miller gave at Duke’s Visualization Forum in September 2008. In the video, Miller describes several aspects of the project, and demos some of the unpublished visualization experiments that he and the team explored. The full video is available from the Visualization Forum website.

For more information, visit the North Carolina and the Global Economy website. The site also includes videos that demo many of the key features, including the value chains, Google Maps and Google Earth.

Project Started: May 4, 2007
Funding: $11,000

Project Description

“How do they connect? The past and the present?”

CIT provided Trudi Abel with funding and student support to create digital versions of historic maps of Durham using Google Earth. Using high quality digital copies of maps from the late 1800’s, Abel worked with CIT staff to figure out the best methods for converting, importing and placing images as overlays into Google Earth. The “georectification” of these maps presented several obstacles, requiring the team to consult with local Durham mapping and historical experts to complete the placement and positioning of these maps.

Several of the resulting digital maps have recently been added to Abel’s ongoing project – the Digital Durham website. Google Earth files can be downloaded and opened on users’ computers for exploration. Visitors to the site can also access several high resolution screen captures of the map overlays without the need to open or use Google Earth. The resulting maps can also be used in Abel’s work with Duke and local high school students – providing a basis for student research projects. Audio pieces created on iPods, geotagged photography and even short video clips can be linked directly to their historical and/or present-day locations.

“I think these maps will help users visualize an industrializing city and gain a better understanding of the process of urbanization in this New South community.”

Click here to view the Digital Durham page for Sanborn 1884

Click here to view the Digital Durham page for Sanborn 1888

Presentations

The following video is an excerpt from the presentation “Everybody’s Doing It: Web-based Visualizations and Mashups in the Social Sciences” which CIT consultant Shawn Miller gave at Duke’s Visualization Forum in September 2008. The full video is available from the Visualization Forum website.

Trudi Abel also presented about the project and the larger Digital Durham project at a Visualization Forum in March 2009. The video from her talk is available here.

Abel and Miller discussed future possibilities for the Digital Durham project at Duke’s Tech and New Media Tuesdays forum. The presentation is accessible on iTunesU.

Articles about the project

The Digital Durham Project: Creating Community through History, Technology, and Service Learning by Trudi Abel

Duke News article: New Map Collaboration Helps Tell Story of Durham’s History

MyNC.com article: Duke, Durham Merge Google Earth technology with historic city maps

Duke Research Blog: Seeing Through Time: Historic Maps, Google Earth, and the Transformation of Durham

Independent article: What Google Earth doesn’t show you: A small movement of alternative mapmakers seek to revolutionize our understanding of the Triangle and the world

Project Started: May 4, 2007
Funding: $1650

Project description

EOS223S is an open, interdisciplinary elective in Nicholas School which satisfies a seminar requirement of Trinity undergrads; it includes topics in geology, engineering, energy, environment, and policy. The course focused on the actual conditions and plans for a US national high-level nuclear waste deposit in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, through a guided field trip to the Yucca Mountain site. Pre-field trip classes included lectures on Yucca Mountain geology and student-prepared seminars/posters on specific aspects of Yucca Mountain and nuclear waste disposal. Geology requires students to visualize both scales and complex three dimensional relationships from 2 dimensional maps, which is particularly difficult for non-majors. The Duke Immersive Virtual Environment (DiVE Tank) provided three dimensional visualization of the geology and subsurface engineering, and an interactive way to explore the scale of the field site.

By the end of the course, students stated that the use of the 3-D Visualization before the field trip helped to frame the spatial relationships between sediment layers, faults, and topography. The students were asked write a position paper on the integrated geological, economic, and social aspects of the proposed site and state their position on its licensing using the graphical evidence. Their papers showed that they achieved most of the following goals: they referenced appropriate data bases of existing documents, and related these materials to the actual scales lengths, including time, space, economic, social, and political dimensions associated with the potential site and its use.

Project start date: May 26, 2006
Funding awarded: $5,000

Project description

The course NEUROBIO95FCS.01 covered the structural and functional organization of the brain, strengths and limitations of techniques in neuroscience, how concepts from economics are being introduced into neuroscience, and how results from neuroscience are changing economics models. Neuroanatomy was taught using a novel approach. First, instructors lectured using two-dimensional graphics. Then, students manipulated brain models in small-group workshops. Finally, the students were led on a “guided tour” of neuroanatomy, in a three-dimensional (virtual) brain models within the Duke immersive visualization environment (DIVE). Students walked through realistic, high-resolution brains with their instructor. This allowed them to learn how different brain parts are organized spatially. They later returned to the DIVE to practice in small groups without their instructor.

We know that students did learn the required neuroanatomy because of their exceptional performance on their mid-term neuroanatomy exam. Our students all completed practical exams in the DIVE, and both instructors were impressed with their facility with the neuroanatomy. We also gave a very challenging, graduate-level written examination. With only 2-3 exceptions in a class of 16, the students’ performance was outstanding. Their knowledge of neuroanatomy – as estimated from the performance on the test – was roughly equivalent to that of graduate students in the cognitive neuroscience program.

This project was presented at the 2007 Center for Instructional Technology Showcase on “Helping Students Visualize Science in Three Dimensions Using Virtual Reality”

Project start date: May 26, 2006
Funding awarded: $5,000

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