Project Description:

In Spring 2008, Lucy Haagen used cellphones to help shape learning communities that connected Duke students with Durham high school students. Haagen and the students used cellphones both as traditional devices (as telephones) and as capturing (audio) and advanced communication (text messaging) tools.

Haagen plans to expand on the success of this pilot through the use of ’smartphones’ in Hanoi, Vietnam. Working with several Duke students participating in Duke Engage, Haagen will use smartphones to assist with ESL activities in the rural Hanoi environment. In addition to using the phones to connect Duke students with students from Vietnam, the phones’ multimedia capabilities will allow students to connect through video, audio and text-based messages. Students will also be able to document teaching and learning moments with built-in video capabilities, as well as use internet connectivity to acquire and provide additional content.

Project start date: 5/07/2008
Funding awarded: $5,630

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As Duke works to ensure that its students develop into active learners and involved citizens, an
increasing number of undergraduates will undertake independent research.  Mentoring these apprentice
investigators, while worthwhile and rewarding, will increase demands on Duke faculty.  Engaging students as competent and ethically aware researchers is necessarily time-intensive, as students require careful and ongoing advice to effectively plan, implement, and complete research.

With this in mind, this project will develop a series of multimedia modules to aid faculty in efforts to educate students about ethical conduct in researching human subjects. Several modules will be tailored to meet needs as identified by faculty, such as: cultural sensitivity, private versus public information, subject rights, risks and information consent, and vulnerable subjects. The modules will also emphasize the global reach of students’ activities and draw attention to the need to craft research protocols so that they are appropriate for the particular cultural context in which they will be undertaken.

Project start date: 4/21/2008
Funding awarded: $$19,860

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Project description

This project will provide geographically dispersed online Duke nursing informatics graduate students with collaborative tools that will help them acquire, critique, summarize, and disseminate available HIT studies and evidence reports. Linda Goodwin will utilize informatics experts, mobile technologies, and remote (virtual) teamwork that enable both synchronous and asynchronous collaboration to compile HIT evaluation resources, critique them for level of evidence, and make them available to a world-wide audience. The project will be focused on immersing students, both Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) Program and Master of Science in Nursing (MSN) in real-world informatics issues and projects in health care.

Linda Goodwin and her students will experiment with different types of mobile tools and web-based citation tools, explore whether mobile technologies that permit student access to synchronous teamwork tools from anywhere they can gain wireless Internet access will improve both the process and the products of remote online teamwork.

Project start date: 6/2/2008
Funding awarded: $7,500

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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

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Project Description:

Five Duke faculty teach voice lessons at Duke and requested hard-drive based camcorders to explore the impact of recording audio and video of voice lessons, classes and performances for immediate or later review by the student and faculty. The voice faculty currently use iPods to record lessons so that students can hear their work for evaluation, but the addition of video would allow faculty to discuss performance problems that have to do with body mechanics, performance, language and communication skills that are manifested in both aural and visual form.

The CIT loaned three hard-drive based camcorders to the faculty to use in voice lessons and preparations for Spring student recitals in courses Music 95, Voice Lessons (50 students); Music 79B, Class Voice (12 students); and Music 179, Advanced Study: Vocal Performance (12 students). The hard-drive based camcorder allowed faculty to randomly access material for playback for discussions with students, in contrast to a traditional tape-based camcorder that would be more cumbersome for these purposes.

Linnartz said that using the camcorder for feedback saved time during lessons, allowing the students to directly see performance issues and how they could improve. “Having video feedback available for immediate student viewing during lessons drastically increased the students’ receptivity to instruction, speeded up their ownership of both the problem and solutions, and created a quicker and more long-lasting change in both technique and performance,” Linnartz noted.

Since the test use of the camcorders proved successful and promising for future work, the faculty are exploring how to obtain a set of camcorders through their department for permanent use in their courses.

Project start date: 2/27/2008
Funding awarded: equipment loan

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Project description

This project will develop 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

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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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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

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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 is providing funding and support to help Gereffi and his team develop interactive representations of value chains using tools like Flash, and to explore the use of mapping tools like Google Earth to rethink the way industry data can be presented visually in a more global context. The resulting developments will in turn create more and varied projects for undergraduate students in Gereffi’s capstone course.

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

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Project Description

CIT is providing Trudi Abel with funding and student support to create and integrate several historical maps of Durham into a set of Google Earth files that will increase the integration of real-world research into her courses. Additional development will be done on Google Earth files to prepare them for students to add audio pieces (collected via iPods, many of which have already been created as a result of a DDI project) and create geotagged photography with standard GPS equipment, digital cameras, and geotagging software.

Abel also plans to incorporate the resulting developments into the Digital Durham website/project, Ultimately, Abel would like to see several old maps of Durham (including several fire maps) located in Google Earth and presented in a timeline/tour to illustrate the changes/changing of Durham. For more on Digital Durham, see this Duke article.

Project Started: May 4, 2007
Funding: $1650

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