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.

Here is a web video of Trudi Abel talking about her class and their participation in the Duke Digital Initiative:

Project Started: May 4, 2007
Funding: $1650

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Project description

In Advanced Geospatial Analysis (ENVIRON 359), students used Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to understand environmental processes and how to protect and manage environmental resources. Students were required to work with large, complex databases and satellite images.

In support of these goals, students used iPods as portable storage to complete labs and projects with datasets too large for the classroom server. They also subscribed to podcasts from commercial GIS companies (e.g. Environmental Systems Research Institute) and from GIS practitioners to add these perspectives on cutting edge GIS technologies not yet documented in their textbooks.

Project start date: August 1,  2006

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“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”

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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.

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“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.

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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

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The riveting half-hour interview with DeAngelis, captured on the women’s iPods, was part of a class project to examine how major events are remembered by various social groups and how cultural texts such as newspaper articles might influence or reflect such group memories. (Baumgartner grew up in Boulder, Co., a town near Columbine, and, based on advice from a family friend, arranged for the interview.)

The project for Professor Michele Strano’s Writing 20 course “Social Minds: Memory as Collective Practice” asked students, in groups of three or four, to conduct a dozen-or-so interviews about an event and then compare the responses to news articles about it. In addition to the Columbine shooting, students examined memories of the Apollo 11 mission, Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, Y2K, first Gulf War, O.J. Simpson trial, Apollo 13 mission and Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster.

After writing essays about the interviews and the articles, the groups gave class presentations on how the news reports and the accounts given in the interviews may be related. The students were required to play clips from their interviews to support their points. The clips were incorporated into the students’ PowerPoint presentations as digital audio files that were played through a classroom sound system. Baumgartner and April Edwards, along with teammates Dean Chiang and Matt Edwards, concluded in their presentation that both the people they interviewed and the news stories they read interpreted the Columbine shootings through the lens of themes, or what they termed “myths.” The four students cited three prevalent myths: “end of innocence,” “perpetrators as victims,” and “personal responsibility.”

“If we could pinpoint one thing — if I could tell you the reason that [the student killers] Harris and Klebold committed this crime was because of A, B and C, then people can say, ‘Well, we’ll make sure that other students do not do A, B and C.’” DeAngelis said in a clip the students played. “But we can’t. We don’t know what the cause was. They took that to their grave with them.” Listen to DeAngelis’ remark about blame. Including audio excerpts in the presentations reinforces a key principle of writing, Strano says. “One thing we emphasize about academic writing is that researchers are expected to move beyond speculation and support their claims with some form of evidence,” she says. “You make a claim, and then you give data to support that claim. Incorporating the sound files made that expectation clear.”

Freshman Rita Baumgartner conducts a phone interview with Columbine High School Principal Frank DeAngelis, while April Edwards, also a freshman, takes notes. The two recorded the interview with their iPods.

“They started thinking of the voice files and the news articles on the same level,” she says. “Through their analyses of the interviews — which they recognized as raw, subjective data from the beginning — they began to realize that the news coverage was also data about how an event is framed.”

Strano has taught other writing courses with interview assignments, but she says, with the iPods, she was better able to guide students through the process of interpreting interviews because the students could easily send her the audio files of the interviews. “I kept all 84 interviews [done by the students] on my iPod,” she says. “It gave me access to the raw data in a way that allowed me to better evaluate how they interpreted it.”

Students said that recording the interviews with iPods and including clips in the presentation made the project more engaging.

“It helps us make our points better,” Matt Edwards says. “But it was a hassle getting all the [audio excerpts] to length.”

“[The assignment] seems more practical because it’s a real world application,” says April Edwards, who called the interview with DeAngelis “eye opening.”

Listen to the beginning of the interview.



Listen to reflections from Columbine High School Principal Frank DeAngelis

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In this lab for “Computational Methods in Engineering,” students picked ten seconds of a favorite song, stored on their iPods, to manipulate. They adjusted the rate at which the computer takes in samples of sound, break out individual frequencies, boost and lower frequency ranges and scramble pitch and beat.

Lab instructor Professor Michael Gustafson explained why he decided to incorporate the devices into the lab. “Rather than spend any money buying signal generators, we could just use the free signal generators [i.e., the iPods] that Duke provides,” he said. Plus, he said, the music helps connect engineering principles to a familiar experience.

Sophomore Joanna Noble had done a similar lab exercise — but without the iPods — in another engineering class. “It makes a lot more sense in the context of the music,” she said.

In the lab, freshmen Corey Butler and Stesha Doku selected the song “Innocent” by rock band Our Lady Peace (listen to the clip of “Innocent” on the band’s Web site). After recording ten seconds of the song into a computer, they ran algorithms that raise or lower the strength of certain frequency ranges in the song, and then listened to how the change in frequency distribution affected the sound.

Next, Butler and Doku applied another algorithm to the original song, which switches around certain frequency ranges, effectively encrypting the song by altering it beyond recognition (listen to “Innocent” after it has been encrypted). Finally, they returned it to its original state by applying the encrypting algorithm three more times.

Butler, Doku and other students agreed the lab is more engaging using music from their own collections, than it would be using a tone generator.

You know your own music, freshman John Pura explained, so any changes to it are “readily detectable.”
In addition to learning engineering principles, students gained insight into their songs. Pura discovered in “100 Years” the lead singer of Five for Fighting “has a really, really high range.” And freshman Emmett Nicholas discovered the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Universally Speaking” “doesn’t have a really strong bassline.

And Gustafson gave the class a tip for do-it-yourself karaoke — just pick a song and filter out the frequencies in the range of the human voice.

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Lisa Huettel, assistant professor of the practice, decided to use iPods in her class because they are essentially portable hard drives. She added a small, portable sensor that attaches to the iPod. Her goal was for students to learn how to collect and then deal with real-world data in their work.

Anthony Lau and Vincent Mao get a reading on Lau’s pulse using iPods. The electrical and computer engineering majors use the iPods to collect
data.

“A primary challenge for the students is to learn to work with data collected under realistic, meaning imperfect, conditions,” Huettel said. “The students learn how to separate the signal they want, the heart beat, from sources of noise such as movement. Gathering their own data teaches the students the important lesson that signals are often not perfect.”

The first time the students worked with the iPods and sensors, they practiced by recording their resting pulse rates. In the lab that day, they got used to how the sensor worked, viewing samples on an oscilloscope, and exporting the data to a software program called Goldwave that will help them manipulate it.

In the next step, students took their iPods and sensors to the gym or the track to record their heart rates before, during and after exercising.

Using their collected data, students then started “signal conditioning.” They were interested in the heart rate data recorded, but of course the sensor picks up more than just that. The resulting sample is called “noisy” data.

Vincent Mao and Anthony Lau, both seniors, and both biomedical/electrical engineering majors, could already see what “noisy data” means.

“You can’t distinguish the beats,” he said, looking at the Goldwave image before him.

Student teams had to use software programs and their knowledge of what the data should be to clear out the extraneous data they don’t need.

The two seniors also used their iPods elsewhere. Since they are upperclassmen, they only received an iPod because of this class, and to say they are thrilled would be an understatement. Mao and Lau were both thinking about conducting an independent study project for next semester that would require an iPod.

Mao used his iPod to record lectures. Lau is used the iPod for his independent study class this semester, downloading CT images of vertebrae and carrying them around with him.

“It’s kind of like a backpack,” Lau said. “You store all your stuff on the iPod and bring it with you.”

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When exchange-student Max Kroiss reviewed the lectures on his computer or iPod, he said, “I am reassured the notes I took are correct.”

Some students used their iPods to make their own recordings of the lectures. A preliminary survey of a portion of the class by Duke’s Center for Instructional Technology indicated that approximately half the students in the class listened to a recording they, or a classmate, made.“I’ve been sick one day,” said Lara Jones, “so I sent my iPod along [to class] and someone recorded the lecture, which is really convenient.” In turn, Jones made a recording of a recent lecture for an absent classmate.

Because the lecture recordings were not meant to substitute for attending class, Leachman used a method that discourages skipping class (it’s at the early hour of 8:30 a.m.!). She didn’t post her lecture audio on the course’s Web site, which also had the graphs and diagrams presented, until a week before an exam. “Who wants to listen to fifteen hours of lecture right before an exam?” she said.

The logistics for making the recordings were simple, Leachman says. She just set her iPod on her podium and started it recording. Leachman emphasized that the iPod “is an accessory to the learning process.”

Freshman Rachel Shack agreed. She has listened to a couple recordings for review, but said, “My notes from lecture are always the most important thing I use in studying.”

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