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.

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
ISIS (Information Science + Information Studies) explored Second Life for teaching and learning. Students studied virtual worlds as social phenomena and “texts” as well as technical aspects like 3d modeling, scripting, and virtual space design. Projects included: construction of a student project gallery and virtual labyrinth for the ISIS Focus cluster; research assignments in Gender and Digital Culture; developing virtual world content in ISIS 140 and 240; a “getting started” script garden; a Next Newsroom prototype, and a virtual economics experiment (co-funded by VSI).

ISIS is currently consulting with faculty in several departments: in Education, to create the English Café, in Nursing, to provide an online classroom environment; in Writing, to launch a Virtual Writing Center and with the Office of Institutional Equity to launch a virtual diversity training center. In addition, ISIS explored Croquet, Qwaq, and Project Wonderland to assess appropriate applications.

“We came into this project with some experience with Second Life, but also with the broader goal of understanding how virtual world environments can benefit our curriculum as well as be a rewarding object of inquiry. Second Life’s strengths are in its sociability, the ease in getting started, and the support resources available for it. Its limits are in house-only tool, the time it takes for users to get up to speed for construction activities and scripting (as opposed to just participating), and the challenges in integrating it into other systems.”

–Victoria Szabo

Find out more about these virtual world explorations, consider using Second Life in your class,  or learn how to get started with Second Life.

Project start date: 5/4/2007
Funding awarded: $ 2,500

More information:
Focus Cluster on Virtual Realities
Course descriptions
Project wiki
Second Life at Duke

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Project Description

This project will create an effective molecular model of drug action to engage students and teach basic chemical and biological principles, like oxidation, enzyme action, and genetic polymorphisms. An interdisciplinary team of students in Pharmacology 197 and 198 (Research Independent Study in Science Education, Fall 2007 and Spring 2008) has selected, planned, and created a three dimensional, interactive, immersive animation of molecules interacting. In the Duke immersive Visualization Environment (DiVE), students can see and manipulate the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase as it binds to NAD+ and alcohol molecules to oxidize alcohol. Over the summer of 2008, student Marcel Yang is perfecting the model, with input from students in the Duke University Talent Identification Program (Duke TIP) and LEAP (Launch into Education About Pharmacology, a science enrichment program for rising 10th & 11th grade students) program.

During the Fall of 2008, another team member, Dave McMullen, will test whether freshman chemistry student learning of basic concepts is enhanced when exposed to the interactive model either in the DiVE or on a flat screen, compared to the “textbook” style of content delivery.

When this project is completed, it will be entered into the NSF Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.

photo credit:  Les Todd

Project start date: 5/4/2007
Funding awarded: $ 6,500

Additional information:

Duke University Visualization Technology Group

RISE (Raising Interest in Science Education)

Other projects by Pharmacology 150

Duke Center for Science Education

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Project description

To introduce authentic research methods and give students practice in research, students in the Methods Primate Field Ecology course used three Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking collars to track primates at the Duke University Lemur Center. Combining these data with Google Earth would illustrate the lemur’s use of three-dimensional space.

The GPS collars were placed on three lemurs at the Duke Lemur Center during the Fall 2007 semester, but none of the collars functioned and no data was collected. Replacement collars are expected. This authentic research experience allowed students to gain first hand experience in the challenges of field work and cutting edge technology. When the tracking collars are replaced, other students will participate in this research experience. Below, lemurs with tracking collars.

Project start date: 5/4/2007
Funding awarded: $3,200

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