Blackboard is changing! Learn what’s new and how it might impact you! Blackboard is being upgraded from version 6.3 to version 8 during May 7 - May 10. On May 11 we will have an upgraded version of Blackboard. Learn about the most important changes and what you need to know to be prepared.
Lucy Haagen, Program in Education
This session will provide an introduction and overview to the m-learning - that is, teaching and learning using cell phones and/or other mobile devices. Haagen will draw on examples from her experiences working first in Durham (with Duke students and Southern High School students) and then in Vietnam (with Duke students and students in Hanoi schools).
Julie Reynolds, Biology
One of the most significant challenges of working with student writers is communicating the subtleties of how their writing is perceived and understood by readers. In this presentation, I will demonstrate some of the ways in which I have tried to address this challenge. I will demonstrate our use of FlipVideos to record interviews of faculty discussing what makes an honors thesis exceptional, and I will discuss how we used these videos in class to deepen our understanding of readers’ expectations. I will also demonstrate how we used the software Voicethreads and Jing to respond to student writing, and describe how these technologies gave reviewers an efficient way to explain some of the nuances of their comments. Finally, I will present preliminary results of a study in which I examine the effectiveness of these technologies at improving students’ understanding of the feedback offered by faculty and peer reviewers.
Victoria Szabo, ISIS
With support from a CIT Strategic Initiative grant, this Spring students in the Undergraduate Certificate Capstone for the Information Science + Information Studies Program put together a multimedia mapping toolkit to be used by DukeEngage students, the WISER program, and Global Health researchers in Muhuru Bay, Kenya beginning in Summer 2009. Students researched and tested GPS-enabled cameras and trackers, developed map development templates for Google Earth layers, documented best practices for research activities and media capture projects, explored information visualization strategies to combine top-down data with bottom-up observations, created an infrastructure back end for content management, and built a prototype for the location-based, media rich mapping environment based on Duke campus and the surrounding community. DukeEngage students traveling to Kenya will use the toolkit this summer, and then continue their work with the content when they return, developing maps as research and discovery tools and creating new resources for the Muhuru Bay community. We plan to make this a multi-year project into which students from various backgrounds and with various skillsets can participate. The project itself is part of a larger ongoing mapping and hybrid world theme within the ISIS program and the broader interdisciplinary Visual Studies Initiative at Duke.
