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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).

PowerPoint: Less is More

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.

With federal initiatives pushing health information technologies (HIT) into a reluctant health care system, decision-makers in health care find themselves without research and evidence that defines best practices. A March 2008 PubMed search yielded approximately 150,000 hits; this illustrates a problem for decision makers trying to sift through evidence for HIT results. A problem exists in that it has historically taken about seventeen years for health care to implement research findings into practice. It is imperative that we find more rapid methods of evidence/knowledge development, dissemination, and adoption if we are to leverage HIT to accomplish needed improvements for safety, cost, and quality in patient care. This project involved students in evaluation of four “netbook” products and then provided online nursing informatics graduate students (n=11) with an Asus ee. The devices were supposed to help them critique, summarize, and disseminate available HIT studies and evidence reports. We utilized mobile technologies and remote (virtual) teamwork that enabled both synchronous (Skype.com) and asynchronous (Blackboard) collaboration. Some students are using their netbook, but for mobile productivity purposes rather than the project goals and most students found the device too slow for efficient web access. There are newer Asus netbooks that may be faster.

Evaluation tool

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What are the possible educational advantages and/or disadvantages of teaching in a MUVE (multi-user virtual environment)? While not trying to answer such a broad question, this presentation will discuss a hands-on exploration of the educational potentials of “Second Life” in enhancing foreign language learning. The aim of the project, that took place over two consecutive semesters, was both to appeal to students’ familiarity with virtual social networks and to make them come into contact with virtual cultural resources and artifacts and with native speakers met in the “Second Life”. Works and responses by students will be presented to discuss how and to what extent activities and assignments to be completed in a MUVE could (or could not) enrich language learning and whether the outcome was worth the time and energy needed in the endeavor.

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We have built a Second Life® infrastructure that allows faculty and students experiential learning and promotes social interaction, in a collaborative environment in our distance education program. It furthermore supports immersion and presence, allowing real-time teaching and discussion. In the School of Nursing, the use of virtual environments for distance education has been piloted for one year. We built a virtual School of Nursing using Second Life as the infrastructure. A Summer theory course was taught using this medium as well as Blackboard and Elluminate (a webinar). A self-administered survey instrument was completed by students following each of the three instructional modalities (Blackboard, Elluminate, and Second Life). The survey instrument included perceptions of learning from a variety of components of the instructional technology, such as pace of class, quality of discussions, integration of technology, and fit between assignments and classroom environment. Significant differences occurred in both overall perceptions of the effect of the instructional modality on individual learning, as well as of the quality of instruction provided to understand the fit between instructional modality and coursework. Student rated experience of Second Life was significantly higher than that of Blackboard for both overall perceptions and quality of instruction (post-hoc Tukey; p<.10). Evaluative feedback from the students suggests that 3D learning environments have the potential to bridge barriers such as isolation, foster interactivity, clarify information, support spontaneous discussions, and facilitate learning experiences.

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Richard Lucic, ISIS and Computer Science

Virtual Peace: Turning Swords to Ploughshares brings together digital learning technologies and international humanitarian assistance efforts. Students and educators enter an immersive, multi-sensory game-based environment that simulates real disaster relief and conflict resolution conditions in order to learn first-hand the necessary tools for sensitive and timely crisis response.

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Visit the Virtual Peace website

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.