Nicholas Gessler, Information Science & Information Studies
What if you could create your own world, which followed your own rules, a world with agents whose perceptions and behaviors you designed, who lived in environments that you constructed? What if you could put evolution to work inside that world? How would that society change through time? In ISIS (Information Science & Information Studies) 72, in LINK Classroom #6, and as part of the Visual Studies Initiative at Duke, we do just that. We build highly interactive, visually compelling computer simulations that introduce participants to the philosophies and practices of the emerging “New Sciences of Complexity” and “Evolutionary Computation.” Most students began with no previous programming and yet all of them have fashioned creative and imaginative experimental worlds relevant to the biological and social sciences, the humanities and arts. Come see what we have done and where we’re going next.
Leonard White, Duke Institute for Brain Sciences
Many of our learners hold in their hands extraordinarily powerful learning platforms. Although initially 
conceived as entertainment and communication devices, hand-held digital technology provides learners with mobile, real-time access to a world of information. How can such devices be configured to provide a rich learning environment with both durable and digital resources in hand? How can educators maximize the impact of hand-held technology to facilitate discovery? Can these goals be accomplished without undermining important pedagogical values, such as autonomy, responsibility and community? What is the significance of mobile learning? This session will focus on the experience of one faculty’s efforts to keep pace with the dynamic learning strategies that characterize our educational environment. Participants will discuss these and other important questions that surround the use of hand-held technology as vehicles for mobile learning. Disclaimer: the speaker will showcase Sylvius MR Atlas of the Human Brain (Modality, Inc.), which is an “app” for Apple’s iPhone and iPod-touch devices co-authored by the speaker (visit iTune’s App Store and search “Sylvius”). A brief tour of Sylvius MR will provide the means for raising questions and engaging in discussion aimed at understanding how hand-held platforms for mobile learning are revolutionizing the digital learning environment.
Alexander Glass, Earth and Ocean Sciences, Nicholas School of the Environment
Despite innovations in remote sensing technology, on-site geological field work remains essential to mineral and petroleum exploration. Hence, relevant introductions to the earth sciences should allow students to learn and apply basic field skills and mapping technology. Unfortunately, large lecture-style introductory courses do not lend themselves easily to individual-based field work. In addition, many earth science programs have access to only limited local outcrop exposures, often of rocks with little structural complexity. The exercise presented here was designed as an assignment for students in EOS 11: Dynamic Earth (>120 students). It was facilitated in groups of ten students at a time over the course of a week. Wooden data stations (~60) and rock samples stand in for exposures (”virtual outcrops”). Students used hand-held GPS units to map the station’s distributions across the Duke campus and their spatial orientation relative to one another. Each data station provides information on the rock type and orientation (strike and dip) of the local “virtual” strata. Using this information, students constructed a geological map and cross-section through the Duke campus. The exercise not only teaches applied mapping, GPS, and data collection skills, but also requires students to critically evaluate inference making, scientific uncertainty, and hypothesis testing.
Jennifer Kim, Undergraduate Student
What makes some blogs successful and others not? Class blogging is a cool idea but often does not work. Students view it as a chore and students stop blogging when there is no response and the blog is not seen as relevant. On the other hand, there are successful and enjoyable class blogs. Jennifer will share her student perspective and talk about factors that keep students engaged, so that faculty can successfully use blogs in the classroom.
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PDF of presentation
Hugh Crumley, CIT and Graduate School
The mobile furniture in the Link classrooms allows instructors to easily reconfigure classroom spaces to facilitate different kinds of student activities. In this brief presentation, you can see a number of different arrangements and talk with other instructors about how to take advantage of this flexibility.
Peter Haff, Nicholas School of the Environment
Use of Google Earth as a tool for integrating class field trip experience by combining and displaying sequential geographic, photographic, and textual information.
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.
Linda Goodwin, School of Nursing
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.
Constance Johnson, School of Nursing
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.
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.
