Teaching with Technology @ Tufts

This has been an exciting week for Tufts University Information Technology (UIT) as the UIT Spark suite of communication and collaboration tools was recognized as the winner of the 2007 Campus Technology Innovator - Social/Community Networking category.

Tufts was one of 338 institutions submitting nominations for the 13 categories in the competition. You can read a case study about Spark in the August issue of Campus Technology.. Students, faculty, staff and others in the Tufts community can currently create blogs, wikis, or asynchronous discussions with Spark, as well as syndicating podcasts from the site.

I wanted to share with you this very interesting article about Purdue University's and the National Science Foundations's nanoHUB site, an online portal for nanotechnology researchers, instructors, and students created by Purdue University and the NSF.

This "authentic learning case study" is an EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) white paper published in early August. This is an amazing virtual toolkit where students and faculty contribute to the science of nanotechnology and perform experiments without downloading software. But more than that, I felt it was a great article that shows how a project that started out as a collaboration and research tool serving faculty has now also developed into a robust teaching and learning site as well.

The National Science Foundation, the Public Library of Science, and the San Diego Supercomputing Center have collaborated to support a site that is being billed as a "You Tube for Scientists" - SciVee.

SciVee's goal is the "widespread dissemination and comprehension of science." To reach this goal, scientists are invited to upload a video and synchronize it to their research papers. They can also publish podcasts, jand oin a disciplinary communities of scientists.

From their About page:

"SciVee allows scientists to communicate their work as a multimedia presentation incorporated with the content of their published article. Other scientists can freely view uploaded presentations and engage in virtual discussions with the author and other viewers. SciVee also facilitates the creation of communities around specific articles and keywords. Use this medium to meet peers and future collaborators that share your particular research interests."

Fluid is a worldwide collaborative project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to "to address the values of usability, accessibility, internationalization, quality assurance and security within academic software projects."

Members are from the Sakai, uPortal, Moodle, and Kuali Student communities and their goal is to "help improve the user experience of community source web applications."

This is a project that is well worth watching as it is sometimes difficult in academic software projects to truly involve potential users in an iterative software design process beyond basic user testing. This project hopes to "help address the diverse needs represented within education, including needs related to ability, language, culture, discipline and institutional conventions."

To help achieve and disseminate this goal, the Fluid team is developing and will freely distribute a library of sharable customizable user interfaces "designed to improve the user experience of web applications."