UIT Highlights

The Fletcher Women's Network and the Global Women student group announce the launch of their new website and on-line community. The website is public: http://fwn.uit.tufts.edu, but access to the community network is limited to to Fletcher Alumnae and members of Global Women.

The interactive site makes it easy and fun for Fletcher women to meet and communicate with each other from all corners of the globe. Members can quickly learn more about one another, identify alumnae with similar professional interests, post information about social events, informally explore mentoring possibilities (not only between students and alumnae, but also among alumnae), and engage in online discussions.

The site is the result of the sustained collaborative efforts of alumnae, students, and staff from the Fletcher School and staff from UIT Academic Technology.

Each year the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research (ECAR) conducts a national survey on undergraduate students’ use of information technology. UIT Academic Technology was very pleased to coordinate with the Undergraduate Deans’ Offices and the Office for Institutional Research in the spring of 2007 to administer The ECAR Survey of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology here at Tufts University for the first time. Tufts’ participation in the study lends value to the overall research study, which includes data from more than 27,000 students at 103 institutions, and our participation provides us with baseline data about how Tufts undergraduates use information technology as compared with their peers nationally.

Our report includes comprehensive comparisons of Tufts student responses with the ECAR four-year institution averages, as well as an overview that highlights notable findings in the Tufts responses. Download PDF from UIT Academic Technology Library.

The VUE team is pleased to announce the release of VUE 2.1 (the Visual Understanding Environment) VUE 2.1 represents a significant evolution of VUE’s pathways metaphor resulting in new set of tools for visualizing maps and creating nonlinear presentations. The purpose of this functionality is to provide VUE map authors with additional tools for communicating the information and ideas contained within their VUE content maps. VUE 2.1 also introduces new semantic tools for analyzing a collection of maps and for creating new maps based on predefined ontologies. Visit the User Guide section to view short video clips highlighting these new features.

Jointly sponsored by University Information Technology (UIT) and the Information Technology Committee in Arts & Sciences and Engineering, the Faculty Information Technology Liaison Program has been designed to provide robust conduits of communication among IT representatives from UIT, faculty liaisons from academic departments within A&S and Engineering, and the Information Technology Committee. For more information about the program, please visit the program site at http://go.tufts.edu/itliaison.

UIT Academic Technology has participated in two successful "Innovations in Education" grant proposals and in the implementation of the two projects, which are supported by the Office of Educational Affairs at the Medical School. The first project, proposed initially by Ruth Palombo and carried through by Libby Bradshaw in Public Health, focuses on developing interactive case studies for a variety of critical topics across the public health curriculum. UIT provided instructional design, educational technology, and project management consultation and models at the conception stages and in the early development of the project. The second project, proposed by Ralph Aarons, focuses on integration of classroom/audience response into the Medical School curriculum. In addition to the face-to-face faculty development opportunities that Dr. Aarons will facilitate in collaboration with UIT Academic Technology, he has also worked with UIT to create a wiki-based community of practice site for faculty across Tufts University who are already teaching, or who are interested in teaching, with clickers. The site will feature video exemplars of Tufts faculty and students using clickers to meet particular teaching and learning goals, research and presentations on effective instructional practices, and a blog by Dr. Aarons to inform and inspire.

UIT Academic Technology partnered with David Locke, ethnomusicology professor in the Department of Music, to design the Dagomba Dance Drumming site to present Professor Locke's research materials as an interactive learning resource for students in spring 2008 and beyond. The site includes audio examples, musical notation, and a custom-designed audio mixer to help students discern the contributions of different drums to the collective sounds. Students have provided rich feedback on the design and usefulness of the site at critical junctures in its development, and their input continues to inform the site itself and the ways that the interactive resources are integrated into Professor Locke's courses. In parallel with the creation of the wiki-based site, Professor Locke is working with the Digital Collections and Archives group at Tufts to prepare his research collection for inclusion in the Tufts Digital Repository. The Dagomba Dance Drumming site will then link directly to the multimedia collection resources in the Repository.

UIT provided technology consultation and support for the Harmony in the Age of Noise project led by Professor David Guss, poet and chair of the Department of Anthropology. Guss worked with sculptor Mark McNamara and media artist Michael Luck Schneider on this project, which involves the collaborative contributions of more than 80 undergraduate and graduate students, as well as professors and staff, at Tufts University. The project includes both a Sound Dial Gazebo installation on the roof of Tisch Library with real-time audio/video feed and a rich media web site to engage the community in "human interaction and thoughtful listening." UIT's contributions included the rapid deployment of a reliable wireless Internet connection on the Tisch
Library roof, the provisioning of dedicated streaming media services for the Sound Dial and for the Internet audience, and the hosting of Harmony's public Web site in production.

UIT Academic Technology partnered with Justin Hollander, faculty member in UEPP, on a Second Life-based course project. In their Second Life Island, students modeled new designs for the Forest Hills neighborhood, which was up for redevelopment. Neal Hirsig from Information Technology Services (ITS) provided 3D modeling assistance for the students. To view the project, create an avatar for yourself at Second Life and search for the island called "UEPP Tufts."

Confluence's ThemeBuilder plugin allows users to quickly and easily customize the design of spark wikis.

A few examples of wiki designs:

The UIT Encyclopedia for Teaching and Learning

The Faculty Information Technology Liaison Program

Erin Phelps' resources for Data Analysis and Statistics

The GIS Teaching Alliance

We are happy to announce a new web site that provides the Tufts community with a comprehensive guide to all GIS related resources available at the university.

UIT staff contributors to this project:

Design and implementation: Ilene Chen
Technical consultant: David Grogan
Content and guidance: Patrick Florance

The 5th UIT Academic Technology Summer Institute for Teaching and Learning with Technology is looking for faculty to apply for this year's event. This seemed like a good time to look at how previous Summer Institutes impacted participating faculty's teaching.

Susan Setnik, Lecturer in the Classics Department, attended the first Summer Institute in May 2003. Here she learned about innovative ways to use the discussion tool in Blackboard and became intrigued about using some of these strategies in her Latin classes. By the 2004 University Conference on Teaching and Learning, she was sharing her experience with her Latin 3 class. Susan reported that the use of strategic discussion assignments, especially at the beginning of the semester, resulted in participation from all students and the forming of a community of learners earlier than she had previously experienced. This seemed especially important for students who were reticent speakers.

When Ross Feldberg, Professor in the biology department, attended the 2004 Summer Institute, he had no idea that one of the presenters at the Institute would spark his interest in trying the anti-plagiarism software Turnitin. After hearing about the tool, Ross asked to pilot the tool with his biology students. UIT Academic Technology sponsored this pilot in the 2004-05 academic year and then expanded the pilot to others in the department. The tool was very helpful in the laboratory sections of Bio13L, a large introductory biology course with 13 separate lab sections taught by different lab instructors. Ross and other biology faculty members' experience was so positive that all Arts, Sciences and Engineering faculty in the 2006-07 academic year now have access to Turnitin.

If you are interested in applying for this year's Summer Institute, application forms are available on the UIT Academic Technology Faculty Development page or by contacting Rebecca Sholes, Faculty Development Coordinator, at rebecca.sholes@tufts.edu by February 1.

Landsat satellite imagery shows part of the Sumatran coast pre- and post-tsunami impact.
Images from NASA.Image Archive 2006 (http://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/archive/e0003.html)

The interdisciplinary nature of the Water: Systems, Science, and Society program, which brings together instructors and students from the geographically separated Tufts campuses, prompted Professor Paul Kirshen to call UIT's Academic Technology department to help him research and implement a low-cost, portable web conferencing solution.

Adobe's Connect product met his needs by providing many-to-many video and audio conferencing. The software also has built-in application sharing to allow presentation materials to be shared amongst the various conference sites.