UIT Highlights

Designed to meet the growing interest in social computing tools, the UIT-sponsored suite of Spark tools is now delivering blogs and wikis to the Tufts University community. Faculty, students, and staff can create their own blogs, or "web logs," and collaborative wiki spaces to support a full spectrum of academic and co-curricular goals. We hope you'll give the tools a try via the Spark site, and that you'll send your feedback and tell us about the kinds of blogs and wikis you've created.

For the first time this fall, incoming students interested in pursuing Chinese or German language studies were able to take their placement exams in electronic form, including questions with rich multimedia examples embedded. The CALT (Computer-assisted Language Testing) system was developed by UIT Academic Technology, building on the QuestionMark application. Approximately seventy students participated in the placement exams on August 31, 2006, and the CALT system and its reporting tools performed seamlessly. The faculty guiding this project are Mingquan Wang from Chinese and Bernhard Martin and Saskia Stoessel from German, all in the Department of German, Russian, and Asian Languages. Based on the success of this fall's tests, the faculty hope to extend online placement testing to all language programs and to enable pre-matriculation students to take their placement tests from a distance before they arrive at Tufts.

Following on the very successful Spring 2006 pilot with George Norman in Economics, Kerri Condito in Romance Languages, and Esther Zirbel in Astronomy, UIT Academic Technology has now implemented CRS as a service available to all faculty on the Medford campus. Faculty place orders for eInstruction CRS through the Tufts Bookstore. Students purchase their clickers at the bookstore. Faculty receive an instructor's kit (base station, software, and account) from eInstruction. UIT provides faculty consultation and training. ITS provides hardware and software support. Two Physics professors, Bob Guertin and Roger Tobin, are the first to order CRS for their respective fall courses, Physics 1 with approximately 100 students and Physics 11 with approximately 200 students. For more information, contact UIT Academic Technology.

At least four faculty at the Vet School will be experimenting this fall with the Classroom Response System (CRS) in their 80-student lecture courses. Faculty members Joann Lindenmayer, Louise Maranda, Mauricio Solano, and Paul Waldau will be supported on the Grafton campus by Betsy Like, Assistant Librarian at the Loew Education Center. UIT Academic Technology will provide faculty with orientation and consultation, both tailored for the pilot faculty and again for all interested faculty at the Vet School's Mini Teaching Institute on October 19, 2006.

This academic year at least four faculty in the Department of Art & Art History will be teaching with digital images for the first time: Danny Abramson, Cristelle Baskins, Eva Hoffman, and Judith Wechsler, supported by Slide Library staff members Pam Born, Deb Griffin, and Chris Cavalier.

As the field of Art History moves from traditional practices of teaching and learning with analog slides to new practices of teaching and learning with digital images, the "Teaching and Learning Art History with Digital Images" project has provided a workflow and associated technology to support access to high-resolution digital images for presentation in Art History courses at Tufts. Partnering with the Department of Art and Art History and with the Tufts Digital Collections and Archives (DCA) group, UIT Academic Technology developed extensions to the Art History department's slide management system and to the Tufts Artifact application to enable export of digital image records from the Slide Library catalog to the central Tufts Repository and access to presentation-quality images via Artifact and other digital image discovery and dissemination services. Through this project, with support from UIT Academic Technology and Tisch Library, faculty have learned to access digital images, to develop digital image presentations, and to incorporate these presentations into lectures and seminars.

Digital image training classes were open to all Art History faculty this summer, and the curriculum that was developed by UIT will now be available to the many other program faculty and staff across the university who are also working with digital images in their departments and courses. This pilot has created a model and processes to support additional UIT-DCA projects with progams that are expressing interest in digitizing their own teaching or research collections and making those collections available through the Tufts Repository. Such programs include Anthropology, Music, The Perseus Project, the Tufts Galleries, and Visual and Critical Studies at the Museum School.

Building on the very successful Spring 2006 Phase 1 pilot with Mary Evenson and Mary Barnes, the Fall 2006 pilot will include the following Department of Occupational Therapy courses and faculty: Gary Bedell's OTS 288, Mary Evenson and Mary Barnes's OTS 234/235, and Andrea Sherwin Ripp's OTS 106, with a total of approximately 60 students. Faculty have participated actively in orientation to the OSP ePortfolio environment developed by UIT Academic Technology, as well as in discussion about how best to integrate electronic portfolios in support of their program and course curricula. Students in the three courses will learn to use the ePortfolio system over the next two weeks and will begin actively gathering artifacts of their learning, reflecting on their work, and presenting that work for review by faculty advisors. DOT's ePortfolio pilot, phase 2, is off to a strong start!

Professor Ross Feldberg is providing Biology 13 students with enhanced course lecture podcasts this term. The course podcast features lecture presentation slides synchronized with the audio of the lecture. Students subscribe to the podcast via iTunes and receive new episodes following each class session. Course podcasts will enable students to review lectures and presentation slides in preparation for upcoming exams. For more information about podcasting, contact UIT Academic Technology.