UIT Highlights

Associate Dean Joe McManus of the Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine is using the internet telephony software Skype to provide an extremely portable and inexpensive method for allowing off-campus guest instructors to "dial in" to his Vet school classes. Using Skype with a laptop computer, speakers, microphone, and remote application sharing software, the instructor is able to move through presentation slides, speak to the class, and also field questions from students. This simple solution has proven valuable as a way to connect students, faculty, and outside presenters.

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.

Pearl Robinson will be leading a group of Africa in the New World (ANW) students to Ghana this winter. She was interested in enabling the students to store and reflect on their writing and experiences on the trip. UIT Academic Technology has provided training to the students on the use of the E-Portfolio repository to facilitate their storing and sharing of materials.

Tufts geographic information system (GIS) specialists Patrick Florance and Barbara Parmenter led a seminar in the uses of GIS for humanitarian relief operations. The seminar was for students in the Humanitarian Studies and Field Practice Certificate Program, an inter-university initiative offered by the Fletcher School and the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts, the Harvard School of Public Health, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (http://www.humanitarianstudies.org/). Students learned about data sources and spatial analysis options using examples from Darfur, Iraq, and the portions of the Indian Ocean affected by the 2005 tsunami. Twenty-five students, many of them with substantial existing experience in relief efforts, attended the seminar, which came at the request of Peter Walker, Director of the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University. The Tufts GIS Team will continue to work with the certificate program as the students prepare for a spring field exercise simulating a rapid assessment of a disaster zone.

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)

With the help of UIT interactive media designers and the SparkBlogs tool, Professor David Locke and his Kiniwe West African Music and Dance Ensemble students will be journaling their trip to Ghana in January of 2007. Follow their journey on the Kiniwe blog.

Members of the Boston Colllege / Tufts University Massachusetts Health Passport research team learned the basics of geographic information systems (GIS) in a recent workshop. Tufts researchers, led by Professor Fran Jacobs (Child Development / Urban and Environmental Policy), are working with the Juvenile Rights Advocacy Project at Boston College, to evaluate programs aimed at improving access to community health services by teens in the juvenile justice system. The initial project area is Boston, but the team will soon be adding several other Massachusetts cities to the evaluation. Geographic information technology may be used to understand neighborhood context and patterns of health care uses, preferences, and impediments, as well as mapping of community assets. Tufts GIS specialists will continue to help the Passport project in the coming months in spatial database design and geocoding.