2011 CRLT TTI Grant Projects

Link to CRLT TTI Grant Projects 2004, [1] 2005, [2] 2006, [3] 2007, [4] 2008, [5] 2009, [6] 2010 [7]

• Mining Corpora: Students as Academic Language Investigators

  Pamela S. H. Bogart, Lecturer IV, English Language Institute/LSA

  ELI students face a particularly difficult challenge in their academic writing when it comes to selecting appropriate “collocations,” or words that pattern together in high frequency and thus “sound right" to fluent English speakers. This project facilitates student use of online “corpora” databases of real language use that are designed for language researchers and that can thus be unwieldy for language learners. The project team therefore created an online video tutorial showing students how to conduct collocation investigations based on word choices in their own writing. Students log their process and findings in a Sitemaker database, where they can also view the findings of their peers. Students reported being pleased and surprised to find a resource for discovering how words pattern in real language use. Since some student conclusions about collocations have been inaccurate, future work will focus on developing additional online tutorials to support more sophisticated searches.

• Italian Through Opera: Internalizing the Music of Poetry

  Alison Cornish, Professor, Department of Romance Languages, LSA

  The goal of this project is to make the internalization of the Italian language in its most sophisticated, powerful, and memorable forms a pleasurable conquest.  To facilitate memorization of words to music and to reinforce familiarity with grammatical forms and vocabulary, several technology-assisted strategies have been developed:

  1. Slow down music.
  2. Display key lyrics to music.  (YouTube videos)
  3. Teach students to make lip-synched videos of themselves singing.  (Photobooth)
  4. Generate exercises for self-testing. (Hot Potatoes)

  The libretto will be broken up into chunks that students will either memorize or learn to sing while reading the text; these chunks can be turned into slow versions and YouTube videos.  Students will visit the LRC to learn how to make lip synch videos. In addition, students will interact with the cultural artifact of the libretto as a site for accretion of knowledge about poetics, rhetorical effects, literary genres, and a particular historical moment (what’s happening in politics, technology, literature, art, music). To this end, the project team is preparing an online version of the libretto in layers, each of which highlights different aspects, such as meter, rhyme, verbs, vocabulary, or cultural information, which can be supplied by the students as they learn and look things up.  Students may also turn in recordings of their oral presentations about historical or cultural topics bearing on the libretto.

• Computer-Mediated Collaboration Platform for Group Decision Making in Engineering Design Projects

  Robin Fowler, Lecturer IV, Program in Technical Communication, College of Engineering

  When student teams pick from competing design options, they often pursue non-optimal strategies based on perceptions of individual team members’ competence and engagedness. This project explores whether electronic platforms commonly used by geographically dispersed industry design teams enable more democratic decision making. Transcripts of student teams making decisions in anonymous and non-anonymous online chat forums will be collected and compared with transcripts of student teams working face to face. The identification of characteristics of effective decision making will inform pedagogical strategies for guiding student design teams.

• SAC 404 Web Docs – Producing New Media for the Web

  Stashu Kybartas, Lecturer IV, Department of Screen Arts and Cultures, LSA

  In this class students will learn the fundamentals of creating short, web-specific video news packages in conjunction with journalism sites. The assignments will be designed to have students develop conceptual as well as technical skills. Keeping in mind both media convergence online and the repurposing of cinema and television in the web’s specific medium, students will explore how the web’s context reframes their own media productions. This course is intended for majors and non-majors and presumes little prior knowledge of equipment and editing software.

• MVS 510 - Introduction to Imaging of Musculoskeletal Injuries

  Mark Palmer, Assistant Professor, School of Kinesiology

  The project introduces students to a 3D image processing tool called Amira, that was developed for use in medical and health related imaging. Students will learn how to interpret X-rays, CT and MRI scans for common musculoskeletal injures, using this technology in a lab equipped with plastinated anatomical specimens and laptops.

• The Poem Comes Alive: Using Interactive Graphics to Teach Poetry and Poetics

  Benjamin Paloff, Assistant Professor, Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature, LSA

  This project will construct interactive graphic editions of poems to provide undergraduate and graduate students a new way of experiencing such fundamental poetic devices as rhythm, allusion, metaphor, analogy, and ekphrasis. While the students in my courses are keenly interested in how poems work, they frequently lack a strong grounding in poetic devises, the study of which had once been a standard feature of any literature curriculum. The goal of this project is to allow multiple ways of looking at a given poem, for example, by instantly mapping its stresses and arranging them into rhythmic patterns, playing musical examples of the same patterns, highlighing syntactic parallels hidden in the text, and revealing on-screen images and quotes referenced in the poem.  The dynamic and multimedia presentation enabled by Prezi offers students a new and inviting way of reading, a kind of "pop-up video" approach to rich literary texts.

• Video Clip Database for Introductory Psychology

  Marion Perlmutter, Professor, Psychology

  Each year, approximately 4000 students enroll in Introductory Psychology (PSY111), in which video clips are frequently used. Although instructors do share videos with each other, many are incorrectly formatted, poorly labeled, poorly edited, or poorly organized, and there is no shared database. This project will therefore 1) create a collection of high-quality, well-edited video clips appropriate for use in Introductory Psychology courses, and 2) develop a database to make these clips easily accessible and updatable by all Introductory Psychology Instructors. The project team has 1) converted DVD files to a format that can be embedded into Power Point using Handbreak, 2) edited video files using Avidemux 2.5, and 3) created a video database using iViewMedia Pro3. About 2,000 video clips requiring 80+ gigs of storage space on a personal hard drive have thus far been converted and/or edited. Future plans include continued editing of videos to shorter lengths bettter suited to lectures, transfer of the local database to the University's yet to be acquired web-based video database system, and better meta tagging of the video clips. These changes will make the video database more accessible and useful to colleagues.

• Collaborative Website for Course on Chinese Policy

  Philip B. K. Potter, Assistant Professor, School of Public Policy

  The project will develop a course website that enables international collaboration on joint research, wiki-style student interaction, and long-term archiving and publication of student-generated policy reports. This will be accomplished by adapting WordPress tools for the U-M web environment. Two students who had previously taken the class were employed to brainstorm useful features of a website built for course collaboration. A site template drawing on these ideas was designed in conjunction with TTI consultants, and the same students began drafting text for the website.

• Increasing Student Engagement by Integrating Technology into a Team-Based Learning Curriculum

  Kavita Warrier, Clinical Lecturer, Department of Pediatrics, U-M School of Medicine

  For this project, the pediatric core curriculum incorporated six team-based web modules, each of which requires two hours of class time. Created by members of the pediatric faculty, these highly interactive sessions portray real-life clinical scenarios. Because all of the students are actively answering the questions together, there is much more discussion from the start, whereas previously, students answered questions individually and then “argued” for their own response. Our research shows that students are more engaged in the classroom during these sessions as compared to didactic lecture. We are improving the modules by adding multimedia. Integrating radiographic images, laboratory results presented as they appear in patients’ charts, and video or audio clips of important physical findings will enhance these cases and highlight key clinical features.

• Thinking Like an Archivist

  Elizabeth Yakel, Associate Professor, School of Information

  Access Systems for Archival Materials is a core class in the Archives and Records Management specialization at SI. It uses technology to explore issues of process, standards, metadata transformation, and the presentation of information to diverse audiences. Instead of simply teaching to the tool, technology is used to help students “think like an archivist” as they achieve the following outcomes: 1) increased understanding of archival information content management, 2) ability to transform metadata and evaluate the results, 3) stronger critical thinking about options for archival cataloging and access for researchers, and 4) experiencing proficiency as the result of reflecting on one’s work, as well as doing it.