2008 projects and presenters
The Blanton Museum
The Blanton Poetry Project
Members of the Blanton Poetry Project invited Texas writers to compose poems inspired by works of art in the museum’s permanent collection. The Blanton held a poetry reading in April, National Poetry Month. The project is also shared through the Blanton’s magazine Articulate, a promotional rack card, on wall labels in the galleries, and on the museum’s website with video of readings and additional discussion on the artists and artworks . Creators of this project are Jennifer Garner, Interim Curator of Education and Academic Affairs at the Blanton; Brian Whisenhunt, Manager of Public Programs at the Blanton; Elizabeth Lee, Interpretation Graduate Intern at the Blanton; D’Arcy Randall, writing faculty in the College of Engineering and published writer; and Kurt Heinzelman, Director of the UT Writing Center.
http://www.blantonmuseum.org/
College of Communication
Usher
The College of Communication provides services to individuals based on major categories; people, locations, resources and events. Currently, to access these categories an individual would have to have some, if not extensive, knowledge of the inner workings of the College. The purpose of this project is to provide individuals a way to browse and interact with these categories from one centralized service. Usher is a series of logic gates that based on interaction with the user (UTEID) where a series of options become available. These options are governed by the appropriate set of business logic conditions as well as FAQ type models. Developed by Andy Greer, Susan LaRonde, Mark Rogers, Charles Soto, Gerry White, Paul Williams, Chris Yandle
http://win-dev.communication.utexas.edu/usher
College of Education
Stellar Tutoring Program
The Supportive Technology for the Education of Literacy Learners and Reading (STELLAR) website offers a highly interactive environment designed to develop effective teaching skills in the area of literacy education using a tutorial setting. The guides and videos are based on an understanding of effective teaching as responsive to the interests and needs of the learner. Instruction builds from the known to the new, extending into new levels of literacy activity. James Hoffman, Melissa Mosley, Audra Roach, and Katie Russell
with David Kim, Shin Hyun Ka, and Ken Tothero.
http://www.edb.utexas.edu/visionawards/hoffman/
Legacy Cycle
The Legacy Cycle uses challenges as anchors for learning. The challenges are designed to create an increasing depth of knowledge in a specific subject, with each challenge presented as one cycle of the Legacy shell. The combination of well-designed challenges and meaningful learning activities provides a rich environment for both the students and the instructor. This project provides an web-based environment through which students can quickly and easily create and share online Legacy Cycle challenges without becoming bogged down with the technology of web-development. Dr. Anthony Petrosino
with David Kim, Shin Hyun Ka, Betsy Brown, and Ken Tothero.
http://www.edb.utexas.edu/visionawards/petrosino/
Team-Based Testing Application
Team-based learning has been shown to positively affect student engagement, achievement, and attendance across many disciplines. This project provides an online system that supports the creation and administration of both individual and team tests in a team-based learning environment. Using the system, students first take an individual test, followed by a team test that displays students’ responses on the individual test and provides immediate, item-based feedback to facilitate team building. Daniel Robinson with David Kim, and Ken Tothero.
College of Engineering
Expanding the Classroom: Mobile Technologies for Construction Education
Construction as a discipline is difficult to teach in the traditional classroom as much pedagogy concerns spatial reasoning about the layout of job sites, materials flows, work areas, etc. There is only so much one can do in the construction classroom to provide students active learning experiences. At the same time, construction projects are large, always changing, and, at least for students, inherently unsafe for much more than a field trip.
To overcome these challenges, Drs. William O'Brien and Christine Julien along with their graduate students and staff from the FIC have developed a custom software platform that runs on tablet PCs and uses sensor motes (devices that can be programmed to mimic a variety of sensors used in commercial applications). This set of hardware and software allows us to virtually recreate a jobsite in a large scale yet safe environment.
IGERT Website on Indoor Environmental Quality
Indoor environmental quality (IEQ) refers to the nature of contamination,
its sources, fate, impacts, and removal in buildings. It relates to all
buildings, including homes, schools, daycare centers, offices, restaurants,
hospitals, and more. The environmental quality of building interiors is
critical to the health of all Americans, since the U.S. population spends
approximately 18 hours inside of buildings for every one hour it spends
outdoors.
This often ignored yet increasingly important subject led Dr. Richard Corsi
(Dept. of Civil Engineering) to request the FIC to produce a website to
educate the general public in an friendly and engaging way. The FIC
incorporated Flash animations and interactivity to create a virtual home
where one could explore widely occurring indoor pollutants. The material was
researched and organized by Dr. Corsi's grad students, and also includes
short PSA videos.
Energy, Technology & Policy Student Podcasts
Cockrell School of Engineering, Faculty Innovation Center
Dr. Michael Webber, Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering,
approached the FIC to help create a new program in which students could
successfully produce a podcast from start to finish. Students in Dr.
Webber’s “Energy, Technology & Policy” course were given the option of
creating a podcast in lieu of writing a final research paper, and were
strongly encouraged to use this new media format to produce short PSAs that
focused on various energy issues. The FIC commissioned an Apple iMac to be a
“Podcast Station,” on which students could edit media with or without
supervision from FIC staff. Likewise, Apple Student Campus Representatives
played a key role during this project by helping the FIC demonstrate how to
edit audio and video during group training sessions, and were also available
for one-to-one sessions throughout the production process. Consumer software
applications iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand were prevalently used,
with additional utilization of Keynote, PowerPoint, and Windows Movie Maker.
This project was the first large-scale initiative of its kind at the
University of Texas in which students are the creators of course podcasts.
http://www.webberenergygroup.com/
http://fic.engr.utexas.edu/
College of Fine Arts
College of Fine Arts Events Calendar
Description: With the new onCampus calendar coming out we decided to rebuild our own system to add enhancements and improve workflow. We faced a number of challenges: we needed a decent CMS which we knew would be difficult to create within our current software setup, we needed to be able to integrate with other calendaring systems within and outside our college, and we needed to do all this in a timely fashion so that the old campus-wide calendar (which we were integrated with) could be retired. Using a combination of web services, Ruby on Rails, and database replication we were able to get it all working.
http://www.finearts.utexas.edu/events/
https://adams.fa.utexas.edu/intranet/
College of Natural Sciences
Quest Learning & Assessment System
Quest is a web-based learning and assessment system developed by the
College of Natural Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin.
Quest provides access to the university's highly regarded database of
60,000 questions covering chemistry, mathematics, biology, physics and
other sciences.
Using Quest, faculty can create assignments, quizzes and exams for their students from existing or newly created questions. Students can access and work the problems, submit their answers for immediate grading, view correct answers and explanations, and track their performance in their courses. Quest can automatically generate many variations from a given question, allowing each student to have a unique set of questions.
Quest was launched in January of 2008 and successfully served 6,000 UT
students during the Spring 2008 semester. Implemented using Ruby on
Rails, MySQL and TeX, Quest has processed more than 100,000 student
assignments
during its first semester of use. Starting in the Fall 2008 semester, Quest
will be available as an educational tool for UT as well as other
universities and high schools around the world.
Project Team:
Project coordinator: G. Shane Lewis
Web developer: Steve Szyszko
User interface design: Rhonda Hostetler
Content coordinator: Patsy McDonald
Server administrators: Melissa Medina-Razzaque, James Derry
Faculty advisor (mathematics): John Gilbert
Faculty advisor (chemistry): Paul McCord
Faculty advisor (biology): Sata Sathasivan
Manager: Mark Anthony Gonzalez
Associate Dean for Instructional Technology: Jeff Brumfield.
Instructor version: http://quest.cns.utexas.edu/instructor
Student version: http://quest.cns.utexas.edu/student
Information Technology Services
Stress Recess
Want to know how stress effects your mind and body? Want to learn how to deal with stress in positive and productive ways? Then come play and learn on the Stress Recess web site. Created by Allen Lambert, Jane Bost, Carol Roberts, Rachel Strain, Glenda Sims.
http://www.utexas.edu/student/cmhc/stressrecess
Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services
Law and Democracy in Latin America (Government, Liberal Arts ITS)
This CSS/HTML/PHP website and accompanying WIKI supports Professor Daniel Brinks' GOV 337 course provides a portal to explore the many challenges to the rule of law across Latin America, and their connection to democracy. Through rich media, text, and structured wiki assignments, students study the relationship between law and democracy, then look at a series of issues that illustrate the strength or weakness of the rule of law in the region.
http://www.laits.utexas.edu/its/splash_pages/lawdem.html
(Password required: contact danbrinks@gov.utexas.edu)
Aswaat Arabiyya(Middle Eastern Studies, Liberal Arts ITS)
Aswaat Arabiyya - "Arabic Voices" - is an open access web site built in CSS/HTML. It houses a custom designed FLASH video player. Professor Mahmoud Al-Batal has provided listening materials and accompanying activities intended for various levels of proficiency from Novice to Superior, selected from television stations throughout the Arab world. Each listening unit contains a segment ranging in length between one and ten minutes that can be slowed down to 80% or 60% speed without vocal distortion to aid in listening comprehension.
http://dev.laits.utexas.edu/aswaat/
eLucy (Anthropology, Liberal Arts ITS)
The eLucy website provides original digital content about the world's most famous fossil, Lucy, which dates from 3.2 million years ago. This website presents numerous digital assets managed by DASe, the Digital Archive Service developed by LAITS. It is related to a suite of rich instructional websites created by Professor John Kappelman, including www.eFossils.org and www.eSkeletons.org.
http://www.elucy.org/
Reading Between the Lines (French and Italian, Liberal Arts ITS)
This FLASH-based application allows students of Professor Marc Bizer to examine interactively five examples of French poetry. A prefatory video, produced in the LAITS multimedia studio, introduces a custom application which provides audio and textual annotations that demonstrate key literary conventions.
http://www.laits.utexas.edu/rbtl/
Texas Language Technology Center
Deutsch im Blick
Deutsch im Blick (Focus on German) is a multimedia 1st-year German language program in development, based on videos of native speakers and the UT Summer Program in Würzburg, Germany. The online textbook will include recorded vocabulary, phonetics lessons, online comparative polls, and Internet writing activities. The grammar component, Grimm Grammar, will feature zany post-modern versions of Grimm fairy tale characters. Faculty developer: Zsuzsanna Abrams
http://tltc.la.utexas.edu/dib/
Grimm Grammar
Grimm Grammar is an online German grammar reference, featuring zany post-modern Grimm's fairy tale characters, authoritative grammar explanations, self-correcting exercises, online audio, and illustrations of the residents of Schloßallee 18 – the modern day fairy tale castle home. Scheduled to be online in Spring 2008. Faculty developer: Zsuzsanna Abrams.
http://tltc.la.utexas.edu/gg/
Tá Falado
Tá Falado, as part of the Brazilpod project, provides learners of Brazilian Portuguese with podcast lessons showing pronunciation differences between Spanish and Portuguese. Podcasts are built around dialogs that illustrate specific sound differences. Users can download PDF transcripts and participate in weblog discussions for clarification of questions. Additionally, all dialogs present cultural scenarios designed to show some of the differences between the U.S. and Brazil. Faculty developer: Orlando Kelm.
http://tltc.la.utexas.edu/brazilpod/tafalado/