ARTstor is a digital library of more than one million images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences with a set of tools to view, present, and manage images for research and pedagogical purposes.

Statement of the problem or issue

Librarians and Educational technologists at MIT are currently engaged with faculty, researchers and students to learn about how they find, use and think about images in their research, scholarly publishing and teaching.  Using images in educational settings takes different forms, but common themes heard from this audience are:

• Where can I find high resolution images with authoritative metadata?
• What are the best ways to search for images?
• Can I manage all of my images in one place?
• How can achieve seamless access to images across the institution?

ARTstor, among other tools, addresses these common issues.

Description of activity, project, solution, and outcome

In the ARTstor booth we will present live demos of ARTstor, highlighting the vast trove of images making specific points about the range of disciplines that ARTstor supports.  Additionally, we will demonstrate the other functionalities offered through ARTstor:  sharing images across the institution and beyond, building image presentations, uploading personal images, creating groups that can interoperate with Stellar, using QTVR images. A desired outcome would be to make contacts with potential faculty and students who may not be aware of the services and collections that focus on images.  If more instruction is needed, a signup sheet at the table would facilitate future contact.

Importance or relevance to other faculty, staff, students, departments, and programs

The ARTstor Digital Library demonstrates a model of shared collections that is emerging in response to changed user patterns and needs.  Instead of individual collections at each institution, shared collections among many institutions with multiple contributors is now possible.  ARTstor plays a key role.  Copyright, Fair Use and Public Domain are also important concepts to decode for users of images.  Making faculty, staff, and students aware of the changing imaging landscape is one desired outcome of the ARTstor table.

Jolene de Verges, Rotch Library of Architecture and PlanningPeter Wilkins, OEIT| ACCORD Image Tools team(Presented at MIT Educational Technology Fair 2009)

Topic Area(s)

2. Finding and integrating digital content into the curriculum

VUE (Visual Understanding Environment), an Open Source project based at Tufts University, can help students, faculty and anyone who works with digital content, make sense of information and data using VUE’s flexible visualization, annotation and presentation tools.

VUE Website

Statement of the problem or issue

High-quality digital content is readily available on the Web and in digital repositories, but few tools exist to organize and contextualize information and to help transform it into knowledge.  In addition, data from RSS feeds and CSV files can also benefit from a visual analysis. VUE can provide a visual and non-linear environment to analyze and present digital content.

Description of activity, project, solution, and outcome

This session will focus on how VUE (the Visual Understanding Environment) can be used as a single interface to search multiple repositories and to organize and present digital content to support teaching, learning and research. Some of VUE’s newest features include the ability to import Zotero citations into VUE and to look at the data in a non-linear and visual way. Data can also be imported from CSV files and RSS feeds.

Importance or relevance to other faculty, staff, students, departments, and programs

VUE has been used successfully by multi-disciplinary teams as a common platform to investigate complex problems, such as the intersection of human, animal and environmental health or global water issues and diplomacy.  With its concept mapping interface and image support, VUE can provide a rich environment for seeing and creating connections in a number of disciplines, including health sciences, computer science, theology and art history.

Melanie St.James, Senior Interactive Media Designer
Anoop Kumar, Information Systems Architect
Academic Technology, Tufts University
(Presented at MIT Educational Technology Fair 2009)

Topic Area(s)

2. Finding and integrating digital content into the curriculum
4. Incorporating visualizations and simulations to deepen student understanding
5. Open educational tools and resources
6. Promoting cross-departmental collaborations

HyperStudio – Laboratory for Digital Humanities explores the potential of new media technologies for the enhancement of education and research in the humanities. A range of projects in the humanities and social sciences along with on-line tools for education and research will be presented.

HyperStudio website

Statement of the problem or issue

How can new digital media and collaboration technologies foster new modes of teaching, learning and research?

Description of activity, project, solution, and outcome

Projects ranging from cross-cultural understanding, diplomatic history, serial novels, and French theater will be shown.

Importance or relevance to other faculty, staff, students, departments, and programs

All HyperStudio tools for education and research are developed as modular open-source components that can be reused and adapted for a range of different topics and fields. The underlying repertoire platform – modular in itself – will be made open-source in the near future.

Kurt Fendt (HyperStudio, CMS, FL&L, SHASS)
Stephanie Stewart (HyperStudio)
Brett Barros (HyperStudio)
Dave Della Costa (HyperStudio)

(Presented at MIT Educational Technology Fair 2009)

Topic Area(s)

2. Finding and integrating digital content into the curriculum
3. Supporting global learning experiences
4. Incorporating visualizations and simulations to deepen student understanding
5. Open educational tools and resources

Modeling Applied to Problem Solving

Modeling[1] Applied to Problem Solving (MAPS) is a pedagogy that helps students transfer instruction to problem solving in an expert-like manner.  Declarative and Procedural syllabus content is organized and learned as a hierarchy of General Models.  Students solve problems using an explicit Problem Modeling Rubric that begins with System, Interactions and Model (S.I.M.).  System and Interactions are  emphasized as the key to a strategic description of the system and the identification of  the appropriate General Model to apply to the problem.  We have shown dramatic gains on test scores using this pedagogy in a 3-week review course over IAP.

1.  M. Wells, D. Hestenes, and G. Swakhamer, “A Modeling Method for High School Physics Instruction”, Am. J. Phys. 63, 606-619 (1995).

Addressing the Textbook’s Shortcomings with a WikiTextBook

This e-Book will enable a shift in the role of the printed textbook[1] from authoritative serial repository to a modular, customizable, linkable, interactive hub that provides a clear overview of the domain, short summaries of key content, links to more detailed online resources and embedded self-assessment.  It will be improved by student feedback.  Our open-source wiki for introductory mechanics uses ideas from modeling physics to encourage strategic, concept-based problem solving. We invite collaborators writing textbooks in other domains to help us reinvent the textbook!

[1] P. Bierman, “Initial Workshop Summary”, NSF Workshop Reconsidering the Textbook, May 24-26, 2006 (National Academy of Sciences, WA).

Statement of the problem or issue

We address the central mismatch in teaching introductory physics by combining pedagogy and a textbook taking advantage of electronic format.  This is a cognitive mismatch: textbooks present mostly factual and conceptual knowledge and some procedural knowledge — but strategic knowledge, the ability to determine which factual and procedural knowledge is relevant to a new problem, is lacking.

Description of activity, project, solution, and outcome

We will concentrate on the development of the possibilities of an all electronic textbook to interact with students’ minds in new ways and especially to use an improved pedagogy.

Importance or relevance to other faculty, staff, students, departments, and programs

We seek collaborators who are interested in writing their own textbook to help develop an electronic textbook environment that will work across disciplines. Dave Pritchard, Physics Dept., MIT
Andrew Pawl, Physics Dept. MIT
Analia Barrantes, ESG and Physics Dept.
Saif Rayyan, RLE
(Presented at MIT Educational Technology Fair 2009)

Topic Area(s)

2.  Finding and integrating digital content into the curriculum
7.  Others: Perfecting an Online Textbook Environment

A la rencontre de Philippe is an original interactive fiction filmed in Paris, in which learners of French interact with the main character and try to help him solve his many problems. Philippe has just broken up with his live-in girlfriend and the student’s main task (among others) is to find him a place to live.

Statement of the problem or issue

Watching a foreign language film is not necessarily very motivating and is often difficult, since students are exposed to authentic language that may be difficult to comprehend and to a foreign culture that may be quite opaque to them. Students are very much on the outside, looking inside (into another language, another place, another culture). Students often tend to tune out or stay on the surface.

Description of activity, project, solution, and outcome

A la rencontre de Philippe allows students to take center stage, as the interactive story branches out in different ways, depending upon what they do, which in turn depends on what they understand. This highly motivates students.

This program also offers a unique and fundamentally different approach to language learning: it first immerses the user in a linguistically and culturally authentic world and then provides them with different sets of tools: tools to understand what people are saying, such as the ability to stop the video on demand, repeat segments, access key words, a transcription, and tools that allow them to take an active role within the story, such as: a map of Paris, an answering machine, a newspaper, a phone, that enable them to experience life in Paris first hand.

Importance or relevance to other faculty, staff, students, departments, and programs

A la Rencontre de Philippe is a language learning interactive story that touches on broader issues of: design, interactivity, simulation, motivation and pedagogy. As such it could be of relevance to everyone who is interested in any of those areas.

Gilberte Furstenberg, Senior Lecturer in French, Foreign Languages and Literatures

Sabine Levet, Senior Lecturer in French, Foreign Languages and Literatures

(Presented at MIT Educational Technology Fair 2009)

Topic Area(s)

4. Incorporating visualizations and simulations to deepen student understanding

Cultura is a Web-based, intercultural project, started at MIT in 1997 thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It connects MIT students taking a French class with students in France taking an English class for the duration of a semester. Its goal is to help students understand the values, attitudes, beliefs and concepts inherent in each other’s culture.

Cultura has since been adopted by other institutions and adapted to many other languages and cultures connecting students in the US and sch countries as China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Philippines, Russia, Samoa and Spain.

Cultura website

Statement of the problem or issue

In a traditional language class, most students spend their time learning how to speak the language, but  the culture inherent to the language is often left at the periphery or dealt with at a superficial level. Cultura is an attempt to reverse the equation and make culture the main focus of an intermediate language class.

The goal of Cultura is to develop and support a new methodology for learning about another culture, with American and foreign students constructing together a better understanding of each other’s culture. It is built upon an interactive process that involves interactions with multiple materials – raw or mediated – and peer to-peer interactions.

Description of activity, project, solution, and outcome

Sharing a common website, students at MIT and in France compare materials from their respective cultures and exchange their observations in online forums, to try and understand the origin of the differences they have discovered.  In the process of comparing these different materials (ex: their own answers to a series of intercultural questionnaires; national surveys and statistics; French films and their American remakes; French and American media as well as literary and historical texts; and images or videos that students upload themselves on the site) students explore, for instance: what individualism, freedom, success, rudeness may mean in their respective cultures; issues of formality vs informality; the different modes of interactions between people in different contexts; etc.

Importance or relevance to other faculty, staff, students, departments, and programs

Cultura is an initiative that provides a concrete illustration of how in-depth intercultural understanding can be developed. Even though it takes place within a language class, it can be of interest to any department and program that emphasizes the need for students to be able to communicate more effectively across cultures.

It perfectly fits into the overall MIT global initiatives.

Sabine Levet, Senior Lecturer in French, Foreign Languages and Literatures
Gilberte Furstenberg, Senior Lecturer in French, Foreign Languages and Literatures

(Presented at MIT Educational Technology Fair 2009)

Topic Area(s)

3. Supporting global learning experiences

Educators teamed up with visual artists to create a series of 3D interactive animations of human motion in microgravity, which now enable students to learn core curriculum concepts, such as conservation of angular momentum, through latest findings from astronautics research at MIT.

Description
Poster

Description of activity, project, solution, and outcome

In this joint project of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Office of Educational Innovation and Technology, researchers collaborated with visual artists to create three-dimensional visualizations of astronaut motion in microgravity. Through the graphical user interface, which is implemented in X3D, students can interactively explore how astronauts rotate in a microgravity environment without using any external torques, i.e. without contact from the surroundings. These rotations are simulated with results from recent research in astronautics using mathematical algorithms that implement core curriculum concepts, such as conservation of angular momentum. The computer character, which was modeled and texture-mapped in Maya®, wears a next generation astronaut space suit which MIT researchers develop for NASA.

Importance or relevance to other faculty, staff, students, departments, and programs

The astronaut visualizations, which illustrate a fundamental physics law, conservation of angular momentum, can be used in undergraduate Physics and engineering subjects. The implementation, to the best of our knowledge, is the first MIT application of X3D, which is the ISO standard for distribution of real-time 3D graphics on the web. With X3D we can potentially create teaching materials that include real-time, interactive, 3D graphics for subjects in any discipline.

Prof. Dava Newman, Aeronautics and Astronautics
Violeta Ivanova, Ph.D., OEIT
(Presented at MIT Educational Technology Fair 2009)

Topic Area(s)

5. Open educational tools and resources
6. Promoting cross-departmental collaborations

MIT GIS Services, a collaboration of the MIT Libraries, DUE’s office of Educational Innovation & Technology, works to support GIS use by the MIT community.  We offer workshops, regular open office hours in the GIS Lab, access to the MIT Libraries Geodata Repository, and collaborate with faculty to implement GIS exercises in MIT classes.

Statement of the problem or issue

How can a small collaboration between the MIT Libraries, OEIT, and IS&T serve the diverse population of GIS users, both research and teaching, at MIT?

Description of activity, project, solution, and outcome

MIT Libraries, OEIT, and IS&T collaborate to offer comprehensive GIS services to the MIT community both through the individual and group consultation in the GIS Lab, the Geodata Repository, and collaboration with faculty.

Importance or relevance to other faculty, staff, students, departments, and programs

We help students and faculty in these areas:

• Locating Spatial data
• Mapping information
• Analyzing data using geospatial tools
• Access to GIS data: Geodata Repository (GeoWeb & ArcMap/ArcGIS Interface)
• Development of Educational GIS Tools for classroom use
• GIS programming support for research
• GIS workshops
• Loaning of GPS units

Daniel Sheehan, OEIT
Lisa Sweeney, MIT Libraries
(Presented at MIT Educational Technology Fair 2009)

Topic Area(s)

7. Others: providing Geographic Information System (GIS) services to the MIT Community

The iLab Project is dedicated to the proposition that online laboratories – real laboratories accessed through the Internet – can enrich science and engineering education by greatly expanding the range of experiments that the students are exposed to in the course of their education. During this session, we will be demonstrating iLabs in electrical engineering, physics and nuclear engineering.

iLabs Wiki website

Statement of the problem or issue

Almost all educators agree that exposure to laboratory experiments is an important part of learning science and a student’s education. In these economic times, hands-on labs are being scaled back or even eliminated from science curriculum. Hands-on laboratories are expensive to run and maintain. Even at institutions where well-equipped laboratories are available, access to them is often limited by staff availability and scheduling conflicts, safety concerns, operating & resource costs required to maintain the lab and the availability of space.

Description of activity, project, solution, and outcome

Online laboratories (iLabs) are experimental facilities that allow students to carry out experiments from anywhere at any time. iLabs is a robust, scalable, open-source infrastructure built on web services that has been developed to provide a unifying software framework that can support access to a wide variety of online laboratories. iLabs effectively address many of the logistical limitations of “hands-on” laboratories (equipment, space, user training, scheduling, safety and staffing constraints).  Through iLabs, students can carry out their lab assignments from any location whenever it is convenient for them.  Because iLabs are online 24×7, students have significantly more lab time available with greater flexibility of access.  Further, as iLabs are all based on a common iLab Shared Architecture, they may be easily shared between institutions.

Importance or relevance to other faculty, staff, students, departments, and programs

Over the past five years, iLabs has become a standard part of upper level course 6 subjects and is now part of the introductory sequence. We are eager to engage with other MIT faculty.

Kirky DeLong – Center for Educational Computing Initiatives (CEC)
Phil Bailey – Center for Educational Computing Initiatives (CECI)

(Presented at MIT Educational Technology Fair 2009)

Topic Area(s)

5. Open educational tools and resources