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Faculty: Dongdong Chen, Ph.D
Department: Asian Studies
Project: Engaging the Learning of Chinese Language and Culture in Second Life

This semester Dr. Chen has embarked on incorporating the virtual world Second Life into two sections of Introductory Chinese I (CHIN 1102). Dr. Chen is using the Second Life School on Chinese Island, created by the Confucius Institute at Michigan State University.

The following abstract describes Prof. Chen's virtual world project:

Along with face-to-face instruction, students will engage with their peers in the virtual world Second Life to learn about and practice the Chinese language and culture. 30 Students in this course have created virtual representations of themselves in the form of avatars and will navigate their way through the Second Life Chinese School, built by the Confucius Institute at Michigan State University. Using the resources provided by the Second Life Chinese School, 8 learning tasks were designed to accompany the teaching throughout the semester. Students are required to complete these 8 tasks individually and collectively. By exploring the learning activities, some of which are built into the school, students will acquire basic concepts and elements of Chinese cultures. They will also engage in conversation using the voice chat feature of Second Life through a number of assignments outlined in the course syllabus. The voice chat will be recorded and submitted to the professor for a grade. In this presentation we will discuss the Chinese virtual learning spaces within Second Life, the logistics of creating student accounts, the learning tasks, and students learning experience of Chinese within this virtual space.

Prof. Chen will be presenting this project at the end of this month at Yale University for the Northest Association for Language Learning Technology (NEALLT) and the New England Regional Association for Language Learning conference.

During the 2008-2009 academic year, Dr. Michael Taylor, Assistant Professor of Political Science and Environmental Studies, has been one of the faculty leaders of SHUmobile, our campus-wide initiative for determining how mobile devices can be effectively used in teaching, learning, and social networking for the campus community. Dr. Taylor has incorporated mobile devices (Nokia N95), digital storytelling, blogging/vlogging (video blogging) and live video streaming in two of his courses: Introduction to Environmental Studies and Introduction to Public Policy.

In the Fall of 2008, students in Dr Taylor's Introduction to Environmental Studies course worked on two digital storytelling projects. The first project, "New Jersey Environmental Narratives," involved students creating digital stories about a place in New Jersey that has been especially important in terms of shaping their own attitudes toward the natural environment. Dr. Taylor feels that

"the creation of these personal narratives of place allowed for a deeper discussion of the roles of culture and world view in the development of environmental consciousness and that these reflective stories that were created and shared among the students led to a better understanding of each other and themselves."

Students were required to geo-code their images and all of the digital stories were linked to their spatial location using Google Maps. Future Environmental Studies classes will build upon this map/database of special environmental locations in the state of New Jersey. Examples of these digital storytelling projects can be found on Dr. Taylor's blog, Using Mobile Technology in the Classroom.

The second digital storytelling project for this course was called "Green Consumer Ethnographies." Students were required to create short digital ethnographies that detailed their feelings about what it means for a specific product to be "green" and how that impacts their purchasing decisions. The digital ethnographies were created using images (still and/or video) captured using the Nokia N95 and compiled using Adobe Premiere Elements. This project was done in conjunction with EarthSense, a green marketing firm in Maplewood, NJ. Kimberly Franko, a student from this class, recently won the Student Technology Showcase award from the TLTR Committee in the Media category for her work on this project. Check out Kimberly's winning video: Green Poultry

During Dr. Taylor's Environmental Studies course, he also takes students on weekend field trips to various New Jersey environmental locations. Because these trips are on the weekends, not all students are able to attend. This time, Dr. Taylor took his students on the Meadowlands ecotour and with a free mobile application called Qik, he was able to livestream the tour from the boat. Students that were unable to attend the trip could view the steam live or were able to view the captured video clips at a later time. Additionally, students on the trip used their N95s to take geo-tagged photos during the ecotour and those can be seen, mapped using OVI, here.

In the Spring of 2009, students in Dr. Taylor's Introduction to Public Policy collaborated with a course blog where students blogged/vlogged about public policy positions. Students used the Nokia N95s to record their own video commentaries that were uploaded directly to the blog from the device. Students also wrote a term paper that analyzed a public policy issue of their choice. The Nokia N95s were used to conduct interviews with individuals who are affected by that public policy. Students then used Adobe Premiere Elements to cut the interviews into mini-documentaries. The mini-documentaries are being graded as you are reading this but you can see examples of student public policy position posts on the course blog, for example, this student post is about the New NJ Driving Law.

Dr. Taylor is an inspiring educator with a long list of new and exciting projects that he is developing for his upcoming courses. If you have any questions or comments for Dr. Taylor, this is his contact information, including his QR Code!

Drs. Irene DeMasi, Jim Phillips, Kim Poulsen, and Tom Sowa, faculty members in the Department of Physical Therapy - School of Health and Medical Sciences (SHMS) at Seton Hall, were awarded a Faculty Innovation Grant (FIG) during the 2007-2008 academic year. The goal of the grant was to develop a video tutorial for physical therapy students. The video includes a review of how to conduct a clinical shoulder examination that integrates the didactic knowledge and technical skills critical for professional competency.

The video content matches the course content taught to physical therapy students throughout the first two years of their doctoral program. This content spans across three semesters of the curriculum and includes an overview, examination, tests and measures for the normal shoulder, as well as specific examinations, tests and measures, and treatment techniques for common shoulder conditions frequently seen in clinical practice.

This logical and clinically applicable approach can be incorporated across disciplines in other SHMS programs for their entry level health professional students' needs. Appreciation goes out to the Digital Media team (Chris Petruzzi, Chris Baldi, and Mike Soupios) in the Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center for their assistance in all aspects of the video production process.

The Teaching, Learning, and Technology Center held its 2nd Annual Boot Camp in September to kick off Faculty Development for the Fall 2008 semester. This year we provided 12 different technology workshops over the course of two weeks. A total of 80 unique faculty members attended Boot Camp, with 46 of them attending at least 1 workshop, 20 attending 2 workshops and 14 attending 3 or more workshops. Prizes were given to the top attendees, who won a Flip Video recorder. The winners were Nancy Cherilus, Shigeru Osuka, and Rev. Forrest M. Pritchett. Here is how they plan on incorporating the video recorder in their course:

Nancy Cherilus, Mentor
Freshman Studies
University Life: CORE 1001 AB, AG, BL, and CA

"My students are currently working on their portfolios. One of the items that they will include is a page titled My Thoughts. This page is a reflection of their first semester experience. I would use the camcorder to capture either video or still photos of each individual class to be shared and posted on the page. Each student will then write a brief reflection of their own experiences in my class.

Shigeru Osuka, Associate Professor
Asian Studies
Japanese Language & Japanese Graduate History and Culture

"For Japanese language courses, I would like to record my teaching and student's Japanese presentations. Each summer, moreover, I am taking SHU students to Japan where I would like to use the camcorder for recording Japanese society, custom, food, and cultural events for both of my courses. I will post the videos/photos into my private personal homepage."

Rev. Forrest M. Pritchett
University Life, African Religions, African Cultural Philosphy, The Black Church, Peoples and Cultures of America

"I will use the camcorder for photo journalism"

The College of Arts and Sciences together with the TLT Center launched two additional online courses this Fall: Communication Ethics (taught by Dr. Don McKenna from the Department of Communication) and American History I (taught by Dr. Brigitte Koenig from the Department of History).

When asked about his experience developing COMM 2134 - Communication Ethics, Dr. McKenna,

Dr. Cherubim Quizon, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology/Anthropology, recently wrote an article entitled "Teaching Anthropology in Small and Liminal Programs" that was published in Anthropology News, the newspaper of the American Anthropological Association.

In the article, Quizon discusses several pedagogical strategies that she has implemented in her teaching. Among those strategies was digital storytelling, which she implemented as part of a Faculty Innovation Grant (offered through the TLT Center at SHU). The project required each student to create a digital story about a Southeast Asian textile, involving a significant amount of research into the use and symbolism of this particular textile and how it affected cultural practices of that area. Using information gathered through research, students used music, images, and narration to tell their own story about a particular textile.

Congratulations to Dr. Quizon on this achievement!

Dr. Ed Jones, Associate Professor of English, was awarded a 2008-2009 Faculty Innovation Grant. The FIG project involved seven students who had just completed their freshman year. The goal for the students was to create digital stories illustrating "conversion" or "aha" moments during the first-year writing program. The finished digital stories will be used as a resource for the incoming freshman class and the English faculty.

Students created their digital stories using Adobe Premiere Elements 4.0 and Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0, both of which are part of the standard software on the new laptops (T61 and X61).

In total, the students spent five days planning, writing, revising, conducting personal and peer review, locating resources, taking photos, and building and editing in Elements and Photoshop. When they were finished, students converted their final digital stories to video format. Below are two examples:

A link to all of the digital stories has been placed on the English 1201 website. Click on Digital stories of first-year writing experience to see all of the wonderful student projects.

The Teaching, Learning and Technology Center's Faculty Innovation Grant program, now in its 5th year, complements CDI in achieving the objectives of the TLT Center's internal grant programs by providing small short term (up to one year) grants to individual faculty to explore how technology can improve student learning in one particular course. This year we received a tremendous amount of proposals from a variety of departments. The faculty review committee had a difficult time narrowing down the pool of applicants to eight outstanding proposals.

We are pleased to announce the award winners, the titles of their projects and their department/colleges.

Each year the TLT Center funds projects that exemplify the pioneering use of educational technology through its Faculty Innovation Grant program (FIG). During the Spring 2007 semester, Monsignor Liddy was one of 10 faculty chosen to receive a FIG for his proposal targeting his Catholicism and Art course (offered Fall 2007).