By Matt Straus

“If we teach today as we taught yesterday, we rob our children of tomorrow.” – John Dewey

It was a normal Tuesday night for Kevin Zhu. After finishing his differential equations homework and hanging with his hallmates, he opened up his laptop and checked his email. Nearing 1 am, he finally decided it was time for class. That’s right; at 12:48 am, Kevin Zhu sat down for his physics lecture.

Across the campus Tuesday night, Kevin was probably not the only one streaming a lecture. In fact, with DukeCapture’s availability in 58 classrooms and lecture halls across the campus—not to mention the mobile units—hundreds of lectures from teachers in all departments, undergraduate and beyond, have been recorded and uploaded.

In a world where technology changes faster than most undergrads do laundry, it is important for the campus to keep pace. The Duke Digital Initiative  (DDI) was created to ease technology into the classroom while helping faculty and students to realize what the digital age has to offer. According to Samantha Earp, Director of Academic Services for DDI, “Duke undergraduates have had access to a variety of cutting edge tools and technologies […that] contribute to an overall environment that enriches the educational experience.”

DDI

DukeCapture is one new teaching technology that gives students a way to return to difficult lectures or to hear important details they might have missed the first time.

But it doesn’t end there.

Earp goes on to mention that the DDI has many other centrally-supported systems. Among these is Blackboard, a website that hosts class pages so that teachers can easily interface with students through document postings, assignment listings, and a discussion board for each class. The DDI also maintains Duke’s iTunesU—the offshoot of the Duke First-Year iPod Experience—that contains podcasts of lectures from certain classes.

Perhaps the strongest barrier in expanding these programs into all classrooms is in the ability of each instructor to learn the new material. Nevertheless, Lynne O’Brien, DDI’s Director of Academic Technology & Instructional Services, does not see this as a challenge. O’Brien says that Duke professors are smoothly being transitioned to a blog-type website entitled WordPress: “The [Office of Information Technology] installed the software; [the Center for Instructional Technology] consultants met with faculty and helped them get started on using the software for their course activities.”

During this academic year, Earp promises that the DDI “is continuing its programs to promote innovative use of technology in support of the academic experience.” Earp notes that WordPress along with other Web 2.0 tools are being explored not only at Duke but also by students abroad. Also, the DDI has recently been expanding the DukeCapture program in an effort to make more lectures accessible to ill students as H1N1 continues and the flu season approaches.

Classrooms Going Beyond

While the DDI  has many entry-level technologies made accessible for the faculty, many faculty are going very far beyond. Annabel Wharton, Professor of Art, Art History and Visual Studies, is taking one of her classes on a field trip—through virtual reality.  Wharton has spent several months studying the effect of digital architecture in immersive online gaming experiences—notably Second Life and Assassin’s Creed—and plans to bring Art History students along for the ride this year.

Cathy N. Davidson, Professor of English and Interdisciplinary Studies, teaches “Your Brain on the Internet,” a course designed to help students defamiliarize themselves with the internet as they are accustomed to seeing it in order to understand how society and the web are interconnected.  According to Davidson, the “Web 2.0 forms of iterative, collaborative processes—whether one is creating Linux or Mozilla or Wikipedia—depend on […] each person [having] something unique to contribute and a unique form of qualification.” In Davidson’s class, students use WordPress to create an interactive blog and are required to post weekly in the blog or elsewhere within the web to learn about the facets of the internet and the collaboration it encourages.  In this way, Davidson has less interest “in technology for itself than in what new forms of creative, collective thinking it enables.” Davidson’s class ran for its first time in Spring of the previous academic year, and will have a new 15 students in Spring 2010.

Also noted in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Negar Mottahedeh, Assistant Professor of Literature, organized the world’s first ever Twitter Film Fest, and it became a part of a Spring 2009 syllabus for 30 lucky students. After creating a list on a blog of 39 film clips from YouTube, students watched these clips over a weekend and tweeted their way through the films. If this was not enough, the class discussion the following day was a roundtable Twitter tweet-fest. Combining blogging, YouTube, and Twitter—just one of the classrooms at Duke fully embracing the technological horizons.

DukeMobile

Duke’s commitment to expanding into the ever-widening technological horizons doesn’t stop within the classroom. Created as a free app for the iPhone, DukeMobile is one of Duke’s newest ways to use students’ favorite gadgets as an interface for information. While it isn’t used for classes, DukeMobile brings campus maps, course catalogs, University news, athletic schedules and rosters, student group calendars, and so much more to a student’s fingertips in an instant.

While the original app was designed and produced by Duke staff working with technology consulting groups in March of this year, the second version, launched at the end of August, includes new functions that were designed by students. Michael Ansel, a junior Electrical and Computer Engineering major, is the creator of one of these who found that he “was hungry and didn’t feel like looking stuff up.” “Places,” designed, tested, and now utilized by Ansel, integrates dining hours, GPS coordinates, and the time of day into a program that will tell a user where the nearest food can be found. While Terribly Clever Design and Duke’s Office of Information Technology supported Michael in this venture, he spent his summer doing the actual programming and coding. To Ansel, using the technology was rewarding, and it pleased him to be “doing something that needed to get done, and making it happen.”

Duke continues to find new ways to pull the technology of tomorrow onto the campus and help it find relevance to students. Whether it is a project of the Duke Digital Initiative, classes like Davidson’s or Wharton’s, or finding campus information in the palm of a student’s hand, Duke students can rest assured that their education is technologically enriched. Perhaps most relieving of all though, is that when hunger strikes somewhere between East and West Campus at around 2:34 in the morning, there’s an app for that.