Category Archives: Humanities

Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling

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Overview: One of the assessment activities in the Interactive Storytelling course was for students to craft interactive narratives using locative media and mobile technologies that were then playable on cell phones. The assessment addressed three of the objectives for the course:

  • To engage students with conceptual issues surrounding the development of digital storytelling;
  • To engage with fundamental concepts regarding computer technology as a creative medium;
  • To effectively communicate through multimodal ‘writing’ technologies.

The program identified to accomplish this goal was ARIS. ARIS is an open source Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling program created by members of the Curriculum & Instruction department of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. VUE, created by Tufts University, was used as a means of mapping or visualizing the flow of the story based on the elements of the ARIS software.

Students were introduced to ARIS in a two hour class session. During that session, the students identified the components of an example game and then constructed the game within ARIS. A second session was held to introduce students to VUE and provide dedicated work time for the groups to develop their project ideas and ask questions. After various rounds of testing, final projects were presented as walk-abouts where the entire class with iPhones in hand experienced each groups game.

  • Course: COSC007: Interactive Storytelling (SP12)
  • Tool: VUE, ARIS Editor and ARIS iOS App
  • Resources:ARIS LibGuide
  • Faculty: Mary Flanagan
  • Instructional Designer: Amanda Albright

Writing Blog Assignment

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Course: WRIT 8: Writing with Media

Project Site: Resource Site

Overview: The site was developed to provide  students with scaffolding or the blog activity assigned in their Writing with Media course. The site itself serves as a project example and provides resources for the design and development of their projects.

Student Assignment: The blog that you will produce for this course will be the place where you can practice and experiment with multimodal composition.  You will be free to create a blog on anything topic you like.  The only requirements are:

  1. that your blog is tied together by a set of questions or ideas to be explored,
  2. that each of your posts pursues and analyzes a question or claim, and
  3. that each of your posts will employ several modes.

In other words, it won’t be enough to just write your blog.  You’ll need to include images, videos, and podcasts.  You’ll also want to think very carefully about the design of your blog.  What will you call it?  What tone will you take?  What design elements will you employ?  Remember that this blog will be public.  It should keep its audience in mind.  It should look professional.  It should be something that you can continue to develop after the course ends.

Blog posts will be due every Monday.  You can post more frequently, if you like.  You will also be asked to read, critique, and respond to your classmates’ blogs (not all of them; rather I will assign you different blogs to read as the term progresses).  Every student can elect to take one Monday off — choose any Monday you want that suits your schedule.

Tools:  WordPress, Fireworks

Faculty: Karen Gocsik

Instructional Designers: JoAnn Gonzalez-Major

Classics Department Artifact Site

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Course: Multiple Classics department courses

Project Site: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~artifacts/?page_id=2

Overview: For this project we migrated the Classics department digital artifacts library from an older technology to an interactive web based application.  The new platform allow for the department to easily maintain and  update the resource.  The site also allows faculty to create artifact groupings for specific courses and to add student researchers to the site for the development of narratives on assigned artifacts.

  • Tools:  WordPress, Fireworks, Dreamweaver
  • Plugins: GRAND Flash Album Gallery, Broken Link Checker, Tooltips
  • Faculty: Roger Ulrich
  • Instructional Designers: JoAnn Gonzalez-Major

Enhancing Language Courses with VoiceThread

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Overview: Correcting pronunciation during class time is time consuming making classes slow and tedious and often discourages oral participation.

The goal of integrating the use of VoiceThread into the Intensive Portuguese course is three fold:

  • Increase opportunities for student practice of pronunciation and intonation.
  • Foster students’ awareness about pronunciation and intonation.
  • Provide opportunities for the instructor to provide more precise and individual feedback to students outside the classroom.

VoiceThread is a Web 2.0 tool that facilitates online group conversations around media and text.  As part of the course assignments, students contributed written and oral submissions based upon various stimuli including self-portraits/images, songs and poetry.

  • Course: PORT 001 Intensive Portuguese I (SP11)
  • Tool: VoiceThread
  • Resources: VoiceThread LibGuide
  • Faculty: Carlos Cortez Minchillo
  • Instructional Designer: Amanda Albright

Feedback: On the course evaluation, students reported enjoying the VoiceThread assignments. Months after the course, students note that they still consider the VoiceThread based assignments useful.

Aegean Prehistoric Archaeology Site Rewrite

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Course: CLST011 – Intro Classical Archaeology

Project Site: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~prehistory/aegean/

Overview: For this project we created an interactive digital textbook for  Dr. Rutter. He requested that a site he started in 1996 be updated and moved into a medium that would be easy for an instructor to update, shareable with individuals outside of the institution and easy for multiple professionals to enhance.

We decided on WordPress as a platform and added a series of plugins to provide him with the requested functionality. GRAND Flash Album Gallery was used to display the large number of photo albums associated with the site lessons. The Tooltips plugin was used to create a hypertext glossary of terms, and the Wiki and WP Symposium were installed to allow contributors to share information, have dialogs about the content and receive newsletters from the site authors.

Tools: Snagit, WordPress, Photoshop, Dreamweaver

Plugins: GRAND Flash Album Gallery, Broken Link Checker, Tooltips, Wiki, WP Symposium

Faculty: Jerry Rutter

Instructional Designers: JoAnn Gonzalez-Major & Amanda Albright

Other Support Services: Web Services