97-10-10: FACULTY FORGE CYBER-TOOLS FOR LEARNING WITH U.VA. GRANTS

By Nancy Hurrelbrinck

Virtual factory tours. An array of France's music, art, literature and architecture. Videos of psychiatric nurses interacting with patients. These are just a few of the resources this year's 11 Teaching + Technology Initiative (TTI) fellows will make available to students on websites and CD-ROMs.

Organized in 1995 by the offices of the vice president and provost and vice president and chief information officer, the initiative is intended to help faculty investigate how multimedia technology can enhance their teaching.

* * * Students learning Civil War history will combine hands-on historical research with electronic media in "Digital History and the American Civil War," a new class taught by Edward L. Ayers, Hugh P. Kelly Professor of History, and William Thomas III, instructor of advanced technology in Alderman Library. Each student will craft a website dedicated to telling the collective biography of a company of Civil War soldiers, about 100 men. This project builds on Ayers' and Thomas' previous work, "The Valley of the Shadow Project."

* * * Art professor John J. Dobbins' "Pompeii as Urban Laboratory" is a new component of the already established Pompeii Forum Project website, an archaeologically based, collaborative, interdisciplinary project. Using an image database, case studies illustrating specific problems and methodologies, and videos, the site will allow students to further their understanding of how cities change by participating in the research and discovery process.

* * * Nursing students will be able to view typical interactions in psychiatric nursing on video -- with student role-playing providing much of the footage -- once assistant professor of nursing Sarah Farrell has finished creating a website to supplement her "Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing" class. The site will present taped clinical situations, allowing students to choose from a variety of interventions and see the consequences of various responses.

* * * As art classes have grown in size, it has become increasingly difficult to give students individual instruction in techniques of drawing, painting, sculpture and printmaking. To help address this problem, art professor James Hagan will create a CD-ROM offering recorded lectures and presentations on artistic technique, as well as a website with links to established artists and an archive for works by students and faculty.

* * * Associate Professor of French Janet R. Horne is creating a Web-based sourcebook for students taking "The History of Contemporary French Civilization" that will introduce them to France's history, literature, art, architecture and music. The site will provide interactive modules containing slide shows and audio and video segments with narrative commentary, as well as a class home page which will function as the central workshop and bulletin board for the course.

* * * An ongoing project funded for the third consecutive year, English professor Alan B. Howard's website devoted to American Studies gives students an opportunity to create their own Web pages, adding to the 10 completed and 26 ongoing hypertexts found on the site; recent topics have included the Holocaust Museum, the Philadelphia Waterworks and quilting.

* * * The "Three-Dimensional Animation of Ecological Dynamics" site being developed by assistant professor of landscape architecture Kathy Poole will allow students to design a stormwater management system, integrating environmental sciences analysis and stormwater practices from civil engineering. Using Boston's Back Bay Fens as a case study, students can virtually reconfigure the form of the land and its buildings, immediately seeing how aesthetic form affects water quality, as well as how environmental concerns determine aesthetic form.

* * * Karen Ryan-Hayes, associate professor of Slavic languages and literature, will develop an electronic sourcebook on modern Russian culture that integrates text, visual images, music, video clips and maps. A potential model for similar multi-media sourcebooks, Ryan-Hayes' project will be a hybrid CD-ROM and website.

* * * Anthropology professor J. David Sapir's website will make a wide selection of photographs available to students taking his course, "The Culture of Photography," as well as to others throughout the University. It will provide a vast "museum without walls" that will eventually encompass the Bayly Museum's collection of over 200,000 slides.

* * * Physics professor Stephen T. Thornton is developing a course for future science teachers that focuses on integrating computers and graphing calculators into the analysis of experimental data; such technology will allow teachers and students to learn about science by acting like scientists.

* * * Different products call for different manufacturing processes -- batch flow, assembly line, etc. -- but many Darden students unfamiliar with these processes have trouble visualizing them. Darden professor Elliott N. Weiss is developing a CD-ROM with three-dimensional simulations of each type of process that combine animation, images and video, enabling students to take virtual factory tours.

For more information about the Teaching + Technology Initiative, see http://cti.itc.virginia.edu/tti/home.html .