Projects

Rosie the Programmer

In celebration of Emerson's Women Herstory Month, Instructional Technology has created a digital story on the history of women in computing. This brief, four minute, narrated slideshow highlights female computer pioneers, their stories, and the innovations they brought to us.

Rosie the Programmer features renowned women such as Ada Lovelace King, daughter of poet Lord Byron, who made groundbreaking contributions to programming and Grace Hopper who developed COBOL, one of the most widely used programming languages.  It also highlights everyday women who acted as “computers” during World War II... read more

WebCT Exemplary Course Project

Instructional Technology and the Library work closely with Emerson faculty on the Exemplary Course Project to develop and evaluate distinctive course Web sites.

The 2006-07 participants include professors Flora Gonzalez, Melinda Robins, Lisa Diercks, John Bell and Ken Cheeseman. Each exemplary course reflects best instructional design practices that integrate classroom dynamics. The visuals for each site are designed to promote student learning; they have been implemented based on their power to engage, motivate, inform, and ultimately enlighten students on the course subject. Past participants include Phil Glenn, Dewitt Henry, David Emblidge, Seounmi "Katie" Han Youn, Melia Bensussen, Todd Gernes, Lori Rosenthal and Robert MacDougall.

Giving Credit

Initiated by Graduate Studies and in collaboration with the Library, Instructional Technology staff developed an interactive online guide addressing appropriate citation of creative work. The tutorial is designed to assist both American and International graduate students with reflecting on basic interpretations of intellectual property, determining when to cite a source, and formatting citations with an emphasis on multimedia.

Video in Teaching Series

Video can be a powerful teaching tool. It can help reveal contextual cues and dynamics of a situation from multiple perspectives. Video is useful for demonstrating processes, artwork, storytelling, witnessing cause and effect, exploring, and critiquing speeches.

In Fall 2006, David Emblidge, Cindy Miller, Daniel Kempler and Gary Gramigna have worked closely with Instructional Technology staff and with a learning goal in mind as they create unique materials with digital video. Using Digital Storytelling as a model, David Emblidge has recorded an instructional narrative with moving images to explain the "author’s rights" section of an author-publisher contract. Dan Kempler has diagrammed still images from video of the throat for student exam preparation, and Cindy Miller assigned digital stories to student groups to present public service announcements through video narratives. Faculty have evaluated the effects of their videos as learning objects and look forward to implementing them again in future semesters.

Emerson Departments and Groups on WebCT

As many are accustomed to using WebCT for their classes, faculty and administrators also use it for departmental communication.

Given the busy schedules of faculty, a departmental WebCT site provides access to time-sensitive and important information through an Emerson Web space many visit regularly. Instructional Technology staff have supported several departments in using WebCT for administrative purposes, including Communication Sciences and Disorders, Marketing Communication, Journalism, and the IT Help Desk. Alumni groups, academic committees, and student organizations have also used WebCT's private online space for easy communication.

Fooling Around in Prose: An Anthology of Postmodern American Fiction

Instructional Technology collaborated with DeWitt Henry and Jeremiah Hakundy of the Writing, Literature and Publishing department to produce a Web site showcasing the work of students in Henry's graduate writing and literature seminar. Basing their work on the Norton anthology Postmodern American Fiction, students produced a series of works of postmodern fiction, and Henry wanted to create a showcase for their best work. The site is designed so that works from future semesters can be easily added, creating a growing record of the intellectual output of the course.

The Learning Portals Project

The Emerson Learning Portals Project is supported with a grant from the Davis Educational Foundation awarded to Emerson through the Institute of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies. The project provides blog-based student communities that reflect campus and curricular communities. Within a structure similar to that of a course-management system, it contains an emerging e-portfolio tool currently used in new media classes by faculty such as Maurice Methot, Eric Gordon and Jim Sheldon. The Instructional Technology Group is part of the planning, development, and implementation of the project.

Library Tutorial: How To Do Research

As a supplemental learning tool for students writing research papers in WP121 Research Writing, the Emerson Library had designed an online tutorial. The tutorial describes how to select a topic for the research paper, frame the paper with a theme, and write an analysis of a subject that illustrates the frame, which is referred to as a case.

To help demonstrate the relationship between case and frame, Instructional Technology used Macromedia Flash to depict the characters from the popular television series, The Simpsons. By clicking on each Simpsons character, a different theme is revealed, showing a relationship between a case and a frame.