ECET

I have a wonderful project I would like to pursue with CONTENTdm that involves collecting historical engineering failures and their subsequent analysis for use in my Intro to Systems Engineering and Robotics course. Every year I teach this course, I collect data on relevant disasters so that students will be able to understand the significance of what they are studying. We use these disasters as case studies in order to tie Systems Engineering principles to real world examples. Over the years, I've collected a large number of these case studies and would really like to organize them in some way so that the students can access them not only for class examples but also for independent class projects. The CONTENTdm system seems to be the right place for this type of information. In fact, if things work out like I hope, this content could also be used by other departments in the school, other USG institutions, and the broader internet community as a whole.

Education theory suggests that student learning is enhanced when students pay attention to their own learning. One effective technique to encourage them to pay this attention is a careful monitoring of their progress throughout the semester. This is especially true for a software engineering course where the course is concerned with the learning theories and concepts, and also with skills and experiences. I strongly believe that a systematic monitoring of students progress in these courses can significantly enhance their learning. And I believe that it is important to employ an effective technique to systematically monitor their progress. In my Software Project Management course, I have been teaching techniques that software project managers use to effectively monitor the project progress. Managers know that some mechanisms must be put in place to constantly gauge the project is progressing on course. The main goal of this project is to work on this issue and investigate the possibility of using these techniques (or similar techniques) in an academic environment. More specifically, my goal is to concentrate on the following three topics regarding the monitoring process:

• How to regularly and effectively collect necessary information from students (i.e., information that is considered relevant to the measurement of goal attainment.)
  How to analyze and evaluate the collected information.
  How to present and communicate findings to the students.
  
• How to analyze and evaluate the collected information.
• How to present and communicate findings to the students.

I propose to use CONTENTdm to redesign and transfer "The Virtual Tools Museum: The Alan and Louise Sellars Collection of Antique Tools" Website to SPSU's new digital collection. This collection, originally photographed by me and created under my direction in 1999, can be viewed at http://www.spsu.edu/htc/bseabolt/tools/index.html This would provide wide public access to the unique collection of Southern Polytechnic’s antique tool collection.

I request Support for two of my proposal's. The first would clearly fit in the SPSU CONTENTdm category. It may also fit in the USG Learning Objects Repository for students and scholars of literature. It is the collection of concordances of Spanish/language poetry that I have been developing. I have had supporting responses from academics, librarians, and journalists from Miami to as far away as Mexico City about these concordances. You can see some of them on my website. There you will find concordances of poets from Spain and Latin America, from different generations and movements. (If you are not sure what a concordance does, click on “Directions for Use.”) Currently, I am working on finishing all the concordances (ten in all) of the Generation of 1927 in Spain. Of those, three are already posted, four more are complete but not yet posted, and of the last three, two will be completed by June 30. The last poet´s work has not yet been collected in a single edition, so I will be visiting the Residencia de estudiantes in Madrid, where all those poets congregated, to do some archival work in their library about his work. The other poets in my online collection who are not a part of the Generation of 1927 belong to other groups which I also intend to add in the future.

The second project for which I am requesting support is to create free-standing units or Learning Objects of basic Spanish language structure and vocabulary that are in the format of an enhanced podcast. This project would fit both in the CONTENTdm collection, as well as in the USG Learning Objects Repository. While I have used the textbook we are using currently at SPSU for SPAN1001-1002-2001-2002 (Blanco and Donley, Vistas: Introducción a la lengua española, 3rd ed.) , these units can be used by anybody in introductory and intermediate Spanish courses. A trial podcast in the format I will use is available, of which, as of this writing, there have been 300 downloads of it and 32 subscriptions-http://podcasting.gcsu.edu/4dcgi/podcasting/gdig/channels15941/24124.xml.

In this format, all concepts are presented visually and in sound files. Because of the importance of culturally appropriate context in foreign/second language learning, these photos, videos, and interviews will be recorded in Spain this summer, where I will be accompanying the SPSU Madrid 2007 program participants. The voice-over work will be done partially in Spain, and partially in the US.

This project entails the use of the CONTENTdm application to catalog the video content created using the resources of the Virtual Construction Instructional Laboratory (VCIL) in the Construction management Department. The project would compliment the project started last year by the author in which students in the CNST 3110 course visit construction sites and record specific construction activities. Students will learn how to use the video recording equipment to obtain the footage and they learn how to use video editing hardware and software to edit and prepare digital video clips which they use to prepare in class presentations. They also discuss what they learned about the construction activity observed and will evaluate ways of improving efficiency of the activity observed. The next step in the natural evolution of this effort is to be able to use the large amount of video content produced by the students to make it available to other instructors, students, and others in the academic and even non-academic community.

I am interested in making support materials available to the world at large for courses or projects in usability testing. In so doing, I will help promote the dissemination of usability testing in curricula in technical communication, human factors, computer science, cognitive psychology, and related fields. I will also help promote Southern Poly and its usability center.