Announcing Summer Educational eProject Development (SEED) recipients

The ITS academic technology team is pleased to announce the eProjects selected for collaborative development this summer. We are grateful to all 16 submitters, who proposed a diverse and creative collection of projects for us to consider. For our inaugural year, our team of professional staff and student workers will be taking on these six projects:

Enhancing Physical Chemistry Lab with Digital Video, Josh Newby. The project will involve in-house production of two pre-lab videos that substitute for in-class lectures.

The Hoodoo-Conjure Online Database, Yvonne Chireau. The project will result in a publicly searchable database and historical information on practitioners of the African American traditions of Hoodoo and Conjure.

Online Cognitive Psychology Experiment for Teaching, Frank Durgin. We will explore the suitability of new web programming options to the production of online demo experiments for Psychology students to use in the classroom.

“The Muslim in Russia” Course Web Site, Sibelan Forrester. The course web site for this new course will also be an open resource for other professors of Russian language and literature.

Building a Swarthmore WeBWorK library, Cheryl Grood. This project will involve professors and students learning how to write new problems in the scripting language of the math homework system, WebWorK. Various math and statistics problems will be coded toward the creation of a rich, local library of potential homework questions.

Assignment Creation from Database of Problems, Erik Cheever. This project entails the creation of a graphical user interface for building and distributing homework assignments from an existing pool of Engineering problems.

We look forward to getting work underway with our partners this summer. On a closing note, we wish to emphasize that the ITS academic technology team works on collaborative projects with instructional staff all year long. While we are experimenting with the SEED process as one way to stimulate focused development of small-to-midsize technology projects, we hope that all members of the academic community at Swarthmore know that they are encouraged to bring ideas for projects or service improvements forward at any time of the year.

–Eric Behrens, Associate C.I.T.O.

on behalf of the Academic Technology Team:
Michael Bednarz, Media Services Technician
Justin Crowell, Media Center Associate
Michael Kappeler, Web U.I. Developer
Les Leach, Web Developer
David Neal, Media Services Technician
Michael Patterson, Media Services Manager
Andrew Ruether,  Academic Technologist
Corrine Schoeb, Web Content Management Developer
Doug Willen, Academic Technologist

along with Michael Jones, Language Resource Center Director
John Word, Language Resource Center Technologist