President presents awards for innovative use of technology

Jeff Porter

Porter was recognized for his course, Multimedia Writing: Radio Essays, which teaches students to write nonfiction for Web broadcast. Using audio production tools, students produce their own voiceovers, record interviews, capture nonverbal sounds and music, and integrate these various audio-based media with spoken texts. Porter said he developed the course after considering the question, “What does it mean to write with sound?”

In Radio Essays, students learn to explore the conceptual resonance between sounds and words, discovering how sounds change the way we experience words.

“An aural text is quite different from its print-based counterpart,” Porter says, “and that’s because sound permits us to experience in a text what we might not otherwise see or hear.”

Students in Radio Essays also find the element of performance appealing to their latent expressiveness, Porter adds.

“Nothing is more engaging than the sound of the human voice put to music or in the heat of a story. Behind every radio essay lurks a song and a tale.”

President Mary Sue Coleman praised Porter for his “true innovation in providing students with an expanded vision of what it means to compose an essay.”

Porter received the award, which carries a $3,000 cash prize, at the annual University Convocation Sept. 25. More information about his course, including an archive of previous student projects, is on-line at http://twist.lib.uiowa.edu/radio.

Coleman also awarded special recognition and a $1,000 prize to two other finalists for the award.

“Multimedia Computer Applications to Teach and Assess Skills in Clinical Medicine,” developed by Michael W. Peterson, associate professor of family medicine, and Scott Elliot, instructional design consultant in the College of Medicine, is a computer-based instructional tool that uses virtual patients to expand training in clinical reasoning and patient management, and incorporates multimedia into clinical problem-solving exercises.

“The Bones of the Skull: A 3-D Learning Tool,” was created by Jerald Moon, an associate professor of speech pathology and audiology, James M. Duncan, Information Commons and electronic services coordinator with the Hardin Library for the Health Sciences, and Marilyn Dispensa, instructional design consultant with ITS-Academic Technologies. This software uses 3-D technology that enables students to view and rotate bones in a way that allows them to understand anatomy and skeletal articulations that are usually difficult to grasp without examining a real skull.

Article by Mary Geraghty Kenyon