Education

Teaching & Learning in Digital Environments

MATRIX researches and evaluates the effectiveness of current training methods and materials for online education and research. Much of its research focuses on developing and evaluating resources for end users. While delivering and enhancing the usability of digital objects is of critical importance, it is equally important to find ways to capacitate effectively teachers and cultural heritage workers.

The ongoing digital preservation of multimedia, online dissemination of cultural heritage and the explosive growth of online resources for humanities teaching and research has created a need for well-trained educators, cultural heritage workers, and community activists with a comfortable fluency in digital media. MATRIX has worked as both a partner with educational institutions as well as a guide and training ground for educators through projects like the Humanties Computing Certification Program, which trains MSU graduate students in online pedagogy and resource development, and the continuing support of projects as Civics Online and Exploring Africa. These latter projects provide both primary resources and also teacher-designed and enhanced materials for classroom learning. Through partnerships and international foundations, MATRIX has provided training in the form of several programs, the Internet and Women's Democratic Organizing (IWDO) program, and the South African National Cultural Heritage (SANCH) program.

During the course of creating and presenting workshops, MATRIX has researched and developed a modularized set of instructional materials, methodologies, and best practices for conducting humanities computing workshops. These materials and methods are constantly under revision as research and reflections on practice provide insights, and are easily adaptable for many environments. The modular MATRIX workshop approach has been successfully used in situations ranging from K-12 to graduate students, international faculty and NGO leaders, multi-lingual environments, and with groups representing various interests.

New Portal Technologies for Educators & Students

MATRIX is currently researching methods for integrating educational portals into the infrastructure of digital libraries. Traditional searches offered by digital libraries deliver single objects to users based on their search criteria, and much of the rich content in these collections is missed. Students and teachers are required to click on, view, and analyze each return to decide whether the object is of interest, so that gathering multiple resources on any one topic can be time consuming and frustrating. In contrast, new portal technologies should interpret the search for students and teachers by returning objects found in digital libraries with a variety of directly related media. For instance, an image of Abraham Lincoln would be accompanied and contextualized with a variety of directly related items such as text information, audio, and additional images. Teachers will be able to quickly and effectively collect resources for classroom use, even pulling up the portal of saved search results in a classroom setting, or directing students to this portal online. Students will not need to be fluent in specialized forms of research and subject vocabularies to explore the potential of an online library.

Teaching & Learning with Digital Objects & Tools

Libraries have increasingly digitized their holdings and made them available online. Coupled with the vast amounts of digital resources produced by mass media, access to digital media on the Internet is at unprecedented levels. However, users are still grappling with ways to use and integrate media into current practices. While bookmarking, downloading, and printing allows students and teachers to re-access digital objects, a central focus of MATRIX's research program focuses on ways for students to interact with online media, as well as integrate digital resources into their own projects.

MATRIX has recently released a beta version of MediaMatrix - an online tool that allows students and educators to find, segment, annotate and organize streaming media found on the Internet. Media Matrix is a server side application that works within web browsers, using the browser's bookmark feature. When users find a digital object at a digital library or while surfing the Internet, they simply click the MediaMatrix bookmark and it searches through the page, finds the digital media, and loads it into an editor. The users can then isolate any portion of a whole video or audio clip and segment it, resize and crop images, save text, and add their own annotations to that media. Using MediaMatrix, teachers can collect and present media for the classroom, students can integrate media into their assignments, and scholars can perform the kinds of tasks performed in traditional libraries with analog objects (gather resources, take notes, publish findings). For instance, students assigned a project on the history of the depression may search across the web for audio, text, mages, and even video, and fund numerous resources online. Instead of a series of hyperlinks at the end of the printed paper, projects are transformed into online interactives, with the integration of edited and clipped multimedia object. No longer simply a text quote within a text document, students now interact with the media in listening and making critical decisions concerning editing and juxtaposition with other media objects.