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Now Open: Proposals for 2012 Freedman Fellows Award Program
In its 8th year, the 2012 Freedman Fellows Award Program begins by inviting faculty proposals for this year's awards. Since 2005, over $100,000 in awards have helped faculty integrate multimedia technologies and digital tools into the curriculum, and varied staff and resources have helped to shape the Fellows' projects into new teaching and learning experiences.
Read more about the Freedman Fellows Program 2012, the application criteria, the April 2, 2012 proposal deadline, and more. Enjoy these weekly features about the 2011 Freedman Fellows Award winners, as they describe how their projects have developed.
Visualizing Nanoparticles
Physics faculty Robert W. Brown, one of the 2011 Freedman Fellows says that he became interested in 3-D effects after an introduction to Freedman Center tools, because his work in nanoparticle behavior was relevant to so many things. When the spring 2011 Freedman Center call for proposals came, opportunities called, too: "it was a match made in heaven!"
Reflecting on the award project nearly one year later, Brown recently showed an animation of nanometer-sized magnetic particles. Brown prefaced the demonstration by saying that he knew the particles rotated & had different frequencies. But the work done through the 2011 Freedman Fellows Program award allowed his project staff to write code to focus on data visualization for a "a microscopic understanding of how nanoparticles behave." Seeing is believing, and his audience saw nano particles self-assemble into agglomerates...and then self-assemble hierarchically into new structures.
Brown, principal investigator, Timothy Atherton, co-investigator (Physics faculty) and Phillip Durachinsky (Physics graduating senior 2012) applied code to data so that images are dynamically generated by OpenGL animation. The results, says Brown are "totally new views, instead of just looking at a slice on a slide!"
The excitement of seeing research come to life also stimulates ideas for future opportunities like applying audio waves, developing future Freedman Center skill sets, and putting research data, animation & text up on the Visualization Wall in KSL.
More importantly for Brown, the results also meet three of his Freedman Fellow project goals:
• more effective publications, with embedded media
• more persuasive oral/slide and e-poster conference presentations
• more compelling classroom experiences
"A moving picture is worth a thousand words, and graphical tools help learning enormously," said Brown. "We should teach with more of this!"
The Samuel B. and Marian K. Freedman Digital Library, Language Learning, and Multimedia Services Center is a partnership between the College of Arts and Sciences and the Kelvin Smith Library.
Posted by Karen Oye on March 5, 2012 04:34 PM
