May 20, 2008 8:00 AM

Teaching, meet technology

Franklin Krasne, a psychology professor who teaches behavioral neuroscience to undergraduates, wanted to convey the workings of the brain by having students conduct lab experiments on a fish brain — but without a fish or, for that matter, a lab. So he came up with "Swimmy," a virtual fish that challenges students to discover how neural circuitry generates the spontaneous, repetitive movement patterns of swimming.

"Swimmy engages the same thought processes as scientists in an actual laboratory, but they (students) make their findings in weeks instead of years," said Krasne, who spent a summer writing the initial software and continues to fine-tune it. And although Swimmy has the feel of a computer game, the program "makes students think pretty hard," he said. "Most students find the exercise rather demanding, but some of them also find it very rewarding."

Krasne and Swimmy are among the winners of this year's Brian P. Copenhaver Award for Innovation in Teaching with Technology. Now in its sixth year, the award recognizes faculty who make innovative use of technology to improve undergraduate instruction. This year, 32 faculty members from 23 departments were nominated, predominantly by their students, said Michelle Lew, who oversees the award as the associate director of instructional technology in the Office of Instructional Development.

"It's an eye-opener to read the nominations," Lew said. "These students just love their professors. 'He's so organized,' they'll say, or, 'She made it much easier for me to understand.' "

The difficult task of choosing the finalists is performed by the Faculty Committee on Educational Technology, which named three other winners this year. One of them is Statistics Lecturer Nicolas Christou, who said that he and his colleagues began to turn to the power of the Internet about six years ago to disseminate information about probability and statistics. Starting by designing software to demonstrate concepts that students had difficulties learning, their efforts have grown into the Statistics Online Computational Resource (socr.ucla.edu), a free online resource of games, tools, a collaborative wiki and more, translated into a dozen languages and accessed by users worldwide.

Also winning the award were Otto Santa Ana, associate professor in the César E. Chávez Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies, and Francis Steen, assistant professor of communication studies. They developed the Communication Studies Television News Archive, a visually indexed collection of thousands of hours of local and national television news dating back to the 1970s.

"For media scholars and educators, the [previously unarchived] collection represented a gold mine," Santa Ana said. "Getting the gold out, however, wasn't easy — you'd have to sit for hours winding through tapes, looking for a particular segment."

He and a multidisciplinary campus team have created and continue to build the archive, which currently includes about 35,000 hours of content. Most recently, they have coupled it with the newly created UCLA Digital Civic Learning Initiative (dcl.sscnet.ucla.edu), which for the first time enables the systematic analysis of television news.

Award winners and nominees were honored at a reception on May 19, where they also demonstrated their innovative technologies to colleagues.

"It's very gratifying to see these faculty who are working very hard, doing wonderful things to make their classes better," Lew said.

Video interviews with the award winners and nominees are posted as they become available at www.oid.ucla.edu/edtech/bpcaward/bpca2008.

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