The Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL) was established in March 1999 under the Provost Office at Columbia University. The mission of the Center is to enhance teaching and learning through the purposeful use of technology and new media. Pierce Mattie recently caught up with Marc Raymond, CCNMTL’s designer. Marc had left a comment on our blog a few weeks prior in regards to Nestle's Social Media PR Crisis.
Tell us a little bit more about Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL)
CCNMTL partners with Columbia University faculty to enhance teaching and learning through the purposeful use of new media. We support a wide range of efforts from basic course websites to advanced, custom-built projects. We are a group of more than 40 educational technologists, programmers, and designers who work with faculty at all schools and divisions of Columbia University, focusing on overlapping areas of innovation to support student inquiry and deepen understanding. Our 250+ projects include training environments, visualization and modeling tools, real-time data collection tools, data sharing programs, annotation and study tools, media archives simulations and multimedia study environments. We've also been the recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Mental Health, Centers for Disease Control, US Department of Education, Institute of Museum and Library Services, as well as the Ford, JPMorgan Chase, Hewlett, and Toyota Foundations, among others!
At Pierce Mattie we are all about beauty, fashion and wellness! We were excited to learn about your work with Tobacco Cessation. What has the feedback been?
The Tobacco Cessation project has received overwhelmingly positive reviews from both faculty and students at Columbia. For students studying to become dentists, understanding available tobacco cessation treatments and pharmacotherapies is extremely important to their practice. With the Tobacco Cessation's multimedia learning modules, students learn about the seven primary therapies for tobacco cessation and work through specific treatment scenarios. One of the most innovative components of this project is the 'virtual patient' activities in which students must conduct a patient assessment and recommend the best treatment plan for four fictitious patients. Learning activities such as this one seek to build students' skills and empower students to effectively encourage tobacco cessation in their future dental practice. Launched in 2009 by CCNMTL and David Albert, associate professor of clinical dentistry, the project continues to expand with new learning modules and may be offered to students in partnering universities in the future.
What is the University Seminar on New Media Teaching and Learning? Who are some of your key partners on this project?
University Seminars provide an opportunity for scholars to engage in sustained intellectual dialogue with fellow colleagues in a forum that cuts across traditional boundaries of learning. These meetings bring together scholars and practitioners from Columbia University and from other institutions in an effort to integrate the many threads of knowledge and experience. The goal is to gain a more unified perspective through interdisciplinary interaction.
Our most recent University Seminar on New Media Teaching and Learning focused on the historical progression of health systems and the role that new media and technology plays in helping to achieve international health objectives particularly as they relate to developing countries. Dr. Prabhjot Singh Dhadialla and Dr. Patricia Mechael of the Columbia University Earth Institute presented on initiatives like ChildCount+ which uses mobile phones to facilitate and coordinate the activities of community health workers in the Millennium Villages Project.
What are some new tools your team has created recently in the space of new media?
Some of the projects we are releasing — or are preparing to release — include WORTH, Project Rebirth, and Harlem Health History
Multimedia WORTH (Women On The Road To Health) is the web-based version of a proven HIV prevention program that teaches communication and negotiation skills, delivers health information, and facilitates empowerment and feelings of self worth to at-risk women in the criminal justice system. We partnered with the Social Intervention Group at the Columbia School of Social Work to develop and test the WORTH tool to support health facilitators in delivering both group and individual intervention sessions. WORTH is currently being tested in a randomized control trial funded by the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) to determine its efficacy in increasing condom use, decreasing the incidence of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and reducing substance use among 432 drug involved female offenders in an Alternative-to-Incarceration (ATI) program in New York City.
The Project Rebirth educational initiative aims to help students to better understand the many dimensions of trauma and recovery following September 11, 2001. The initiative provides faculty partners from Columbia University and Georgetown University with access to hundreds of hours of footage from Project Rebirth, a documentary by filmmaker Jim Whitaker that chronicles the stories of 10 people significantly affected by the attacks on the World Trade Center, including extensive footage of interviews as well as the rebuilding of the site. Using VITAL — our custom-built video analysis tool — faculty and students from a range of fields (clinical psychology, social work, business, architecture, English, film, etc.) can view the Rebirth footage in a secure, web-based environment that supports managing and annotating video content. Through the project, the academic community can capitalize on the power of close viewing and observation to engage in thoughtful study, and the material can be used to train professionals to better understand and respond to the broad impacts of traumatic events on our world.
The Harlem Health History Project was created to enhance students' historical research on health-focused social movements in an African American community. The project offers students a repository of digitized primary source materials about health and public policy issues in Harlem. Until now, many of these primary source materials—including health reports and studies, news articles, advertisements, images, and interviews—have not been available in any online archive. The Harlem Health History project will enable students to browse, analyze, and tag items, and add their own primary source material to the collection.
How was your experience in the masters program at Columbia where you earned your MS in Strategic Communications?
I simply cannot say enough positive things about the Strategic Communications program and how it positively influenced my career as a designer. It put my career in a direction that a return to traditional art school never have done. I was lucky to have access to an amazing group of teaching professionals from the worlds of marketing, advertising, and public relations who helped transform my work from mere graphic design into a career of complete creative direction.
Posted by Pierce Mattie on May 6, 2010 2:53 PM
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