"Technology is bringing things into the classroom that would otherwise be unavailable to students," said Lynne O'Brien, director of the Center for Instructional Technology, which sponsored the event.

For example, the Duke Primate Center has created digital images of many of its vast collection of fragile fossils, to enable wide access without jeopardizing the specimens. Students using the "Paleoprimatological Digital Teaching Library" can zoom in for the most close-up examination of the fossils, according to the library's developers, Elwyn Simons of biological anthropology and anatomy and Timothy Ryan of the Primate Center.

Legions of students can also safely scrutinize original drafts of Walt Whitman manuscripts, including corrections in Whitman’s hand, thanks to a collaborative project of CIT, Perkins Library and Assistant Professor of English Matt Cohen. The digital image collection also includes a rare edition of Leaves of Grass, which Whitman gave only to about a hundred people.

Even such rare historical sources as Bezhboznik U Stanka (Godless at the WorkBench), a Soviet party periodical published in the 1920s are available as archival-quality images, thanks to the efforts of Alison Rowley, visiting assistant professor of Slavic Studies, and art librarian Lee Sorensen.

The gargantuan task of managing burgeoning collections of such images will require new database tools, according to Paul Conway, director of information technology services at Perkins Library. Fortunately, said Conway, the Duke community has available the new Luna Insight imaging database tool adopted in 2002 to organize images. Conway said that Insight can not only replace slide projectors in the classroom, but can "also permit organizing and annotating collections, creating more dynamic classroom presentations, and publishing them to the web."

Duke faculty are also using new software tools to enhance collaborative distance learning over the web, as demonstrated by Assistant Professor of Nursing Linda Goodwin. She showed a distance-learning system based on Yahoo group software in which a team of students in the Health Systems Leadership course could see one another on their video screens, as well as converse via text messages. However, emphasized Goodwin, student ratings of the system she used, as well as its competitors, made it clear that improvements are needed. Nevertheless, she said, the pedagogic value of distance learning is clear, "The quality of the work already produced by these teams is high."

While image libraries and distance-learning classes are relatively well-established technologies, web-based laboratories have been far more difficult to implement, said showcase participants. However, a team led by Henri Gavin and John Dolbow, assistant professors of civil and environmental engineering, is trying to improve web-based access to laboratories so that students can run real-life experiments as well as simulations from afar. They have developed a system called WEAVE (Web-based Educational Framework for Analysis, Visualization, and Experimentation), to implement physical experiments and simulations on the web. And according to the engineers, WEAVE is adaptable enough to enable faculty with limited technical expertise create such remotely controlled and virtual laboratories.

Accelerating the sometimes onerous process of learning a language is also benefiting from new video and audio technologies, reported Diane Bryson, assistant director of English for International Students. For example, a teaching program developed by Bryson allows foreign graduate students to transcribe famous American speeches and to compare their own transcriptions with correct ones. Such comparisons allow the students to identify the unfamiliar English sounds that elude both their hearing and their speech.