Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences                                                  
Visual Ethography: Using Digital Video for Social Research

Next semester, a new course in Visual Ethnography will open to Third Year students of the Sociology Department and the Information & Communications Management Programme. It will teach students a critical appreciation of film as a documentary medium for social research and provide some hands-on training in digital video making. Because new digital media technologies have made video filming and editing equipment vastly cheaper and easier to use, it has now become feasible to train students in the use of video, which has potential applications in many fields of study. So far, student interest in the new course has been keen, and we hope to expand such courses in future.

In conjunction with this new initiative, a workshop was held on 19–20 February 2001, entitled Visual Ethnography: New Horizons for Social Research Using Digital Media in Southeast Asia, and organised by A/Prof Roxana Waterson, Dr Aileen Toohey and Dr Leong Wai Teng of the Sociology Department. In this workshop, various highly distinguished international, regional and local makers of ethnographic and documentary film shared their expertise in teaching film or video making. They also generated lively discussion on how digital media practices might contribute to social commentary, civil society, and cultural life in Singapore today. The fifty-plus workshop participants, drawn from across the Faculty as well as from outside the University, enjoyed two very full days of stimulating presentations, film screenings, and enthusiastic debate.

Faculty of Engineering                                                              
Introducing PBL in Transportation Engineering

A problem-based learning (PBL) project was introduced into the course CE3121 Transportation Engineering in the first semester of 2000/ 2001. Students were divided into groups of about ten to evaluate the performance of an actual signalised intersection and make changes to improve its operation. With the lecturer and tutors serving only as facilitators, the students were left to organise themselves and acquire relevant knowledge and collect needed data to deal with the ill-defined problem. In the process, students had to contend with less-than-ideal site conditions, non-homogenous traffic, missing data and unique situations. The students were evaluated based on their individual participation in discussion sessions and their group presentation of their findings and experience.

From the feedback survey carried out two months after the project, students indicated strong learning benefits from the experience. Students who functioned as leaders or organisers appreciated learning critical-thinking and decision-making skills while those who acted as researchers gained in knowledge. Despite the positive interest shown in PBL, students still preferred tutorials and lectures because they acquired knowledge and skills faster through these conventional methods. But based on an assessment of their confidence level in solving problems, students appeared to retain better the knowledge and skills learned through the PBL project.

Faculty of Engineering                                                                 
Multiple-choice Questions on the Web

The usage of multiple-choice questions (MCQs) for teaching is often conceived as something that is done only at the last resort. Yet although they do not elicit creative answers, MCQs can go a long way in helping students deepen their understanding of the material covered in lectures. For instance, MCQs can be incorporated in the form of pop quizzes at the end of every chapter of each lesson. Putting MCQs on the Web is not uncommon. However, the facility in the TM1151/TC1412 Materials Science course has been designed to make it more personalised and interesting. Questions are posed randomly from a pool, making the system less predictable than looking through a list of questions. Students are also encouraged to try again until they get it right; a congratulatory message greets them when they do. The positive feedback received from students thus far has made the effort of posting MCQs on the Web worthwhile.

Faculty of Medicine                                                                       
Family Medicine Programme

In response to health care needs of having more ambulatory care, a new Family Medicine Programme was designed to provide our students with more experience in primary health care and community medical services. The student is made to recognise that patients have physical, social and psychological dimensions in health and disease. The new programme commences in the second semester of this academic year and spans Years 3 and 4, providing a longer period of experiential learning with general practitioners in private and polyclinic settings. There will also be attachments to Paediatric and corporate practices. The focus will be on general consultation and counselling skills as well as special needs of children and the elderly in the community. Case studies, assignments and presentations will provide the interdisciplinary integration required in such community-based health care. Aspects of Family Medicine will be tested in the new Final Year examination.

Faculty of Science                                                                     
Pharmacy Practice Preceptorship Programme: An Update

The Pharmacy Practice Preceptorship Programme was introduced in 1999 to provide an experiential learning platform for undergraduate pharmacy students to imbibe professional ethics and practices under the tutelage of experienced practitioners. A total of 64 Level 2 students participated in Part I (Community Pharmacy) of the programme in May to July 2001 at various NTUC Unity Healthcare Pharmacies, Guardian Pharmacies and the Retail Pharmacy of the National Cancer Centre. During the same period, 61 Level 3 students also participated in Part II (Hospital Pharmacy) at the Tan Tock Seng Hospital, KK Women’s & Children’s Hospital, Changi General Hospital, Singapore General Hospital, National University Hospital and Mt Elizabeth Hospital. One student took up an industrial attachment at the local SmithKline Beecham pharmaceutical production facilities. Two students arranged their own overseas programme—one in Alberta, Canada and another in Aberdeen, Scotland: both reported enriching exposure to the community and institutional pharmacy practices conducted overseas.

School of Design & Environment                                                      
‘Things Different’: The First NUS Architecture Mobile Digital Design Studio

The design of vibrant places as places of creativity and joy of life is becoming ever more important for architects. To plan them means to understand them. But what makes these places so inspiring and unmistakable? To uncover this secret, the Department of Architecture offered in July 2001 the first mobile digital design studio called ‘Things Different’, which was three times oversubscribed. The objective of this studio was to look at places differently—analytically—in order to highlight the components and their contribution to the vibrancy. This analytical approach using multimedia to represent knowledge nodes in a different way is crucial for the creative process to design things and places differently. The findings of this studio will be uploaded to http://www.arch.nus.edu.sg as a design guide by the end of this semester.

14 Apple Titanium Powerbooks and 4 Sony Digital Video cameras ensured the digital analysis and high-end creative representation of places on the spot; and wireless connection enabled file sharing and dynamic group arrangements and critiques outside the common static desktop computer oriented classroom. Apple and Sony Singapore and NUS CIT contributed to this studio, conducted by A/Prof Milton Tan (Head, Department of Architecture) and Dr Stephen Wittkopf (Leader, Design Computing).