OK, "assistant professor of storytelling" is probably a bit of a stretch, conjuring images of children grouped in the library eager for a Sunday afternoon romp with The Cat in the Hat. So the shingle outside Jennifer George-Palilonis' door instead reads assistant professor of journalism. Though, like that cat, she knows a lot of other tricks.

Like how to inspire students to create a first-of-its-kind-anywhere interactive newscast or develop a new, user-informed interface for delivering such innovative electronic programming and other enhanced functionality to handheld mobile devices such as the iPhone and iPod touch. Her latest diversion: a collaboration with MIT physicist John Belcher to visualize and thus better explain to students scientific phenomena such as electricity and magnetism.

"As a visual storyteller, I don’t need a degree in physics to help explain some of these concepts," says George-Palilonis, who earned her undergraduate degree in journalism graphics from Ball State (as well as an M.A. in composition and rhetoric from BSU in 2004) and is a veteran designer in newsrooms at the Detroit Free Press as well as the Chicago Sun-Times.

"But I can apply some journalistic storytelling and graphics techniques, made more powerful by emerging technology, to try to improve how many of these complex ideas are communicated."

Her culminating goal, Palilonis adds, is to develop a "research stream" investigating other ways that emerging media storytelling can be employed to produce new, dynamic, and ultimately more effective teaching and learning tools explaining other scientific principles and long term, perhaps, the basic precepts of other disciplines such as mathematics, economics, and engineering. Though already the project with Belcher (literally a rocket scientist, having worked more than 30 years tracking the Voyager missions for NASA) is garnering attention.

At a recent meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers, Palilonis reports that Belcher's presentation on the pair's prototype module received approving nods from physics teachers at all levels. During the subsequent  International Conference on the Future of the Book, Palilonis and Belcher also presented a paper that chronicles their collaboration, illustrating for another appreciative audience how professors of two very different disciplines can come together to develop teaching tools both creative and involving.

Next for the seemingly unlikely duo—she's in her 30s; he's in his 60s—is creating additional, enhanced multimedia modules for students in some of Belcher's more advanced physics classes at MIT. Soon after, Palilonis also hopes to initiate some learning outcome studies seeking to determine more precisely in what ways and to what extent the graphics-oriented approach to the often demanding subject has added to students' understanding.