Scalar is a born-digital publishing platform developed at USC that allows the integration and annotation of media with long form text. Faculty and advanced students will learn the basics of developing a project in Scalar from project set up, to intention, voice, and organizing your content, to using Scalar for collaborative class projects.

This FLC provides ongoing support to Mellon Undergraduate Research Faculty and Post-Docs from the CDLA and Special Collections.

The primary goals of the FLC are 1) to assess what skills students need to learn in order to be competent GIS users and determine how these skills relate to the existing geology and biology curricula, and 2) to develop or redesign test labs for biology and geology courses. This FLC will build upon the work of two previous FLCs on the use of tablet computers in field courses by addressing GIS and mapping needs at a curricular level.

The goals of this FLC are to: Create a community for learning the basics of Python through weekly meetings to provide discussion, support, and exploration of the programing language. Develop course-specific material for teaching Python and/or for using Python as a learning tool in the classroom and for student research. Discuss broader curricular goals as they relate to departmental and college needs.

As faculty develop multi-modal, interdisciplinary assignments, they may often feel they are charting new territory in terms of how to address students’ aesthetic choices and sensibilities in projects that require craft, making, visualization and/or sound. In addition to our substantive interests in trauma, identity, social location, healing, and community, we will explore pragmatic and pedagogical questions of how to scaffold assignments while enabling and evaluating students’ creative practices.  Furthermore, we will engage in study as to the ways in which archival materials give voice to, and build a sense of identity amongst, communities as well as individuals. 

In this FLC, faculty who currently use “clickers” (aka audience response systems, such as i>clicker, Socrative, or Poll Everywhere) or faculty who want to learn more about using clickers will meet to: share ideas with colleagues on how to use clickers in the classroom and/or to assess student learning; talk through the benefits and drawbacks of different systems, with the possibility of a permanent set-up of systems in one or two classrooms; and learn about the integration of clickers with Moodle.

This FLC brings together faculty and community partners to reflect on how we gather, share, and publicize data together. Participants will 1) consider how we can make use of open data in academic and public contexts 2) engage in hands on workshops with open data repositories, data exploration tools, and data visualization tools 3) examine the economic, political, and educational implications of open data on knowledge production within and beyond the academy.

As many of us consider the merits of teaching with visual materials and asking our students to produce arguments in a visual vernacular, we might reflect on how such an engagement with these tools and techniques demands specific forms of critical visual fluency. Framed broadly in order to account for a range of disciplinary perspectives, this Faculty Learning Community will consider how visual materials should be contextualized in the classroom; how their use introduces questions of citation, attribution, and intellectual property rights; how texts and data sets might be visualized; and how student use of visual materials might be taught and assessed.