Outdoor Classroom Workshop Will Be Held on July 28-30 at Beloit College

ACM faculty in the field sciences – geology, ecology, biology, environmental science, and archaeology – are invited to participate in the Outdoor Classroom II, a workshop to develop and disseminate field-based teaching activities using mobile computing technology.

The organizers, geologists Sue Swanson from Beloit College and Jeff Clark from Lawrence University, have structured the gathering as a working group in which faculty will share curricular successes, offer technical advice to each other, and expand resources available to ACM faculty in the field sciences.

Beloit College will host the workshop on July 28-30, 2010 at its new LEED Platinum-certified Science Center on the campus in Beloit, Wisconsin. The workshop is supported by funding from the ACM Faculty Career Enhancement (FaCE) Project and the NITLE Instructional Innovation Fund, which will cover lodging and meals for faculty. The participants’ colleges are responsible for travel costs.

Swanson and Clark noted that new technologies – such as global positioning systems (GPS), mobile computers, and wireless communications – have the potential to revolutionize the way field-based science courses are conceived and delivered. Faculty from across the ACM who are using such technologies can be an important resource for each other in tapping that potential.

Outdoor Classroom participants will be expected to bring field exercises or lab activities that they have used or are developing for courses. Over the two days of the workshop, the faculty will break into smaller groups to discuss and critique each other’s activities and to develop recommendations for additional web resources of value to faculty teaching field sciences.

As a final step, participants will refine their activities and prepare web-accessible versions, along with supporting materials, to make available to colleagues through the Outdoor Classroom website hosted by the Science Education Resource Center (SERC) at Carleton College. ACM is working with SERC to disseminate the results of activities funded by FaCE Project activities to a wide audience of educators.

Faculty interested in participating should contact Sue Swanson (swansons@beloit.edu; 608-363-2132) as soon as possible for more information and to register for the workshop.

This workshop builds on last year’s Outdoor Classroom I workshop, also organized by Clark and Swanson, which focused on the types of mobile digital technology available and ways that faculty could use the technology in field-based courses. Faculty are welcome at the Outdoor Classroom II whether or not they attended the previous workshop.

This is a revised date and location for the Outdoor Classroom II workshop, which was originally scheduled to take place in late June 2010 at Lawrence’s conference facility in Door County, WI.

The ACM Faculty Career Enhancement (FaCE) Project is supported by generous funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.