Center for Teaching, Learning and Research

Please join us for lunch on Wednesday, April 4th, from 12 pm-1:30 pm in the CTLR Lounge for the first gathering in our Digital Fluencies series. Databases undergird almost every digital publishing project, platform, interface, and tool. How do we better understand what databases are—and what they can be—as a key aspect of the digital liberal arts? We’ll gather to explore the topic. Faculty, students, and staff at all levels are welcome to attend participate regardless of digital skills.

We increasingly live in an algorithmic society, our everyday lives shaped by interactions with Google searches, social media platforms, artificial intelligence software, and myriad devices and programs that rely on the execution of computational algorithms. Algorithms at once bake into their equations the assumptions and biases of their human makers and also take on lives of their own, for we now even have computational algorithms developing other algorithms. But what are algorithms, exactly? Is all thinking, computational or not, algorithmic in some manner?

9:00 – 9:30 -Registration & Light Breakfast – CTLR

9:30 – 10:45 - Mind Games: Teaching Hard Books and Big Events Through Role-Play, Workshop by Patrick Coby, Smith College
Davis FamilyLibrary105 A & B

11:00 – 12:15 - Panel Discussion 1: Inspiring Deep Student Engagement, Ellery Foutch (American Studies), Pete Johnson (Computer Science), Jim Ralph (History)
Davis Family Library 201

11:00 – 12:15 - The Table at Which a Community of Learners Gathers, Workshop by John Elder - CTLR

Keynote:


John Elder will focus on some of the ways in which the teacher, the interactions among students, and the subject-matter of a given class can all foster a vibrant, exciting educational experience.

In The Narrow Edge, winner of the 2016 Academies of Science Best Book Award, and the Rachel Carson Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists, Deborah Cramer accompanies small sandpipers along their extraordinary migration from the tip of South America up into their Arctic nesting grounds, exploring how their lives are intertwined with ours.

In The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux, Professor Cathy N. Davidson argues that the American university is stuck in the past—and shows how we can revolutionize it to prepare students for our age of constant change. Our current system of higher education dates to the period from 1865 to 1925, when the nation’s new universities created grades and departments, majors and minors, graduate and professional schools in an attempt to prepare young people for a world transformed by the telegraph and the Model T.

Have you considered applying to graduate school in the UK? Join Dean Lisa Gates for a discussion of how to apply for a British scholarship and what makes an ideal candidate. The deadline for the British nomination application is April 6, 2018. Detailed information is available at go.middlebury.edu/fellowships.

For Faculty

Presenter: Prof. Tara Affolter, Assistant Professor of Education Studies, Middlebury College
Monday, January 15, CTLR, 11:00-12:15, followed by lunch
Register online at http://sites.middlebury.edu/ctlrjan2018/portfolio/tara-affolter/

Join us on Tuesday, March 20th from 12:15-1:30pm for our next Behind the Scenes presentation.