Teaching Mineralogy: A Digital Collection of Teaching Materials

Announcing New Content for Faculty and Students

New module on Teaching Phase Equilibria

This web-based learning resource provides a comprehensive introduction to heterogeneous phase equilibria in the geosciences. This site contains the essential background information needed to understand phase equilibria, links to related resources, examples of worked problems, and teaching activities.

Some of the highlights of this module include:

Descriptions, definitions and worked examples of standard topics like the Clapeyron Equation or deriving and balancing metamorphic reactions
Phase diagrams for teaching, which contains pdf files of common phase diagrams, plus animated versions that take students step-by-step through the reactions
User-friendly tutorials for modern thermodynamic modeling programs such as ThermoCalc, MELTS, TWQ and Perplex.

New module on Geochemical Instrumentation and Analysis

This project provides an on-line tutorial of the analytical techniques commonly used to characterize geological materials. The goal is to help novices (such as students or scientists working out of their field) to gain an understanding of mineralogical, petrological and geochemical analytical techniques. This module covers X-ray crystallography, electron microbeam, elemental analysis, mass spectrometers and more. See the entire list of techniques covered on this site.

This is a collection of resources for teaching mineralogy at the undergraduate level. These digital teaching materials are designed for faculty to use while designing new courses, enhancing existing courses, or simply looking for new ideas in teaching mineralogy.

Students will also find this collection helpful for finding supplemental study materials and for doing research projects in mineralogy.

This collection is intended to build upon the 1996 Teaching Mineralogy workshop. A volume of teaching materials was published as a result of that workshop, but it exists only in print form. [Brady et al., 1997] This module will be the digital follow-up to that original collection of materials.

Within this site you will find:

Internet resources - a collection of useful web-based learning materials, browseable by topics.
Teaching activities - Classroom-ready exercises, problem sets and projects, complete with handouts, instructor notes and supporting materials.
Journal articles that are especially useful for teaching mineralogy at the undergraduate level.
A place to contribute your own teaching materials, course information, articles and your favorite mineralogy URLs.

April 2007 volume of Elements Magazine on teaching mineralogy, petrology and geochemistry

To complement this volume, we have developed the Elements Bibliography that includes an extensive collection of articles, teaching activities, on-line resources, and related information on the scholarship of teaching.

Mineralogy-petrology-geochemistry community discussion

Visit the discussion board to submit your recommendations to identify the most significant contributions made in these fields to the geosciences, the larger scientific enterprise and to society. Post a new topic or add to existing topics to create a threaded archive to demonstrate the relevance, importance and centrality of mineralogy, petrology and geochemistry to the geosciences and beyond.