Program

Monday June 27

9:00-10:00

  • Welcome: Introductions, Workshop Goals and Program
  • Developing Review Criteria: What constitutes a good exercise?

10:00-11:00 Familiarize Yourself with Exercises

11:00-12:00 Preparation for Activity Review

After taking a brief look at the participant activities, we will gather to discuss the following before entering into our extensive reviews:

  1. Having looked briefly at the exercises, how do you feel the review criteria will work? Do you have corrections or suggestions for revising the criteria?
  2. What are some of the key quantitative skills and concepts that we want students of surface processes or climate change to possess?
To discuss these, will break into two separate groups (climate change and surface processes). For question 2), we are interested in developing a list of the quantitative skills we think are essential for students of climate change and surface processes. Here we are referring not only to quantitative examples/equations unique to your discipline, but also more general quanititative skills with which a student should be competent. For instance: unit conversions, estimation, spectral analysis, etc. - those quantitative skills that might be used repeatedly in the discipline, but with which students may not have had enough practice or exposure before your upper level class. Our definitions of what constitutes a good exercise and the review criteria may be modified to incorporate some measure of whether the exercise is training students in these essential concepts.

The list of quantitative skills will be a working list, revisited later in the meeting. By the end of the meeting, we will try to create a final list of skills that can be posted for feedback on the web page.

12:00 Lunch: Informal Discussion "What do you want to get from this workshop?"

1:00-2:30 Review Activity 1 and Prepare Comments

2:30-3:00 Touching Base on Review Criteria

3:00-4:30 Review Activity 2 and Prepare Comments

4:30-5:30 Reflect on Reviewing and Review Criteria:
We will have a discussion based on our experiences with the reviews to capture our thoughts about the criteria and to consider the commonalities among activities. In particular, are there aspects we view as common strengths or weaknesses in activities. What advice do we have for authors regarding these common elements? How can the review criteria be used to encourage development of these strengths and avoidance of the weaknesses for authors in the future?
Following the discussion, reviewers will return reviews to authors and meet with them briefly.


Collect Road Check at 5:30

6:30 Dinner

Evening work as needed


Tuesday, June 28

9:00-10:30 Sharing and Presentations on Activities

10:30-12:00 Work on Activities

12:00 Lunch

1:00-2:00 Creating Activity Pages in the Content Management System

2:00-4:00 Work Time: complete revised activity and associated activity page

4:00-5:30 Key Concepts II: Thinking beyond the activities at hand

Now that we have reviewed the activities submitted by participants and have a sense for what topics are covered by the exercises we have on hand, we will once again discuss the idea of Key Concepts we'd like our students to be exposed to in our courses. This will build on the Key Concepts I session, but with different goals. We will discuss the following:

  1. What are some of the key quantitative skills and concepts identified earlier for which we need to develop exercises? Could our existing exercises be modified to incorporate these skills?
  2. Are there concepts or topics specific to our disciplines for which we need to find or develop quantitative exercises?

Once again, we will break into discipline groups. For question 2), we are interested in developing a list of dream exercises: quantitative labs, problem sets, etc. that illustrate a subject from our discipline that is essential for students to know and is quantitative in nature. For instance, the surface processes group might suggest an exercise illustrating the concept of stream power and channel erosion is needed, or the climate change group might suggest that an exercise illustrating the analysis and presentation of d18O curves is needed (note these two are efforts at illustrating the idea rather than actually being suggestions!). For each subject suggested, we will develop a brief sketch of the exercise and the background data and information needed to develop the exercise.

By the end of this session, we will have modified our list of key quantitative skills that we began the day before, and created a new working list of quantitative discipline-specific topics for which we would like to develop exercises.

6:30 Dinner

Evening work as needed


Wednesday, June 29

9:00-10:30 Reviewing activities

10:30-10:45 Meet with reviewer 1

10:45-11:00 Meet with reviewer 2

11:00-2:00

  • Make final revisions
  • Surfing for broader ideas

12:00 Lunch

2:00-3:00 Whole Group Discussion:

  • What else is needed? Activities, Overarching Pages
  • Where will they come from?: from the web, from colleagues, from our efforts
  • Organizing final work time

3:00-4:30 Work time

4:30-5:30 Finalize review criteria; reflect on workshop; review next steps; wrap up; evaluate and make the pages live.

6:30 Dinner