About Carleton College

Carleton_CollegeFounded in 1866, Carleton College is a small, private liberal arts college in the historic river town of Northfield, Minnesota. Best known for its academic excellence and warm, welcoming campus community, Carleton offers 37 majors and 15 concentrations in the arts, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences.

Carleton College is committed to providing a true liberal arts education, a curriculum that challenges our students to learn broadly and think deeply. Instead of training for one narrow career path, Carleton students develop the knowledge and skills to succeed in any walk of life.
Read More

LACOL DH panel at ACH 2023 – June 29

DH, Social Justice, and Liberal Arts: Developing an online, multi-campus DH course through the LACOL consortium

Thursday, June 29 at 5:15pm-5:45pm EDT (online)

Beth Fischer1, Mackenzie Brooks2, Liz Evans3, Austin Mason4, Nhora Lucía Serrano5, José Vergara6

1Williams College Museum of Art, United States of America; 2Washington & Lee University; 3Liberal Arts Collaborative for Digital Innovation (LACOL); 4Carleton College; 5Hamilton College; 6Bryn Mawr College

Through a unique collaboration across peer colleges, LACOL’s Digital Humanities: Social Justice Collections and Liberal Arts Curricula has fostered a prodigious environment of original, collaborative research, undertaken by students as part of an interdisciplinary online course. First taught in 2021, the course will be offered for the third time during summer 2023.

Over eight weeks, the team of instructors introduces students from LACOL’s eleven partner schools to ways of working with digital humanities data, digital modes of humanistic inquiry, and specific approaches including text analysis and geographic analysis. Students work in teams, closely mentored by the instructors, to implement projects that use digital methods to explore historically and socially relevant topics drawn from their engagement with multiple campus archive collections, such as representations of BIPOC at PWIs in the 1960s and the documentation of women’s suffrage and environmental/climate movements across campuses.

In this presentation, the teaching team, course development collaborators, and the director of LACOL share how this course was developed and implemented, and the ways the partner schools have managed handoffs and transitions between their own institutions and this shared collaborative curriculum. We will address key components for the course’s success, especially how the model developed under LACOL might be enacted among institutions that do not have such a pre-existing framework and how the course has sparked ongoing student engagement with DH and social justice topics, and led to the development of new courses at partner institutions.

ACH Session #6B: Perspectives on Critical Pedagogy

https://ach2023.ach.org/

Video Creation and the Science of Learning – tips from D. Hurlbert

Dann Hurlbert, Carleton College’s Media & Design Specialist and long-time friend of LACOL, shares three new video guides, drawing on the popular textbook e-Learning and the Science of Instruction by by Ruth Covlin Clark & Richard E. Mayer.  Visit Carleton Academic Technology blog for more tips from Dann and the Carleton ATS team: https://blogs.carleton.edu/academictechnology.

Video 1:  Making Video Work Well

In this short video, one of three in a series on the textbook, ELearning and the Science of Instruction by Ruth Covlin Clark & Richard E. Mayer, Dann Hurlbert digs into how these important concepts should impact instructional video production. The book is an in-depth, research-based look into best practices surrounding using audio and visuals in e-learning. In this first video, Dann relays how best to use the dual channels (audio and visuals) to make his or her instructional videos more engaging and more effective. (See full post.)

 

Video 2:  Talk is Cheap

In this short video, Dann Hurlbert digs into the textbook, ELearning and the Science of Instruction by Ruth Covlin Clark & Richard E. Mayer. This time, Dann relays why audio alone is often less effective online–and what simple steps an instructor can do to make his or her instructional content more engaging and more effective. (See full post.)

Read More

Digital Agility and Liberal Arts – collab highlights on the EDUCAUSE Transforming Higher Ed

Digital Agility: Embracing a Holistic Approach to Digital Literacy in the Liberal Arts

A group of institutions is collaborating to identify what digital agility means in the liberal arts and to encourage the use of that definition to guide institutional initiatives that involve digital agility …

Read More

Introducing CHIANTI – language resources from LACOL

visit chiantiWhat are some of the biggest rewards of learning a second language? As a student, what do you know now that you wish you had known as you began learning your language at college? As faculty, what one piece of advice would you give to students as they are about to start their language learning at college? What are models or maps that integrate all aspects of language learning?

These are just some of the questions to be explored through CHIANTI (https://chianti.lacol.net) a new shared resource for students and teachers of language at the college level.

Over the past year, faculty and language learning experts from across LACOL have been collaborating to develop the CHIANTI concept and prototype.  For students, an initial set of videos are posted that feature LACOL language instructors and students reflecting on the college-level language-learning experience. For language teachers, a self-curated online digital library of shareable tips and teaching resources is developing.

As an ongoing initiatve of the LACOL Language Instruction Working Group, the Chianti site  and team invites contributions from LACOL language instructors in the areas of: General tips for college-level language learning, including research on adult second-language (L2) acquisition. 2) English grammar for L2 learners including models or maps that integrate all aspects of language, 3) Phonology, and 4) An interactive glossary of grammatical and linguistic terms from which instructors can draw for their own pedagogical purposes and to which they can contribute their own definitions and examples. 

Go to CHIANTI

Online Modules for Quantitative Skills: Exploring Adaption and Adoption Across LACOL

Year 1 LACOL IUSE revisedLACOL has been awarded an IUSE grant from National Science Foundation for a project titled, “Online modules for quantitative skill building: Exploring adaption and adoption across a consortium”. This three-year project will research the adaption and adoption of face-to-face and online pedagogies for teaching quantitative skills (QS) with the aim of improving understanding of best practices for the development of online modules to support students’ QS development.

The project proposal was developed by Melissa Eblen-Zayas and Janet Russell of Carleton College and Laura Muller and Jonathan Leamon of Williams College based lessons learned from the QLAB pilot project.

Additional information about the project, including details about the project advisory board, a needs assessment survey for faculty, and opportunities for faculty and staff to get involved, will be be shared later this summer and into the fall through the QS Working Group Forum.

CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE for ongoing news!

FACING INSTRUCTIONAL VIDEOS

How important is it for instructors to include their own faces when creating instructional videos? The answer might surprise you. Dann Hurlbert, Carleton College’s Media & Design Guru (and an actor, director, and inventor of the Little Prompter) leans on research and his own expertise to offer guidance.

Read More

CIVIC ENGAGEMENT AND INSTRUCTIONAL VIDEO

Dann Hurlbert and Palmar Alvarez-Blanco at Carleton College recently co-taught Spanish 206, a course focused on developing language skills with native speakers and fostering civic engagement–while also giving something tangible back to the community. Students in this course worked with under-represented local organizations to help them create a “participatory videos” (short documentaries) to help tell each organization’s story. In addition to having students create video as a portion of their coursework, Dann also used instructional videos to teach and guide the learning. Dann created a successful Moodle-based micro-course that can now be easily replicated and plugged into a multitude of courses in which the faculty member hopes to tie Civic Engagement with his/her own course content, and video production.

Here’s a short video that offers a peek into the course and this engaging instructional method:

*Note: this sample video includes short selections from the following films: Bacon and God’s Wrath by Sol Friedman and Sarah Clifford-Rashotte; Godka Circa by Antonio Tibaldi and Alex Lora; Damon at 86th Street by Emily Sheskin, and the Price of Certainty by Daniele Anastasion.

For more information on how you and your institution can use this technique and these materials to foster civic engagement in your courses, contact Dann at dhurlbert@carleton.edu

Digital Competencies and Digital Studies – LACOL 2018

Session: Digital Competencies and Digital Studies
Discussion Leaders:

  • Gina Siesing, Chief Information Officer and Constance A. Jones Director of Libraries, Bryn Mawr College
  • Austin Mason, Assistant Director of the Humanities Center for the Digital Humanities and Lecturer in History, Carleton College

Date/Time: Thursday, May 31, 9:30am-10:30am
Location: Weitz 236
Pre-workshop activity/instructions: Group annotation of the BMC Framework

A. Mason, Carleton College

To build upon foundations laid at the Think Tank on Digital Competencies at Davidson College last fall, an interactive session exploring digital competencies and digital studies across the curriculum will be featured at the the 2018 Summer Workshop.

This discussion will focus on how digital competencies and digital studies programs connect with faculty priorities and practices for teaching and learning in the physical and virtual classroom and how digital competencies support and relate to other learning goals.

To approach these questions, Siesing and Mason will guide:

  • An overview of Bryn Mawr College’s digital competencies framework as one model to stimulate exploration of campus-wide digital literacy programs in the liberal arts, integrating faculty, staff and student comments from the pre-workshop annotation activity.
  • A look at Carleton College’s visioning around curricular pathways for Digital Studies.
  • Discussion of related initiatives across liberal arts colleges, to be continued beyond the session.

As input into this discussion, all workshop attendees are invited and encouraged to share reflections in advance by joining in the Group annotation of the BMC Framework.

Active Learning – Strategies & Spaces

Workshop Session: Active Learning – Strategies & Spaces

Session Leaders:

  • Michael Jones, Director of Language and Media Centers, Swarthmore College
  • Ashley Turner, Academic Technologist, Swarthmore College

Description: The purpose of this session is to start a discussion about Active Learning Spaces at Liberal Arts Colleges, and explore if there is an opportunity and mechanism through LACOL to share approaches and lessons about the design, technology and support of these classrooms.  

Come to share insights on experimental, flexible learning spaces on your campus.  What is the intent of those space?  How are they used?  How are they assessed?

 

 

Language Skills Diagnostic Dashboard: 2018 Faculty Workshop and Pilot for French

C. Born, Carleton College, presents at ELI in Jan 2018
C. Born, Carleton College, presenting at ELI
Jan 2018

To advance the LACOL Language Skills Diagnostic Dashboard Framework, a three-day hands on-workshop will be held in spring 2018 at Swarthmore College, leading to a pilot study of the emerging prototype in French.  

The workshop and pilot are the next step in a sequence that began with the Language Skills Hack-a-thon at Swarthmore College in May 2017 and the Dashboard Prototype Technical Workshop at Carleton College in October 2017.  With groundwork laid at these previous events, the team is well positioned to put forward a working prototype in French that can be piloted with faculty and students for placement and advising in the summer/fall of 2018. Read More

Digital Competencies – annotate the Bryn Mawr Framework

The activity described below is linked to the Digital Competencies session at the 2018 LACOL Workshop

The concept of digital competencies (also known as digital fluencies, literacies or dexterities) reflects the need for students to develop digital skills and critical perspectives as lifelong learners prepared for scholarship, work and life in the 21st century.  Recently, Bryn Mawr College has developed a digital competencies framework focused on these five areas:

  • Digital Survival Skills
  • Digital Communication
  • Data Management and Preservation
  • Data Analysis and Presentation
  • Critical Design, Making, and Development

Bryn Mawr’s framework served as the basis for the excellent Think Tank on Digital Competencies last fall at Davidson College which attracted a vibrant group of faculty, librarians and technologists from across the liberal arts.

Digital Competencies Session at the LACOL Summer Workshop

For faculty and staff across LACOL to build upon foundations laid at the Think Tank, an interactive session exploring digital competencies across the curriculum will be held at the 2018 Summer Workshop.  This discussion will focus on how digital competencies connect with faculty priorities and practices for teaching and learning in the physical and virtual classroom, and how digital competencies support and relate to higher order learning goals.  

Pre-Workshop Activity – Group Annotation of the BMC Framework

As input to the workshop discussion, we are inviting groups of faculty, staff and students to annotate a copy of the Bryn Mawr Digital Competencies Framework using a collaborative annotation tool called Hypothesis.  This tool is easy to use and allows everyone in a group to add and comment on annotations overlayed on top of any web document through a shared view. Shared annotation for the BMC Framework can help to reveal key trends and themes that will serve as a starting point for face to face discussion at the workshop.

Read More

Language Skills Dashboard – drill down on data visualization

UPDATE: Join Carly Born for her Dashboard Poster Presentation at ELI this January

As a sequel to last summer’s Hack-a-thon Toward a Collaborative Language Diagnostics and Refresher Framework at Swarthmore College, a dedicated group of language learning technologists and Carleton’s student “Data Squad” gathered this fall at Carleton College to work on platform requirements for a dashboard prototype.  Led by Michael Jones  and Carly Born, this two-day mini-hack-a-thon focused on solving technical pieces of the puzzle that will enable the flow of useful data from a language skills diagnostic test into a data-rich visual display. 

LI Framwork banner

The dashboard is just one piece our faculty’s vision for the shared framework drafted at the meeting last May. Elements include a language skill map, a self-assessment survey, diagnostic/placement tests (question banks) and the dashboard that can help faculty visualize the data for better placement and advising.

Language Learning Skills Map / Top Level Categories:

  • Grammar
  • Comprehension
  • Discourse
  • Vocabulary

Diagnostic visualizations also may point to trends in language skills development within and across our liberal arts programs and language curricula.  A user-friendly dashboard tool can ultimately help students gain feedback on their skill levels and close gaps as they traverse the liberal arts language sequence. Read More

LACOL Hack-a-thon Toward a Collaborative Quantitative Skills Support Framework

See also: QLAB project launch https://lacol.net/qlab-launch

This January, LACOL’s Quantitative Skills working group held a 3­-day intensive workshop (also known as a hack­-a­-thon) to explore a shared framework for review of online modules designed to strengthen students’ quantitative skills (QS) and quantitative reasoning (QR). The face-to-face event was designed by a core team of faculty and technologists from the QS group.  The workshop was hosted at Carleton College, with support from the Office of the President, Perlman Center for Learning and Teaching, and Office of Academic Technology.

Click for the Slideshow
Click for the Slideshow

Goals for the LACOL QS hack-a-thon:

  1. Identify aspects of existing QS/QR curricula, frameworks, and methods to be adapted as an online module/program by participating colleges. The goal for the collaboration is to enhance, not replace, local offerings.
  2. Plan for participating campuses to pilot one of the frameworks and agree to a process for assessment and sharing results among campuses.
  3. Document workshop outcomes and recommendations to share with colleagues across the liberal arts.

Location: Carleton College

Dates: Jan 9-11, 2017 (live blogging)

Workshop Outline: click here

Special Guest: Jim Rolf, Shizuo Kakutani Lecturer in Mathematics at Yale University; lead for Yale Online Experiences for Yale Scholars (ONEXYS)

Workshop Participants: list

Background:

Throughout the year, the QS working group has been exploring ideas for a collaborative framework to curate or build online tools and resources – including metadata on related pedagogical practices – to support students with QS/QR. Earlier this year, QS group members contributed to a joint exercise informally titled “What do we mean by quantitative skills?” to generate a shared list of key skills across the quantitative disciplines that students will need to have or acquire early in their academic careers. This common skills list provides input into strategies for helping students identify and close gaps.
Read More

Live from the LACOL QS Hack-a-thon at Carleton College (Jan 9-11)

Welcome! Here is a slideshow and live tweets from the #LACOLQS hack-a-thon, Jan 9-11 on the campus of Carleton College.

Colleagues with wide-ranging expertise and disciplinary interests from seven LACOL schools spent three days sharing, working and learning side-by-side at the hack-a-thon. Together, the team developed an initial draft and prototypes of a collaborative framework for creating/curating and evaluating online QS/QR modules that can boost students success and improve access. With inspiration from special guest Jim Rolf from Yale ONEXYS, we delved deeply into collaborative strategies for design, implementation and measuring effectiveness. A grand time was had by all … and more to come! (Read more about the project.)

Webinar: Carleton Cube Debrief (October 19)

Meeting:

Debrief on Carleton’s CUBE pilot (online summer bridge program for quantitative skills)

On October 19, LACOL held a webinar with special guests Melissa Eblen-Zayas and Janet Russell from Carleton College.  In this one-hour session, Melissa and Janet shared their experiences running the first iteration of the ‘Carleton Undergraduate Bridge Experience’ or CUBE, a new online summer bridge program designed to support entering students with quantitative skills and reasoning.  Carleton’s creative approach to developing CUBE riveted the audience at the June LACOL workshop as the pilot was just getting underway.  Now in this “debrief” session, you can hear all about what went into running the program in the first round, how students responded, and the lessons that were learned.  The meeting was held in Zoom with ample opportunity for Q&A and discussion.  Contact Liz Evans (eevans@haverford.edu) for more information.

Special Guests:

  • Melissa Eblen-Zayas, Associate Professor of Physics and Director of the Perlman Center for Learning and Teaching, Carleton College
  • Janet Russell, Director of Academic Technology, Carleton College

Related Resources:

Date:

Wednesday, Oct 19

screen-shot-2016-10-19-at-2-22-05-pm