Street Rigor: Community Learning in the Liberal Arts

This essay was originally written for an online collection of articles on liberal arts in urban contexts, but it has not been formally published. The beginning and ending discuss community learning as a specific pedagogic approach in a liberal arts context. I\u27ve revised it for our retreat not to advocate for community service learning (though I do regard CL as a Good Thing), but rather to air the speculations about the nature of the liberal arts -- inspired by Hannah Arendt and John Dewey -- that arise in the latter part of the paper, beginning in section III (p. 6). In my opinion, much of the public discussion of higher education (for example, in Arum and Roksa\u27s Academically Adrift) is distorted by a commodifiction of knowledge, where knowledge is regarded as a Thing that can be transferred from teacher to student (the banking model criticized by Paolo Freire), and where community is construed as a sort of container in which students and faculty are housed. The alternative Deweyan view focuses on the activities of discovery, learning, and common purpose which are shared by all participants in college life

The Musical Structure of Time in the Brain: Repetition, Rhythm, and Harmony in fMRI During Rest and Passive Movie Viewing

© Copyright © 2020 Lloyd. Space generally overshadows time in the construction of theories in cognitive neuroscience. In this paper, we pivot from the spatial axes to the temporal, analyzing fMRI image series to reveal structures in time rather than space. To determine affinities among global brain patterns at different times, core concepts in network analysis (derived from graph theory) were applied temporally, as relations among brain images at every time point during an fMRI scanning epoch. To explore the temporal structures observed through this adaptation of network analysis, data from 180 subjects in the Human Connectome Project were examined, during two experimental conditions: passive movie viewing and rest. The temporal brain, like the spatial brain, exhibits a modular structure, where “modules” are intermittent (distributed in time). These temporal entities are here referred to as themes. Short sequences of themes – motifs – were studied in sequences from 4 to 11 s in length. Many motifs repeated at constant intervals, and are therefore rhythmic; rhythms, converted to frequencies, were often harmonic. We speculate that the structure and interaction of these global oscillations underwrites the capacity to experience and navigate a world which is both recognizably stable and noticeably changing at every moment – a temporal world. In its temporal structure, this brain-constituted world resembles music

Turning on the heat: ecological response to simulated warming in the sea

Significant warming has been observed in every ocean, yet our ability to predict the consequences of oceanic warming on marine biodiversity remains poor. Experiments have been severely limited because, until now, it has not been possible to manipulate seawater temperature in a consistent manner across a range of marine habitats. We constructed a "hot-plate'' system to directly examine ecological responses to elevated seawater temperature in a subtidal marine system. The substratum available for colonisation and overlying seawater boundary layer were warmed for 36 days, which resulted in greater biomass of marine organisms and a doubling of space coverage by a dominant colonial ascidian. The "hot-plate'' system will facilitate complex manipulations of temperature and multiple stressors in the field to provide valuable information on the response of individuals, populations and communities to environmental change in any aquatic habitat

Lessons Learned from Teaching MOOCs at Liberal Arts Colleges

Five years ago, the New York Times declared 2012 to be the “Year of the MOOC” (Pappano 2012). Although research universities led the movement, several liberal arts colleges (most notably Wellesley, Colgate, Davidson, Hamilton, and Wesleyan) climbed aboard the bandwagon that promoted massive open online courses as a grand experiment to reshape higher education, while faculty elsewhere (such as Amherst) voted to stay off (Kolowich 2012, Rivard 2013, Straumsheim 2015). When our institution, Trinity College, partnered with edX in 2014 and began to launch courses on the TrinityX platform, each of us decided to go along for the ride and explore this new terrain, while remaining skeptical of the hype. Now we share reflections from our journeys. Both presenters have designed and taught edX courses for dual purposes: 1) to freely expand education for a global community of online learners 2) to supplement instruction for existing face-to-face courses at our liberal arts college Dan Lloyd created his non-credit edX course, “The Conscious Mind: A Philosophical Road Trip,” which he blended into his for-credit Trinity course, Philosophy 374 Minds and Brains (cross-listed with Neuroscience) in Spring 2016 and 2017. https://www.edx.org/course/conscious-mind-philosophical-road-trip-trinityx-t004x-0 Jack Dougherty and contributors created his non-credit edX course and open-access book, “Data Visualization for All,” which he blended into his for-credit Data Visualization internship seminar in Spring 2017. https://www.edx.org/course/data-visualization-all-trinityx-t005x http://DataVizForAll.org Dan Lloyd’s presentation: Being massive, open, and online, a MOOC affords the possibility of spreading the life-enriching ideals of the liberal arts to an audience that cannot access the expensive, elite, and localized resources of a residential college like Bryn Mawr, Trinity (where I teach), or Oberlin (my alma mater). But a) Will MOOCs come to embody liberal ideals? And b) Can they? Regarding (a), in their course offerings, publicity, and platform limitations, EdX and Coursera promote a vision of higher education that is technical, instrumental, and intellectually authoritarian. Regarding (b), the decentered, asynchronous, and relatively impersonal MOOC format presents pedagogic challenges to the liberal arts mission of promoting curiosity, empathy, and open-minded inquiry. In this presentation, I hope to present some ideas for retooling the MOOC toward a free and transnational education that promotes the ideals of the liberal arts. The examples will include small bits of my own MOOC, offered to spark ideas among those of us who might be pondering MOOC creation: What can be taught? And how? Jack Dougherty’s presentation: The online MOOC marketplace forces small colleges to compete with large research universities that can more efficiently create conventional online courses with high-quality video production. Liberal arts colleges are not likely to win at their game. Instead, we should rethink our use of web technologies to focus on what we do well: engaging students in our face-to-face communities as co-researchers, co-authors, and co-instructors for open-access books with online course components. My presentation will offer ideas on collaborating with liberal arts students as active producers, rather than mere consumers, of online knowledge, with examples drawn from http://DataVizForAll.org

Feminist Scholarship Review: Women and Philosophy

Published from 1991 through 2007 at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, the Feminist Scholarship Review is a literary journal that describes women\u27s experiences around the world. FSR began as a review of feminist scholarly material, but evolved into a journal for poetry and short storie

Models designed to efficiently allocate irrigation water use based on crop response to soil moisture stress

May 1977.Bibliography: pages 50-51

Soil Testing: Field, Sample and Laboratory Variability

Soil testing has advanced as a science and has become a tool widely used in making fertilizer recommendations. One of the basic components for ensuring reliability of recommendations is calibration of soil test results to determine the proper match of fertilizer recommendations with the soil test level for each nutrient and crop. Generally, calibration has been accomplished on small plot areas and is quite accurate. Even though there is nutrient variability within small areas, the potential for variability is much greater on a field basis. An important factor in making reliable fertilizer recommendations is the assumption that the soil sample itself accurately represents a field. Large variations in fertility levels and pH within a field can result in poor recommendations. Therefore, the nutrient variability within a field is of interest and importance. In some cases, the nutrient variability within a field can be caused by a number of things such as soil erosion and deposition, combining of fields, past history, fertilization and manure application patterns, soil types and other factors. Large variability within a field has been proven to cause variable yields. Soil test records from many fields over a number of years show that the extent of soil test variability is dependent on the field. Because of this, some fields show little change in soil test levels from year to year while other fields show large changes in the nutrient status from year to year. Such large yearly changes can come from a combination of primarily four sources: 1) Variability in the field as described above; 2) How the soil sample is taken (number of cores, depth, time of year, etc.); 3) Quality control within the laboratory (the capability of the lab to reproduce its results); and 4) Fertilizer applied during the year and time of soil sampling relative to fertilizer application and crop growth. We have closely monitored a field for a number of years to evaluate the effect of these factors on making lime and fertilizer recommendations

Canola: A New Cash Crop for Kentucky

For the past few years, Kentucky farmers have become more interested in alternative cash crops for their farming operations. One such crop that is starting to receive attention is Canola. Classified as an oil crop, Canola is a type of oilseed rape. Rape is a member of the mustard family and is closely related to turnip. cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli and mustards. It is a cool-season annual and an important oilseed crop in many parts of the world that is used for both human consumption and industrial purposes. Major rapeseed production areas are in Europe and Canada. The seed contains approximately 40- 45% oil content (dry basis) and 35% protein (oil-free dry basis). Two products are made from processed rapeseed; an oil that has industrial or edible uses and a high protein meal which can be used in animal feed. There are two types of rape. One type is used for industrial purposes and sometimes called industrial rape. The other is Canola which is used for human and animal consumption. The oil from the varieties of industrial rape contains a high amount of erucic acid (50% or more) and is not suitable for human or animal consumption. It is used in the rubber industry, textiles, detergents, leather, plastics and special lubricants. The meal from these varieties contains high levels of glucosinolates which make it unsuitable for livestock consumption. The current Canola varieties were made possible by breeding improvements which greatly reduced the undesirable components in rapeseed (erucic acid and glucosinolates) and made it suitable for human and animal consumption. The name given to this type of rapeseed is Canola , which is an international registered trademark of the Canola Council of Canada and the name used to identify the modern rapeseed varieties known as double low with 2% or less erucic acid content and less than 30 micromoles of glucosinolates per gram of oil-free meal. One of the strong selling points for Canola oil is its very low saturated fat level and favorable mixture of mono-and polyunsaturated fats. Like other vegetable oils, it contains no cholesterol. Many feel the edible rapeseed oil market will improve as new vegetable oil products made from rapeseed continue to be developed. In addition, there are strong foreign markets, particularly in Europe and Japan, with demand on the increase. The Canola meal is 35% protein and has an economic worth of about 703 the value of soybean meal (44% protein). The value of the meal is also limited by its high fiber and low lysine content