June 2023Cali Biaggi is one of 17 faculty members (and the only librarian) from around the country to be invited to participate in the Digital Liberal Arts Summer Institute, sponsored by Transylvania University’s Bingham Program for Excellence in Teaching. The institute will take place June 25-28 in Lexington, KY. From the institute website:
"Focusing on our three pillars of the Digital Liberal Arts—digital fluencies, design thinking, and human-technology interaction—the institute will convene faculty from a variety of disciplines and liberal arts institutions in a series of seminars and expert-led workshops. The goal of these sessions is to advance a broader conversation about the role of technology in pedagogy and liberal education. [...] Through these readings and conversations, faculty will explore the ways in which digital fluencies, design thinking, and human-technology interaction are already in play in liberal arts education; moreover, they will consider how these concepts will shape the future of our students’ learning and the world they will come to inhabit."
Cali is very excited to bring back her experiences and ideas to share with colleagues.
November 2022Blake Colclasure was selected from a large and competitive applicant pool to be a 2023 Early Career Workshop Fellow for the Nielsen Center for the Liberal Arts. Blake will join a cohort of educators teaching at small liberal arts institutions from across the country for three on-site teaching workshops held at Eckerd College in Florida. According to the center, “workshop fellows reflect on their vocation, context, and teaching practices and develop teaching strategies that nurture transformative student learning,” while “building their capacity to understand and articulate the goals of a liberal arts education.” The award provides all travel expenditures and an honorarium. More information on the Nielsen Center for the Liberal Arts can be found at https://nielsencenter.eckerd.edu/
September 2022The Agribusiness Program is adding three new courses to the curriculum this academic year. Pete Poppert is developing the Introduction to Agribusiness course which will start in January and will be taught as both an online and in-person course. This is the first course from the Agribusiness Program to be offered in person on the Crete Campus. In addition, Pete is working with Adjunct Faculty, Ron Osborne, on the development of a cutting-edge course in Applied Agricultural Technology and Data Analytics. And lastly, Professor Julie Lee is developing an Agricultural Economics course. As part of the A.R. Kinney Endowed Fund for Business and Economics, Pete Poppert and undergraduate student, Sydney Erickson, researched the impact of student connectedness in online agribusiness courses. The research involved 18 months of data gathering, and during the summer Sydney analyzed the data and wrote a paper on the findings. Pete and Sydney will be presenting the results of the research in the coming months and will also submit the paper for publication.
Summer 2022Dr. William Whipple was the invited guest artist at the 2022 University of Iowa Summer Music Camp where he performed in recital, taught applied piano lessons, and led a piano pedagogy special topics class. Pre-college students from surrounding states (Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, and Missouri) as well as international students (Panama) were in attendance.
Website: Iowa Summer Music Camp Faculty Listing