Event Title

How Micro-grants Build Peer-peer Intellectual Community

Presenter Information

Aneesah Ettress

Location

CB1-303

Start Date

4-11-2017 1:45 PM

End Date

4-11-2017 3:00 PM

Description

The Occidental College Center for Digital Liberal Arts has recently launched its first co-curricular Peer Learning Program. The PLP has the capacity to build a culture of open learning and address issues of access and equity on Occidental's campus both in its interaction with the broader community and within the program itself. We have 60+ peer learning mentors across 7 interdisciplinary teams, from critical making to subject advising. One of the key ways in which the Peer Learning Program addresses issues of access and equity is through its micro-grant initiative. The micro-grant initiative offers small grants to Oxy students for the purchase of equipment and supplies related to projects that advance the digital liberal arts. Students apply for these grants in the Fall and Spring and work on their projects over the semester. At the end of the semester students return the equipment to the CDLA (making what they purchased available to more students in the future) and they provide a final report on their project. Micro-grants are a new facet of our program, where we can clearly see the positive impact it has on the peer mentors and those students that are supported by the Peer Learning Program. In an 8 minute soapbox talk and 15 minute project demo we would like to share with the DH community how micro-grants build peer-peer intellectual community at a liberal arts college.

The 8 minute soapbox talk will feature an overview of the Peer Learning Program and the micro-grants initiative. Specifically, we will detail how the application process itself addresses issues of access and equity at Occidental College. I will then discuss the various projects that were supported by the micro-grant initiative and the ways in which peer-peer intellectual community was facilitated. For this talk I will need the ability to move through a powerpoint presentation, standard projection equipment in the form of a desktop computer or HDMI output to screen. After the 8 minute soapbox talk we will move into a 15 minute student project demo that is supported by the micro-grant initiative. This project addresses the theme of digital cultural heritage and hegemony. Five Occidental students have taken it upon themselves to preserve a portion of the Moore Lab bird collection, which features 65,000 American bird specimens (mostly from Latin America and Mexico), using Photogrammetry and Virtual Reality. The micro-grant initiative and Peer Learning Program has provided, space, equipment, and support to facilitate this homegrown student project. One student from the team will provide a 5 minute explanation of the project itself followed by a 5 minute demo of interacting with the bird specimens in a virtual reality environment. There will be 5 minutes left for participants to interact with the bird specimens as well. We will bring all of our own equipment with us. All we need is space and access to multiple outlets.