Trinity College is a private liberal arts college in Hartford, Connecticut. Founded in 1823, it is the second-oldest college in the state of Connecticut after Yale University. Coeducational since 1969, the college enrolls 2,300 students.
How can we strengthen sustainability? By empowering individuals and communities to transform and balance dynamic natural resources, economic prosperity, and healthy populations.In this course, you’ll explore productive and disruptive social, ecological, and economic intersections – the “triple bottom line.” You’ll investigate a spectrum of global, national, regional, municipal and personal relationships that are increasing resiliency. Most importantly, you’ll learn how to effectively locate your interests, and to leverage optimistic change within emerging 21st century urban environments.This course will describe fundamental paradigm shifts that are shaping sustainability. These include connectivity, diversity, citizen engagement, collaboration source tracing, mapping, transportation, and integrative, regenerative design. We will take examples from cities around the globe; making particular use of the complex evolution of site-specific conditions within the Connecticut River watershed. In addition we will present tools and strategies that can be utilized by individuals, communities, and corporations to orchestrate effective and collective change.Each week, lessons will highlight the significance of clean water as a key indication of ecosystem, community and human health. Learners will be asked to investigate and share information about their local environment.Finally, we will note the impact of such disruptive forces as industrial pollution, changing governance, privatization of public services, mining of natural resources, public awareness, and climate change. A fundamental course goal will be to characterize indicators of economic prosperity and happiness that relate to environmental sustainability – and the capacity of individuals to create change.
In this education and teacher training course we will explore effective teaching methods for biology. We will emphasize approaches proven to be effective and show you how to implement them. We will also give you the opportunity to reflect on your own teaching experience and exchange ideas and share challenges with other learners in the course.We will begin by looking at the most common method of teaching science, the lecture. We’ll discuss what the lecture method does well and look at data that illustrates when it is less effective. You will hear highly successful teachers talk about their experience with lecture and how they modified their lecture time to more actively engage students. We’ll investigate creating learning objectives and how they can be used to communicate your expectations to students. You will practice writing your own learning objectives and see how they can streamline exam construction. We’ll look at a variety of ways to include active learning during class time, discuss how active learning strategies support your learning objectives, and give you practice developing learning activities for biology topics you find challenging to teach. Lastly, we’ll look at how to use resources for student learning outside of class, and how to know that your students have successfully learned from both in-class and outside of class activities.Our course is designed for instructors, or instructors-to-be, of undergraduate-level biology. High school instructors of AP Biology, post-doctoral fellows and graduate students looking ahead to teaching should find the course useful. The course can serve as a means of professional development. There are no pre-requisites, although prior satisfactory completion of a college biology course is highly recommended.
How do artists create visual effects? In order to create an artistic impression, artists select materials that allow image formation, and that lend color, emphasis, shape, and size to the object created.A scientist might follow up by asking, why those materials? What characteristics do they have that allow them to embody the artist’s intent? How durable are they? Will they maintain the same qualities, both physical and aesthetic, they had when the work left the studio?Conservation science further notes that all materials deteriorate over time, and then asks a follow-up question: What physical interventions are possible to maintain, preserve and protect the work as the artist intended? Whatever is done to the art object, the result must be to make the work recognizable as the artist’s work or the result is a failure. That is a key goal of this course: to understand, from a chemical point of view, how conservation protocols and the material aspects of an art work allow a better appreciation of an artwork and its creation, as well as confidence that it is the artist’s work.These are not new problems. According to Leonardo da Vinci, the study of art should include the following topics:A knowledge of materialsThe chemistry of colorsThe mathematics of compositionThe laws of perspectiveThe illusions of chiaroscuroAs the briefest study of Leonardo's life shows, he was clearly ahead of his time in wanting to understand the reasons for a vast array of natural and artificial phenomena. Even so, a thorough understanding of those subjects listed above still escapes us today – but, progress has been made and that progress is at once the subject matter and the goal of this course.Course banner painting: Unknown (previously attributed to Vincent van Gogh), Poppies, c.1886-c.1887, oil on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Bequest of Anne Parrish Titzell, 1957.617
Tell your story and show it with data. In this data visualization course, you will learn how to design interactive charts and customized maps for your website.We’ll begin with easy-to-learn tools, then gradually work our way up to editing open-source code templates with GitHub. Together, we’ll follow step-by-step tutorials with video screencasts, and share our work for feedback on the web. Real-world examples are drawn from Trinity College students working with community organizations in the City of Hartford, Connecticut.This course is ideal for non-profit organizations, small business owners, local governments, journalists, academics, or anyone who wants to tell their story and show the data.This introductory course in data visualization begins with the basics. No prior experience is required.
This course focuses on a different side of the law than most law-based courses. Rather than exclusively examining the results of a court case, we will explore how law generally and court decisions specifically are shaped by politics, by the political processes that form American democracy. It is a process that a particular group of scholars have called the “political construction of law.” Put another way, judicial decisions, particularly those from the Supreme Court of the United States, should not be viewed as separate and distinct from the politics that shaped them. And in this course, we will seek to understand why.More specifically, in this course, we will examine the role American presidents play in this process of the political construction of law. We will first consider the presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, both of whom successfully shaped the Supreme Court to advance their political and ideological interests. We then move to the more recent conservative movement to dramatically transform constitutional law; it was an effort begun by Ronald Reagan, and advanced by both President George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. At both the beginning and the end of the course, we will examine recent events that have and will continue to shape the Supreme Court; namely the presidential election of 2016, the death of Justice Antonin Scalia and the confirmation of his successor, Justice Neil Gorsuch, and the likelihood of more departures during the presidency of Donald Trump. As we consider these presidencies, we will also explore a range of issues, including abortion, civil rights, freedom of religion, gun rights, and same-sex marriage.
In ordinary life we barely notice the operations of our own minds. In The Conscious Mind - A Philosophical Road Trip, we will illuminate what we take for granted in perception, action, and interaction with others. We’ll explore this mindful awareness through demonstrations, illusions, brainteasers, thought experiments, riddles and jokes, all designed to shake you loose from your ordinary assumptions about the way consciousness works. You will explore your own mind and the minds of others in a new way, using a philosophical approach known as phenomenology. You’ll encounter some of the main ideas of the phenomenological tradition, through short readings by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Their ideas are provocative and will animate the online and offline conversation as we proceed. But the main approach of the course will be experiential and experimental. You’ll learn phenomenology by doing it and journeying among the structures and elements of your own conscious experience.
We will use the free and open tool, App Inventor for Android, to explore advanced topics in computer science.You’ll build an app a week, exploring such advanced topics as gameplay over a network, encryption, and more.At the end of the course, we’ll collectively decide on an app that we will build together. You will be able to build almost anything you can imagine!Because computer science is not just about coding and building apps, we will also learn some of the fundamental principles of computer science. We'll explore the potential and the limitations of computing and coding. We'll learn how the Internet works and about the positive and negative aspects of computing in today's society.For these broader computing concepts we will work within an emerging curricular framework -- the Computer Science Principles (CSP). The CSP framework is being developed by leading computer science educators from around the country under the auspices of the College Board and with funding support of the National Science Foundation.In addition to programming and CSP, the course is project-based and emphasizes writing, communication, and creativity. Multiple-choice questions, in the style that students can expect to encounter on the AP exam, will also be a key component of this course.
This course explores the growth of global wine production and trade over the past three centuries. You will explore key themes in wine history and learn about the methods and resources that historians use to understand the past.The course is designed for both wine-lovers who want to know more about their favorite beverage, and for history-lovers who are curious about the growing field of commodity history. Topics include the differences between the “old” and “new” worlds of wine, the changing nature of taste, and innovations in wine quality. We’ll discuss the historical development of appellation systems to classify wine, as well as the importance of global trade in creating the world’s distinctive wine regions.The course is divided into six modules. Each module includes short video lectures, guided readings, and primary sources. Videos have been filmed in four countries, including France and Australia. All reading materials are in English. This is an introductory course that requires no previous knowledge of wine or modern history. Students will be given the tools and skills to start researching the histories of their own favorite wines. The online discussion forum creates a unique opportunity to connect with other students of wine history.
How can music play a role in helping us to understand ourselves and others, as well as how we interact in different communities throughout the world? In this course, we will uncover some ways of thinking about music, community, musicians, and musical instruments, and how this relates to our lives. This course will introduce concepts in ethnomusicology, which is the study of music in a cultural context. In this course you will: learn to become more aware of the variety of sounds in your own environment, and challenge your ideas about which sounds may be considered “music” OR “noise.”explore the different meanings a song can have in different cultures, and how ethnomusicologists document and preserve music.learn about musical instruments and what they can tell us about a culture. You will even have the opportunity to create your own instrument!find music in your own community and learn tips for conducting interviews and recording performances. Musical knowledge is not necessary!