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Faculty/Graduate Student Workshop at USC - 04.08.2011

On April 1st-5th, COSEE-OS and COSEE-West (as part of a collaborative grant with COSEE NOW and COSEE California) hosted a Faculty/Graduate Collaborative Workshop at the University of Southern California (USC). Five scientists; Drs. Jed Fuhrman and Sergio Sanudo-Wilhelmy (USC), Peggy Fong and Aradhna Tripati, (University of California Los Angeles), and Chris Lowe (California State University Long Beach) collaborated with a collection of 20 graduate students from California State schools, USC, and UCLA in a peer-to-peer workshop. 

Concept mapping was introduced to participants as a tool for deconstructing complex science, and a way of reaching audiences at various levels. On the first day of the workshop, faculty learned to concept map and created maps based on their own research interests that spoke to Ocean and Climate Fundamental Literacy Concepts. On day two, faculty presented their concept maps to graduate students, then worked together to fine-tune the map for presentation to a high school audience. High school sophomores from Tesseract High School (Phoneix, AZ) were on hand during the final day of the workshop to provide feedback on the graduate student group presentations.

The goal of these series of workshops is to improve communication of complex science topics using concept mapping and web-based tools. This workshop also challenged scientists and graduate students to open new lines of communication at the academic level. The next phase of this project - a hybrid online/in-person workshop based on this model - will occur on May 11-12 at Rutgers University, hosted by COSEE NOW.

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