Author Archives: Paolo Mangiafico

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Submit your proposal to join SCI 2023 in October – this year’s theme is Trust

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[ Note added on May 3: the proposal due date has passed, and we’re currently reviewing the proposals that were submitted. Team selection will be completed in June, and the teams that have been invited to participate will be announced on this site in July. ]

The Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute invites you to participate in SCI 2023, its eighth year in North Carolina’s Research Triangle region.

This year’s theme is Trust, and the program will take place from October 8 to 12, 2023, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA.

TriangleSCI is not your typical academic conference – it’s four days of concentrated but relaxed time with a diverse cohort of individuals who have come to start new projects they have proposed, in teams they have built and with advice and contributions from participants on other teams and a set of interlocutors and experts who work across teams.

You set the agenda, and you define the deliverables – TriangleSCI provides the scaffolding for your team to develop its project. If your team’s proposal is selected, SCI will cover all the costs for team members to participate, including travel, meals, and accommodations, including for international participants – so this is a great opportunity for potential participants who might normally find traveling to such a program cost-prohibitive. Your team can use TriangleSCI to launch a new project, have some concentrated time to further develop an existing project with a broader set of collaborators, or just to begin to explore and experiment with ideas that are difficult to pursue in your usual work context.

For more information about how TriangleSCI works, see the FAQ and links from previous years of TriangleSCI.

Probably the best way to get a sense of what it’s like is through the words of participants from past years, for example: “One of the best scholarly experiences I’ve had.”; “an amazing incubator of ideas, innovation and collaboration. Grateful to be a part of this incredible experience!”; “participating in #TriangleSCI was a highlight of my 2019“; “I can’t recommend this opportunity strongly enough. Run, don’t walk!“; “It was a privilege to participate to this fantastic gathering last year… It’s a unique opportunity for international teams to get together & work on a project.“;  “My 2016 @TriangleSCI experience gave me the space and time to collaborate deeply with new colleagues & incubate a project … that has become foundational to all my work. What a gift.“. Learn more about TriangleSCI from the perspective of participants, for example from this podcast (with transcript) and other highlights from SCI 2019, SCI 2022, and previous years.

This year’s theme is Trust, described in part this way in the page about the theme:

Trust – something we often take for granted – is critical to the scholarly communication ecosystem. Trust is radically social, requiring an immense amount of individual and community courage to build. To trust is to open toward an outside, an other. Thinking about scholarly communication as an ecosystem highlights the interdependence of many different parts, and the importance of trust in making it all work.

SCI 2023 provides a platform where teams can develop projects that seek to understand the factors that lead to or detract from trust in scholarly communications, and to build mechanisms for improving trust.

Please see the theme page for more information, including some ideas of questions you might address – we’re looking for a broad and diverse set of perspectives, and teams that will address both specific and general problems and opportunities.

For 2023 TriangleSCI will return to Rizzo Center, a conference and retreat center affiliated with the University of North Carolina, after 2 years of pandemic hiatus and one year at a different venue in Durham. Invited participants will be provided hotel rooms in the complex, and most meals will also be there, with opportunities for excursions to local restaurants in the evenings. You can read more about how the program works and what the days are like in our FAQ.

To participate, form a team of 4 to 6 people, and submit a proposal along the lines of what’s described in the Request for Proposals (RFP). Proposals are due by the end of the day on April 27, 2023.

Two Zoom information sessions will be held in March (both sessions will have the same information/format – they’re being offered at different days/times to accommodate multiple time zones). If you’re thinking about submitting a proposal, or are just curious, these are an opportunity for you to learn more about the program and ask questions. Details about the times of these Zoom sessions and how to register are in the RFP.

If you have questions that aren’t already answered in the FAQ, please contact scholcomm-institute@duke.edu and we’d be glad to help. You might also find some people you know in TriangleSCI cohorts from past years, and you can ask them about their experience and get tips from them about what made their proposal and project successful.

Thanks as always to the Mellon Foundation for continuing to provide funding for the Triangle SCI and making all of this possible!

[ Photo by danilo.alvesd used under Unsplash license. ]

Photo of SCI 2022 participants

SCI 2022 highlights

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The 2022 Scholarly Communication Institute was held from October 9-13, 2022. This year’s theme was Reckoning, Care, and Repair, and five teams were invited to participate based on proposals they submitted in the spring. You can read about their projects in the blog posts linked from here.

Highlights of this year’s institute were added throughout the days of the program, and appear below. Other information about the 2022 program will be added to the SCI 2022 home page as it becomes available.

If you’re interested in participating in future years, check back on the trianglesci.org web site periodically (the request for proposals is typically announced in January) and follow our Twitter feed or the #TriangleSCI hashtag for news about the program.

Intercultural and interdisciplinary open resources supporting environmental justice

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This is the fifth and final in a series of posts about each of the teams that will be attending SCI 2022 and their projects. This one was submitted by Jeff Gima.

Photo of wind turbines on a green hillside

Challenge and context

The April 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, “Mitigation of Climate Change”, provides a harsh assessment of how far behind we are on commitments to reversing climate change trends, and of how urgent action on the climate has become. The IPCC’s February 2022 report, “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability,” reminds us of the importance of engaging in climate action from a perspective of equity and justice, recognizing the inequitable impact of climate change on parts of the world most vulnerable, least able to combat, and least responsible for, climate change.

In the context of this broad challenge, there are a few challenges specific to global higher education that members of AMICAL Consortium may be well placed to work on, in a modest way that our means and reach permit:

  • the need for greater global availability and visibility of teaching resources and scholarship on the environment arising from the global south, given their current underrepresentation
  • the need for future global citizens and leaders from the global south, regardless of their field of study, to learn how their work, and their intellectual and personal interests, may relate to and impact the environment in their part of the world and elsewhere.
Map showing location of AMICAL consortium members

Member institutions in the AMICAL Consortium

AMICAL is a group of 29 international liberal arts colleges and universities following an American model of higher education but based outside the United States, in 20 countries across the Middle East, Central and Southern Asia, Africa and Europe. AMICAL has historically focused on professional development and project support that brings librarians, technologists and faculty at these institutions together, encouraging closer collaboration in their shared educational missions.

This combination of relevant stakeholders for collaborating on open educational resources and scholarship, our inherently multicultural learning environments, and our balance of members from the global north and south, provides our team with a strong basis for working on intercultural & interdisciplinary open resources supporting environmental justice. Our team therefore aims to build a program of support for the development of innovative and collaborative curricular resources, pedagogy and scholarship from a wide range of disciplines and contexts of application at AMICAL member institutions, including:

  • environmental studies, environmental science, environmental humanities, etc.
  • other disciplines affording an interdisciplinary connection to environmental topics (political science, literature, philosophy, etc.)
  • co-curricular programs and activities, wherever possible involving outreach and collaboration with neighboring institutions, organizations and communities

Tentative project plans

To do this, we plan to develop collaboratively with faculty, librarians and instructional designers at AMICAL institutions a program with multiple areas of action, combining support for OER and OA content development with support for OER and OA capacity building. Our “intercultural & interdisciplinary open resources supporting environmental justice” project, tentatively abbreviated as “Open Resources for Environmental Justice”, would:

  • Help faculty and staff to build capacities for using, adapting and creating Open Educational Resources through
    • sharing of outreach and awareness materials
    • training and consultation
    • faculty stipends for adapting/creating OER
    • shared infrastructure (e.g. platforms for creating and publishing OER)
  • Curate a consortial collection of Open Educational Resources produced by members around environmental and related studies, in support of:
    • course and curriculum development
    • pedagogy (materials for improving teaching practice, possibly produced by faculty development centers at AMICAL member institutions)
    • co-curricular programs and activities that bridge class, student life and community
  • Identify and help implement models for promoting and managing Open Access scholarship at member institutions (through sharing best practices, models appropriate for AMICAL institutions, members’ OA policies, etc.)
  • Provide technical and financial support to authors from AMICAL institutions to publish environment-related scholarship under Open Access frameworks, with a focus on scholars from or related to underrepresented countries

Though some of the above activities can already be supported in preliminary and incidental ways by AMICAL, we hope to find funding to allow us to support these activities at a consortial scale.

Screen shot from ecomedialiteracy.org site

A prototype for environment-related OER that could be supported by our Open Resources for Environmental Justice project: Ecomedialiteracy.org

One of our team members, Dr. Antonio Lopez, has already been developing a project,  ecomedialiteracy.org, a curated collection of resources for teaching on topics related to media literacy and the environment. Dr. Lopez’s project is not only an inspiration for the larger “Open Resources for Environmental Justice” project we’re working on at TriangleSCI, but also a prototype for the kind of environment-related OER collections that we hope to support through our larger project. We hope to develop a consortial framework for supporting projects like ecomedialiteracy.org, learning along the way how to help our member institutions contribute to educational resources and scholarship representing the global south, in the most open and accessible way.

Team members

Our team includes colleagues from different AMICAL institutions and professional roles, including:

  • faculty members interested in building collaborative resources to advance environment-related teaching, scholarship or action
  • a librarian with experience in library-based OER and OA initiatives
  • an instructional designer with experience collaborating with faculty on the development of OER
  • consortial leadership staff with experience building and implementing collaborative programs

Antonio Lopez is an expert curriculum designer, educator, trainer, and theorist with a research focus on bridging ecojustice and media literacy. He is a founding theorist and architect of ecomedia literacy and creator of the ecomedialiteracy.org website, for which he recently received a Marieli Rowe Innovation in Media Literacy Education Award. He has written numerous articles, essays, and books related to media literacy and the environment. Currently he is Professor of Communications and Media Studies at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy. In the context of this project, Antonio will be developing out ecomedialiteracy.org, as an exemplar of collaborative work on OER for environment-related studies. He will also help shape our approach to working with faculty on environmental OER and scholarship generally.

Elena Berg is an Associate Professor of Environmental Science at the American University of Paris (AUP), where she teaches courses in environmental science, evolutionary biology, animal behavior, and human evolution, and conducts laboratory research with her students on cooperation and conflict in seed beetles. She also directs AUP’s Environmental Science Center and chairs the university’s Advisory Board on Environmental Sustainability. For this project, Elena will help guide efforts to develop shared resources to support co-curricular activities, in particular at the intersection between teaching, research, and outreach related to campus sustainability efforts, or that help students to take what they are learning and doing in the classroom out into the communi​​ty.

Dalal Rahme is Data Services Librarian at the American University of Beirut, where she is currently leading a campus-wide initiative in support of OER. She is also Convener for AMICAL’s Open Education Interest Group and at AUB. Dalal will be helping to shape this project’s approach to OER and OA, both in terms of consortial initiatives (e.g. curation of a consortium-wide collection of OER) and in terms of how AMICAL might support activities at individual member institutions (e.g. supporting individual authors to publish in OA venues).

Nadine Aboulmagd is Senior Instructional Designer at The Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo. Nadine has collaborated on the creation of several OER projects, including an open textbook with a Music professor, published by Rebus (her collaboration is briefly reported on here). She has expertise in areas such as online learning, blended learning, digital pedagogy, educational technology, faculty development, learner experience design and graphic design. On this project, Nadine will be helping to shape our approach to collaboration with faculty and faculty development centers on adapting and creating OER.

Alex Armstrong is Program & Technology Officer for the AMICAL Consortium. Alex co-develops AMICAL’s programs, manages all technology used by the consortium, and is responsible for communications and community development related to all of AMICAL’s programs. For this project, Alex will be helping to develop, implement and communicate with AMICAL members about any consortial-level programs. Alex will also lead planning and implementation of any technology-related aspects of the project, including identifying appropriate external resources that need to be sourced.

Jeff Gima is AMICAL Consortium Director. Jeff provides organizational leadership for AMICAL, manages all business aspects of the consortium’s operations and co-develops AMICAL’s programs. For this project, Jeff will provide overall project leadership at the consortial level, while helping to source funding for the project and plan for project sustainability.

 

[ Feature image by Appolinary Kalashnikova used under Unsplash Free License. Other images provided by the AMICAL team. ]