Physical Sciences Department Gary Calderone Geology Instructor

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GLG101 | GLG103

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Extracurricular Professional Activities

National Science Foundation/American Geophysical Union Project

I am a co-investigator on a National Science Foundation sponsored project administrated through the American Geophysical Union. The project title is "Using Computer Technology and Multimedia Materials to Develop an Integrated Systems Approach to the Earth Sciences". The principle investigators are Dr. Michelle Hall-Wallace and Professor Robert F. Butler at the University of Arizona.

Although numerous exercises were produced at the University of Arizona, my involvement with this project resulted in two local products. The first was the construction of the GeoScape and publication of its associated exercises. The second was the production of a web-based tutorial on geologic time, structures and the interpretation of geologic maps.

Co-Author, Physical and Historical Geology Lab Manuals

Commercially published manuals have two major shortcomings for use in our physical geology laboratory courses. First, they are written so as to be marketable to audiences all over North America. Consequently, these manuals tend to be very general- often emphasizing maps of Appalachian areas to which most of our students cannot easily relate. In addition, many manuals tend to rely on a memorization approach to identification of only a few select rocks, rather than on the fundamental observations that geologists use to distinguish them. Secondly, commercially published manuals tend to be very expensive- almost as expensive as textbooks themselves. Yet lab manuals are designed to be used only once. Consequently, Bob Thompson & Wayne Johnson elected to publish an in-house manual customized for maps of our areas, rocks and minerals in our collections, and coordinated with exercises in our courses. When I began teaching labs, I began adding and modifying the lab on the basis of my experiences with the hundred or so students that take GLG103 with me each semester. It is a work in progress and allows us to experiment with different approaches and content arrangements for the benefit of our students. We can publish it for less than a third of the cost of commercial lab manuals. I spend about a week or so between each semester working on modifications to the lab manual.

When Pam Nelson arrived and began building up the Historical Geology program, we collaborated in the design and publishing of that lab manual.

Volunteer Research, U. S. Geological Survey

I occasionally still work on research projects that I began while still employed by the U. S. Geological Survey. For better or for worse, and with apologies to my former co-workers, these tend to be my lowest priority given my present duties as described above. Nonetheless, I found time in the Summer of 1997 to advance the publication status of my work on the source of the Apache Leap Tuff in central Arizona. In addition, I hope to do tie off some work on structural rotations of fault blocks in the Virgin Mountains region of northwestern Arizona soon.