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# System prepended metadata

title: LLUF ONBOARDING

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# LLUF ONBOARDING

## welcome to the LL
As the R&D wing of the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, we function as an incubator for projects related to teaching: for faculty interested in designing innovative courses, new modes of instructional content, and new assignments and activities for their students.

## what we do
We have built our team’s expertise in video, 2D and 3D animation, data visualization, graphic design, podcasting, game design, public speaking, and many many more media and modes of communication. This has enabled us to create nearly anything a faculty member can dream up, whether it’s an interactive web-based game like Music51’s “Chord Crusher” or Ned Hall’s “Knights and Knaves,” or a 15-angle studio record of the Parker Quartet so that students can analyze the bodily movements of performers, or an animation that flies through a topographical map of Turkey to show you how patterns of seismic stress develop before and after earthquakes. And, crucially, it has enabled us to teach countless undergraduates in courses begin to develop these skills themselves

## the LL team & community
We are an intergenerational team! Our community is made up of about  50 Fellows, including yourselves and the Media & Design Fellows (MDFs) who design, build, and create together. The full community will gather on Fridays for team training, whole group prototyping, and Weekly Wrap Parties and sharing works in progress. For project work, we’ll assemble into “Labs” which will focus on the media and tools of greatest need in the coming year, which could include, codeLab, realityLab, videoLab, musicLab, gameLab, and more. Labs are spaces to learn key tools, prototype, and get feedback from others developing similar projects and skills. We’ll form labs and set meeting times once we know more about your projects and courses we’re supporting.

We hope you get a ton out of working and connecting with each other, but our full-time Learning Lab team is here for you well, all the time:

**Marlon Kuzmick**, @marlon
*Director of the Learning Lab*
Reach out for anything
Excited about writing pedagogy, 3D and AR, photography and filmmaking, the early Marx, graphic design and visual rhetoric, reality-show production workflows, coding and the arts, and whatever it is that comes after writing 

**Jordan Koffman**, @jordan
*Assistant Director of the Learning Lab*
Reach out for anything really, but especially connecting to other folks in the Learning Lab, like the undergraduate fellows (LLUFs).
Excited about physical and digital design workflows, art, music, construction, oral and visual presentations, and  animals.

**Christine D'Auria**, @christine
*Assistant Director of the Learning Lab*
Reach out for anything, but especially connecting to the Media & Design Fellows (MDFs) and learning about the tools and projects these graduate fellows support.
Excited about filmmaking and cameras, sound, designing learning experiences that use a range of tools, films and television, literature, history, and the Great British Bake Off (and baking!).

**Katie Gilligan**, @katie
manages learninglab@fas.harvard.edu
*Learning Lab Project Manager*
Reach out for logistical and scheduling support, help accessing any of the LL tools, help with Peoplesoft.
Excited about databasing(!), productivity hacks, plants, and video games.

**Casey Cann**, @casey
*Technical Operations and Learning Lab Studio Manager*
Reach out for help with media programs, Adobe apps, and help with technology.
Excited about all things media, anything in the video, image, 3D and podcasting realms. Making things and video games are also high on my list of excitements.

**Luke Pollack**, @Luke
*Media Production Coordinator*
Reach out for help finding footage, editing, and handling cameras.
Excited about technology in general, and how it relates to storytelling through high production value, lighting, set design (even when creating a clean and minimalist desk set up)...and of course, video games.








## your role
LLUFs are essential to our work, creating prototypes and giving feedback on the assignments and workshops we develop with faculty and graduate students. But their presence on our team has an impact well beyond this explicit role. While they aren’t yet experts in the disciplines, they are experts of their own experience—they know how they learn, they know what makes them feel included or excluded, they know what matters to them. Crucially, they are what economists might call a “leading indicator” of where Harvard is headed, and we have found that in listening to them and giving them a voice, we end up anticipating what University leadership is going to need from us, and being more prepared to help when called upon. 

## LLUF goals
### Test & Prototype
LLUF feedback is invaluable. Since we are supporting faculty who are trying things for the very first time, in each and every instance we are operating with a lack of experience, We could over or underestimate how long a particular step in an assignment or in a group activity might take; we could be wrong about what students might find exciting and what they might find boring; we could overlook logistical or technical flaws in our initial design.
### Build Useful Skills
Given that many of the assignments and activities we design involve new, or at least, alternative modes of communication—drawing, speaking, coding, 3D modeling, video-editing—the LLUFs have the opportunity to explore and become proficient in a remarkably broad range of media and tools for communicating academic content.
### Assist in Events
In a typical semester, the Bok Center’s Learning Lab hosts an array of workshops and hackathons to help students in Bok-supported courses complete assignments and capstone projects. LLUFs are central to these efforts, having spent a year or more developing technical skills that they share with their peers, acting as TA's or peer-media tutors.

## your first day
3 things to do now
### 1. Google Calendar
* Make sure you can access the LLUF Schedule and the Learning Lab Events calendars.
* Add your schedule for the week to the LLUF Schedule calendar.

### 2. Slack
* Join our slack.
* Change your profile picture. Want to learn how to take a new one? Ask Jordan or another lluf to help!
* Join a lab channel and introduce yourself.

### 3. Read the [Spring 2022 LLUF Manual](https://hackmd.io/EoEtMVo0QaSMvN4TNqY_Zg)
* Check in with Jordan about any questions or interesting things you found!


