# MDF Basics 21-22

There are a couple of key pieces of information about how (and where) we’ll be working this term:

* Our required weekly meetings will be at **10:30-11:45 am EST on Fridays**. Some of these will be just the MDF cohort; some will involve the full Learning Lab team. Our current plan is to meet for the first four Fridays in a hybrid fashion (meaning you can attend either in Zoom or in person) before reassessing what is obviously a developing situation.

* As a reminder, we’ll encourage each of you to **join one of the collaborative working groups we call “labs” at some point this term**. In these labs you’ll learn key skills from each other and from our staff, you’ll design and build cool things in multiple media, and you’ll be able to get help from each other and our staff on some of the more time-consuming tasks we face when supporting courses like the drop-in office hours and workshops. The first “Lab” meetings will begin later in September, once we all have a stronger sense of the projects you are working on this year and which clusters of collaborators might make sense. The Labs themselves will determine when and how they meet (but it will be roughly once per week). Some--theatreLab and AVLab, say--might need to meet in the Learning Lab space because it contains materials, props, gear, or computers that they need to use. Others--dataVis or codeLab, say--might decide that online meetings make the most sense. Likewise, the support and drop-in office hours these labs offer later in the semester might be either online or in person, depending on the needs of the courses we are supporting.

* We ask that you **submit at least one project proposal** by September 3rd using [our Airtable form](https://airtable.com/shrLwQeLDqmKLwnUO). Don’t worry, we can talk you through this (we’ll even help you fill in the form!) during an individual meeting, just reach out in your channel on Slack. The key purpose for doing this is that we are hoping to track and support all of your main projects this term in an Airtable projects base, and the second, more immediate, purpose is that we will do a little activity with these project ideas during our first meeting on September 10th.

* Two points of admin:
* Please use the **LL Fellows Schedule** Google Calendar to let us know when you'll be working physically at the Learning Lab Studio. This will help us know when to expect you and (just in case!) will help contact trace.
* If you need to get in touch with folks at the LL, **please use your Slack channel (#ll-mdf-your-name) to get in touch**. This automatically archives our communication and makes it visible to all our staff. If you need to use email (to loop in a faculty member, for instance) please cc [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail]).

For those of you who haven’t been to the Bok Center in person or who are trying to coach folks on how to find us:

> The Learning Lab studio is located at [50 Church St. Cambridge, MA](https://www.google.com/maps/place/+50+Church+St,+Cambridge,+MA+02138/@42.3739624,-71.1226702,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x89e3774299bd271b:0x44341bcbf2ef7d98!8m2!3d42.3739624!4d-71.1204815) (on the third floor, Room 308).
>
> The entrance is next to the Sinclair (it's actually the ramp where bands load in equipment at the Sinclair!). You will walk up the ramp and take the elevators to the 3rd floor. Once on the 3rd floor, turn left and proceed through the door, up the ramp, through the next door, and then we're in suite 374 on the right side, look for the red "BOK" letters.

You can find the [official MDF Roles and Responsibilities here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-zRSHTVLhNfPv87QUEgcC638CDmtrBrhdpSLiRoVOt8/edit?usp=sharing).