This
tutorial offers highly flexible options for use in the classroom, in the
petrography laboratory, and for outside assignments or study. For the classroom,
the tutorial contains a wealth of imagery that can be used as demonstration
materials while you teach your students about carbonate rock components or for
test materials for assessing student progress. Instructors are welcome to pull
individual images in jpg or pdf format from the DVD for use in their own lecture
or test materials in an educational setting.
There are various options for copying the tutorial materials. For, images in the subtutorials (using the html interface) right-click on an image and select "save picture as". Pdf virtual thin sections can be saved by going to the File menu and using the "save as" option. To copy materials in batches, view the DVD contents and navigate to the "www" folder. Within this folder, various content can be found within the "images", "content", and "pdf" folders. All public use of these images must be properly attributed by citation to Milliken and Choh, 2011, Carbonate Petrology v. 1.0: An Interactive Petrography Tutorial: AAPG Discovery Series 15, Tulsa, Oklahoma, DVD.
This tutorial is built around 82 samples (virtual thin sections) of carbonate sediments and rocks. In the hands of a given teacher and it is possible to imagine these materials being used with quite a broad spectrum of students. The images included in this tutorial include features to interest students ranging in experience from elementary school (for whom an introduction to magnified sand is an eye-opener to "things that exist that you can't see too well using your eyes alone") to reservoir characterization professionals (who need to know about pore formation and evolution).
Most learners who encounter this tutorial will be college students or those
even farther along in their educational careers. Common questions from both
students and teachers are: "How should I use this tutorial?" and "Where should I
begin?" As with the companion sandstone tutorial (Milliken, Choh, and McBride,
2007) there is no one recommended path through the material. The architecture of
the tutorial permits both systematic and 'random walk' approaches. It would be
possible to first go through the subtutorials on grains, cements, and pores, and
then to go through all 82 samples, systematically, reading all of the
annotations. In a more inquiry-based approach, one could use the search function
to seek out rocks of a certain age or examples of a certain allochem type. A
less rigid way of learning might be to make a leisurely inspection of a selected
random thin section, examining in detail any feature that catches your eye and
ignites your curiosity. All of these approaches and more can be applied with
this tutorial, each to its own good effect on your understanding of carbonate
rocks.
The "random pick" search function may prove valuable in several contexts: for
sparking classroom or laboratory discussions, for student test preparation, or
for actual testing.
A narrative on why the sample was chosen for the collection can be accessed
from the clickable box to the left of the information box and detailed
information on identification of particular rock features can be called up by
mousing over the "sticky" note markers scattered around each of the virtual thin
sections. These materials represent information that the annotator or authors
believed to be important, or at least interesting.
Options for instructors go much farther than the identifications and
interpretations that are provided with each of the samples, of course. There is
ample opportunity for instructors to share their own interpretations and to
devise uses for particular samples that are aligned with a particular
curriculum.
Each of the virtual thin sections is labeled with a unique numerical
identifier in the following format: ct0001 to ct0082. These numbers are included
as part of the thin section information box on the upper right of the layered
pdf. If there is a particular thin section or group of thin sections that you
would like your students to examine, they can call these up by searching on this
catalog number. There are many possible exercises that could be built around
asking students to compare and contrast particular samples of different ages,
textures, or grain compositions.