June. We look forward to these conversations, because from them we discover a lot about learning communities on very different campuses.Without exception, wherever hardworking faculty, staff, and administrators organize learning communities and students come, the reward is gratifying and immediate: The student retention rate goes up, just as the literature predicts. Institutional attention then shifts to scaling-up the work. Emily Lardner and Gillies Malnarich, co-directors of the Washington Center for Improving Undergraduate Education (www.evergreen.edu/washcenter), lead its national learning-communities work and other curricular reform initiatives.Lardner has taught academic writing and composition for many years, and Malnarich has taught developmental education and sociology. Both currently teach in Evergreen's Evening and Weekend Studies Program.

This paper introduces Spreadsheets Across the Curriculum, a workshop-based educational materials development project to build a resource to facilitate connecting mathematics and context in undergraduate college courses where mathematical problem solving is relevant. The central idea is "spreadsheet modules," which, in essence, are elaborate word problems in the form of short PowerPoint presentations with embedded Excel spreadsheets. Students work through the presentations on their own, making and/or completing the spreadsheets displayed on the slides in order to perform calculations or draw graphs that address the issue (context) posed in the word problem. The end result of the project is the resource: an online library of 55 modules developed by 40 authors from 21 institutions that touch on 26 subjects as differentiated by Library of Congress classification categories. Judging from online requests for instructor versions, the SSAC Web site disseminated the SSAC module idea to an additional 60 institutions via instructors of courses with 67 different titles. The disciplinary distribution of authors and requests for instructor versions shows that the SSAC resource serves both sides of the mathematics-in-context interpretation of quantitative literacy: mathematics educators seeking ways of bringing context into their teaching of mathematics; non-mathematics educators seeking to infuse mathematics into their teaching of disciplinary subjects. The SSAC experience suggests two answers to the question: "What works to spread teaching of QL across the curriculum?"-spreadsheet exercises in which students do math to solve problems, and workshops or workshop sessions that focus on educational materials.

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What mathematical topics do educators committed to teaching mathematics in context choose for their students when given the opportunity to develop an educational resource explicitly to teach mathematics in context? This paper examines the choices made for the 55 modules by 40 authors in the General Collection of the Spreadsheets Across the Curriculum (SSAC) library. About half of the modules were made by authors from natural science, and about 60% of the other modules were by authors from mathematics. The modules are tagged with terms of a search vocabulary developed for the browse page of the collection. The four terms most frequently used to tag the modules are: visual display of data (particularly XY plots and bar graphs); ratio and proportion; rates; and forward modeling (e.g., what-if?). Subdividing the modules into those authored by instructors from mathematics vs. natural science vs. other disciplines shows universal popularity of the first three choices. Forward modeling was a favorite of authors from mathematics and natural science. Manipulating equations, unit conversions, and logarithms (orders of magnitude, scientific notation) were called for by authors from natural science. The paper concludes with a list of 15 concepts and skills that received the most "votes. "Keywords quantitative literacy, spreadsheets

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