June 2007

Education in Second Life

June 30, 2007

Second Life is an online virtual world, you can download the software at http://secondlife.com/, which has a lot of potential for education. Right now there are probably a lot of you nodding your head, and even more of you saying, “whatever.” Well, read on… SL is what’s called a Massive Multiplayer Online Game (or MMOG) [...]

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Don’t keep it bottled up

June 26, 2007

If you fill a glass bottle partway with water, and hit it with a spoon, you’ll hear a pitch. If you dump out some of the water, and hit it again, you’ll get a higher pitch. Less water, higher pitch. That’s because the frequency of sound is related to how quickly the sound wave can [...]

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podcasting in the classroom

June 16, 2007

I’ve recently been teaching workshops to teachers about how they might use podcasts in the classroom. I just taught one yesterday to a wonderfully enthusiastic bunch at CCSF. There are always those tech-happy teachers who know about the latest things and host beautiful webpage highlighting class work. But most teachers aren’t them. Many teachers are [...]

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Seeing the unseen

June 8, 2007

A few weeks back I saw a presentation by artist Ned Kahn. Ned’s a genius — literally. He got one of the coveted MacArthur genius awards to pursue his ideas. He made a lot of the exhibits at the Exploratorium many years ago. Most things having to do with granular flow are his: Soap Film [...]

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Creation Science Museum

June 1, 2007

Yikes!  A “Creation Science” museum just opened in Petersburg, Kentucky.  You can read the article about it in Salon, which I highly recommend.  It’s really a religious museum, which would be fine, but it posits itself as a science museum.  It claims that modern science isn’t to be trusted, and explains phenomena using the bible.  [...]

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Science in films

June 1, 2007

I recently heard a talk about using science films to teach a science class. How fun! Even when they get the science wrong (which they often do), it’s a good springboard for talking about science. In Armageddon, for example, Bruce Willis blows apart an asteroid about to hit earth. Would that work? Well, disregarding the [...]

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