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) — these sorts of things have been around for a while, like the online version of the Sims. But the difference with SL is that the “residents” get to create the world they’re in. It’s 100% created by the players… and that’s the whole point of the “game.” You can make your own character (“avatar”), who has their own house. You can own land (and the economics of virtual land ownership… real dollars being traded for cyberspace… is interesting in itself). And the Exploratorium has been building online versions of its exhibits, and other museums and education institutions are also getting in on the game (so to speak).

There are three things that I think SL offers that’s important:

1 – the ability to do things you can’t do in real life (First Life)

2 – a social environment

3 – the chance to reach people who wouldn’t otherwise walk into a university or museum

Most people come to SL to socialize, and hang out, check out other avatars, go to dance clubs, build their houses… it’s pretty fun. So that social draw gives you a real “in” to people who we don’t usually have a lot of contact with.

Plus, you can do things that you can’t physically do in first life, like fly to the moon, see the distance from one planet to the next, zoom into a nanotube, or simply enjoy the exhibits at the Exploratorium if you live in Cincinnati. It’s really fun to create experiences for people that you’ll never meet, too. You don’t just create objects in SL, but with scripting you can make a whole experience — transparent gardens that play music, or a rotating chair that turns the world upside down.

One thing that I find fascinating about SL is from a sociology perspective… the social interactions in SL are *real*. I have all the same emotions and reactions to social interactions on my computer screen in SL as I do when I physically interact with people in first life. If someone’s avatar walks right up to me, bumps into me, and stands there staring… I feel *really* uncomfortable, and a little angry. If two people are “talking” together, I feel shy approaching and look for some sort of invitation to join their group. I find this fascinating, and think this demonstrates some of the power of the environment.

Here are Paul Doherty’s notes on Second Life for Museums, including good places to visit, how to build and script, and why to be there in the first place.

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A fun little thing with sound that was just pointed out to me.

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 make a “round trip” through the thing it’s traveling through. If there’s less water, it takes less time for it to make the round trip, and the pitch goes up. (Look up “resonance” if you want to know more.) You can actually make a whole xylophone this way if you tune the bottles just right — go to Phil Tulga’s website for instructions!

But now, instead of hitting the bottles, blow across the top to get a tone (like you used to do to annoy your parents when you had an empty coke bottle). The bottle with less water will now have a lower pitch. That’s because now the sound is traveling through the air in the bottle. The more air, the more time it takes the sound wave to do the round trip, so the lower the pitch.

This type of sound we get from blowing across a bottle is called Helmholtz resonance. Back in the 1800’s Herman von Helmholtz made sets of these “Helmholtz resonators ” (shown here in the picture). These were the first frequency analyzers! Each bottle will only resonate (make a sound) when the right frequency sound is played into it. So if an orchestra played a chord, Helmholtz could run around and put his ear to his resonators, and determine which notes were present in that sound.

So with the same set of bottles, with decreasing amounts of water, you can play two different sets of notes — one by blowing, which decreases in pitch, and one by hitting the bottles, which increases in pitch!

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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 a little older, and podcasting is a very new idea. Most come to my workshops asking, “is this a good workshop for someone who has no idea what this is all about?”

Listening to podcasts is one of the most powerful things that I think educators can get from podcasting. This can be a great professional development tool. Teachers have such busy lives, it is hard to stay on top of, say, recent developments in educational research or technology, or the latest in science news. The key thing about podcasts is that they are so specialized – unlike broadcast radio, they don’t have to appeal to a general audience, so there are podcasts out there that are as specific as educational technology news. So I spend much of the workshop listening to podcasts, and showing how to download them.

Or kids can listen to podcasts. But one teacher mentioned that it is hard to get kids (especially elementary kids) to sit still and listen to anything for longer than a minute. One teacher suggested that they be given a simple task to do with their hands while listening, which helps with fidgety-ness. I’d be interested in any other suggestions.

Making podcasts can also be extremely rewarding — kids love hearing themselves, and can get more enthusiastic about this than writing a book report. Plus, this is a chance to use writing in a science class (“writing across the cirriculum” in ed-speak), since they have to write a script to go along with it. There are many tools that make it extremely easy to publish simple podcasts. That said, it takes a good amount of time to develop and record a podcast.

If you’d like more information on podcasting in the classroom, please download the handouts from my workshops. I list great podcasts for science and educators, tools for making podcasts, and ideas for class podcasts, as well as tell you how to use Audacity as an editing tool.

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.

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 Painting A large flat soap film shows interference patterns

Aeolian landscape A fan whips fine sand into patterns and dunes as you watch. A change of the fan changes the pattern of the landscape.

Tornado Fine water mist is circulated by air currents and drawn into a spiralling, wispy tornado 10 feet tall.

The Exploratorium sells exhibits to other museums and the tornado is pretty popular. He’s not the only one, but Ned also extended this to create a fire tornado, a real thing of beauty. Watch a video of the fire tornado on his website. He had to go to Europe to do it, where the willing curator told him, “we have a lower density of lawers per capita here than in the US.”

He also worked on an installation to create a temporary building, many stories high, which created a water vapor tornado in its central atrium, many hundreds of feet tall. Amazing!

Lately he’s been working on a variety of installations on buildings. What I was struck by was how his work focusses particularly on reflecting something unseen, or making the invisible visible.

For instance, many of his exhibits visualize the wind. See his wind exhibits on his website. In one, small lightly hinged panels cover a building wall. The movement of the wind over them makes them move and flutter, and the whole building facade moves in waves, so you can see large-scale undulations in the air currents that are not felt.

Or, on a beach, an array of small mirrors pointed towards the surf reflects the movement of the waves, the change from light froth to dark sand, and the overal movement of the water, in a surprisingly delightful fashion.

In a BART (transit) station in San Francisco, the wind from the departing trains flutters an array of shiny panels, making the wind currents visible.

What I liked about these is that he wasn’t creating something new from nothing. He took what was there in nature and made it visible, and beautiful. He works with patterns, but not regular ones that we understand well. He chooses primarily the flow of fluids to create his works — and the laws of fluid mechanics are intricate and its behavior often chaotic and unpredictable. Fluid flow is also something we rarely get a chance to see. Air is invisible, and it’s hard to see the motion of water.

You can see pictures of much of his work at Ned Kahn’s website. I won’t copy any of his images here — but please take a look!

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.

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.  For example, the fossil record can be explained by where animal remains were deposited before the floodwaters receded in the Great Flood.  The Flood also created the Grand Canyon as it receded.

It was put in Kentucky so it would be within a days’ drive for 2/3 of the U.S. population.  Darn, I’m just too far away in California.  (Still, wouldn’t it be an amazing trip.  I could make a pilgrimage of sorts, a sort of anti-Darwin road trip complete with stops at creationist outposts.)

It’s disturbing in itself, but I was particularly upset when I read this passage, taken from the Salon article linked above:

“With a staff of nearly 300 employees, Answers in Genesis, devoted to “Biblical apologetics,” produces a daily radio program fed to 860 stations, operates a Web site instructing visitors how to out-argue Darwinists, and organizes about 300 traveling lectures each year. It’s also a well-oiled money-raising machine and opened the $27 million museum without a penny of debt to banks or lenders.”

That’s about the operating budget of the Exploratorium.  We also have a staff of nearly 300 employees.  We are constantly struggling for funding.  We do host programs outside the museum’s walls, but certainly not a daily radio program.  This isn’t just some rinky-dink museum.  It’s a major endeavor, with major backing.  Why don’t people donate as generously to science as to religion?

Plus, very few organizations (certainly not us) help train scientists or people who believe in evolution to respond to creation scientists’ arguments, which are often very well-argued and convincing.

About equal numbers of the American public believe the message of the Creation Science museum versus the views put forward by traditional science museums.  In addition, most traditional science museums don’t explore issues of evolution.   Should they?

Creation Museum Website 

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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 fact that it was raining (!) on the asteroid at the time, the instructor has the class actually calculate the effect that the blast would have on the trajectory of the asteroid. It’s so massive, and moving so fast, that the megaton bomb that Willis plants would only have made the two pieces land about a mile apart on earth (instead of parting like the Red Sea to sail safely on either side of the earth, as in the movie.)

Another interesting thing about movies is that they reflect the scientific issues — and the public’s concern over them, such as global warming (The Day After Tomorrow), space exporation (2001), or cloning (Jurassic Park). Movies also affect us emotionally, much more so than a written article or textbook, and so is a great way to hook people into talking about science. Many of the top films nowadays are science fiction, so why not use them to inspire young people?

The speaker was Sydney Perkowicz. He’s got a book out on the topic , “Hollywood Science,” which won’t be out until later this year. He breaks films down into some useful categories, such as:

Planet Killers (Deep Impact, When Worlds Collide, Armageddon)
Unnatural Disasters (Soylent Green, Waterworld, Day after Tomorrow)
Cloning & Genetics (Gattaca, Jurassic Park)

Sidney Perkowitz’s website

I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.