Earlier this week I had the experience of being in a lecture again, in a junior-level Electricity & Magnetism class (I will be studying this class as part of my new job). The contrast between the structure of a university class and the Exploratorium workshops was dramatic. In the university class, the material was presented in the abstract, with formulas and references to the “E-field” and an example problem. In the Exploratorium workshops, the focus is on the phenomenon, with almost no math, and the explanations are given like a story (eg., “electrons are stripped off of one material, and that charge pushes on the balloon…”).

The goal of the different workshops is different, of course — the university class is training students to solve problems and pass a test. The Exploratorium workshops are training for conceptual understanding. But can’t the two intertwine a little bit more?

In speaking with the professor for the university course, he made the distinction between theoretical/mathematical understanding and conceptual understanding. He is teaching students for theoretical understanding, not concepts. I respect this, as I do the conceptual emphasis at the Exploratorium. But, what I would like is to see more of a marriage between the two.

Many scientists argue that “popularization” of science is not useful because you can’t really get across the essence of the science, only the big ideas. The true essence of the science requires an understanding of complicated, indirect relationships, and a mathematical description of the world. That mathematical description of the world is what these young physicists are getting in their classes, and what I got in mine. Some of my deepest insights into the world were gained through understanding of these equations and what they said about the laws of nature.

However, my other deepest insights into the world were gained through a simple explanation of a phenomenon, which drew on my physics knowledge and told me what the equations were really saying.

So, the two methods of teaching certainly have their place, but I would like to see more overlap between the two. I don’t think you can truly understand the world without a good grasp of both the mathematics and the concepts, though the emphasis must change depending on the learner’s goals.

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

I’ve just posted a new episode of my podcast, Science Teaching Tips geared at secondary school science teachers.

How many hairs on my head? In this episode children’s book author David Schwartz tells us how he got excited about big numbers when he was a kid.

Enjoy!

These are produced through the Exploratorium’s Teacher Institute.

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

No post last week, as I was driving across the country from San Francisco to my new digs in Boulder CO. As I was camping in the middle of very very very dry Nevada, I noticed something a little cool. As any science teacher can tell you, any demonstration having to do with static electricity works best on a dry day (and is a terrible failure in, say, Florida). As I was rolling up my thermarest, I saw the tiny little grains of hay from the ground were sticking to it, and sticking straight out from it like little porcupine quills.

You can do this yourself with spices, like dill. Rub a plastic comb with a piece of wool, and hold it near dill and you can watch the dill dance in the electric fields. It may very well stick to the comb, too. The comb has grabbed electrons from the wool and is negatively charged. The dill has no charge, but when it’s brought near the comb, those negative charges push away the electrons on the dill, making the near end of the dill positive and the far end negative. It’s induced a charge on the dill. So, then the positive end of the dill sticks to the comb, and the negative end strains to get away, so you get the porcupine quill effect.

The same thing probably happened with my thermarest and the hay. The thermarest rubbed against the fabric of the tent, making one of them negative and one positive (I don’t know which, but if I had a tape electroscope I could have found out — I’ll write about that later). It’s easier to charge things like this on a dry day because water on the surface of things gets in the way of electrons jumping from one to the other.

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

I promised a post on my oddball career path, because many people find it interesting. It’s certainly been a bit of a random walk and I’m thrilled to find myself here! Here is an interview with me about my career through the American Physical Society.

I’ve often likened myself to a bacteria. Bacteria tend to be named for what they like — heat-loving bacteria are “thermophilic”, or acid-loving bacteria are “acidophilic.” But a thermophilic bacteria on one end of the petri dish doesn’t have a satellite map of the whole petri dish so that it can make a beeline for where it’s hottest. Instead, it senses the local changes in heat, and just heads in the direction where it senses it’s a little warmer. Then it senses which direction to go from there. In math terms, it’s following a “gradient.” So it doesn’t go from point A to point B directly, but gets there by wandering around, “sniffing out” the directions that get it closer to what it wants.

I certainly haven’t gone from point A to point B. I don’t think there is a point B, point B keeps changing. I just kind of sniff around and go in the direction that feels good. That’s how I got here. Sometimes I worry that I should try to do things that “build a career.” But life’s too short to do things just because you have to. I’ve gotten along very well by doing things that I enjoy, and because I enjoy them, I end up being valuable.

So, my undergraduate degree is in social psychology — I studied women in the workplace, but my true love was understanding how people interact in groups and just trying to get some insight into the mystery of how people work. I took a lot of physics and math while I was in college, though, and was taking 2 physics courses my senior year while completing my senior project. I got tired of the imprecision of psychology, though it was clearly applicable to everyday life, and thought perhaps I’d like to go to graduate school in physics. Physics made me feel good.

But I took a bunch of time off (5 years) and worked in San Francisco, and then went to Peace Corps in Guinea, West Africa. In Guinea I taught science for the first time, explaining the existence of invisible things like germs and HIV to villagers. That was where I understood that many people have alternative explanations for why things happen — explanations that don’t rely on science. That was also where I met my first science writer — a woman visiting a Peace Corps volunteer who was also a writer for Science magazine. I thought, wow, there’s a great career — I love writing, love learning science, it’s perfect. So, I kept that in my back pocket.

When I came back, I entered graduate school in physics at UC Santa Cruz. It had been 5 years since I’d been in school and 7 years since my last calculus class. It was very, very hard. But I did it, and 5 years later had a degree in physics. I somewhat regret sticking it out to the PhD, because it was not an enjoyable experience for me. I could have gotten the expertise and fun that I wanted with an MS. On the other hand, the doctoral degree opens a lot of doors for me.

While I was in graduate school I began freelance science writing and (through a lot of hard work) got several dozen publications in newspapers, magazines, press releases, and the web. That culminated in me getting the AAAS Mass Media Fellowship at National Public Radio’s Science Desk in DC. What a great job! I fell in love with radio (which I really hadn’t listened to that much before).

After my dissertation, I found the postdoctoral fellowship at the Exploratorium and that was the best thing that ever happened to me. The Exploratorium has been a creative hotbed, full of great people and great ideas and I’ve learned a lot from my mentor, Dr. Paul Doherty as well as the other amazing people in the Teacher Institute where I work. This job has made my career, and everywhere I look now, people are interested in hiring me.

So that’s me, from psychology to physics to writing to the Exploratorium, and now on to education research in Boulder.

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

This past weekend I was invited to speak at the Ecological Society of America for a workshop on communicating science. A bunch of ecologists wanted to know how to talk about their research to a broader audience. This is a huge issue nowadays, in part because of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) new “Broader Impacts” portion of their grants, which stipulates that researchers have to indicate how they will bring their work to the public. There are currently no reward systems in place for academics to talk to the public about their work (they get kudos for publications, not public lectures), and they’re not trained to explain their work in short, simple sentences.

I spoke about my own career path (which I’ll post on later), and one student mentioned this was useful because it shows you don’t have to walk the straight and narrow path (boy, I’ll say). I also talked a lot about blogging, even though I’m not the world’s expert, and about podcasting too and how to get your message across by talking clearly and using examples that are familiar to your listeners.

One thing I was struck by was that the ecologists were concerned that it was difficult to explain their science because it was esoteric and not directly related to people’s lives. And then they talked about waterways running dry, endangered species and the disruption of ecosystems, and trees. What the heck are you complaining about!? In physics we’re trying to talk about neutrinos, dark matter, and superconductors. And they’re worried about talking about trees? Give me a break. However, it is true that all science faces many of the same challenges in communication. In physics and chemistry, though, we’re often discussing things people have no direct experience with at all, and their only relationship to these things is through curiosity.

Now, that said, many people say you have to show how science is directly related to someone’s life in order to draw them in. I disagree. It certainly helps if you can answer the question “how does this relate to me?” but people do also have a natural curiosity about the world and how it works. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have all the popular stuff like Bill Nye, NOVA, and Mythbusters.

The other challenges that ecologists faced, that we physicists often don’t, were that the relationships and correlations they discuss are often indirect, and changes happen slowly over time, and many of the findings are nuanced or depend on context. This is a huge challenge, especially in trying to alert the public to climate change or endangered species. The public wants simple, quick, and dire messages, which the complexities of ecosystems do not lend themselves to. Al Gore spoke to the American Geophysical Union last year and urged the scientists there to find a few messages and stick to them — repeat them over and over until they become part of the public consciousness (that’s what the administration does after all). I think the same could be said of ecologists. What a massive undertaking, but necessary.

Here is a link to my talk on my website: http://www.exo.net/~drsteph/conference.html

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

Just added my blog to Technorati, finally.  Is there somewhere else on the blog that I should post this link?  I’m still figuring this all out.

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

I have a new job! My postdoc at the Exploratorium ends next week, and I will be taking off for the mountains. I have a fixed term position as Senior Teaching Fellow at the University of Colorado at Boulder. I’ll be doing research on physics education — studying how students learn and offering suggestions to restructure their upper division undergraduate courses (quantum and electricity & magnetism). If there are any teachers reading this, I would be really curious to hear what they think of education research and whether it’s helpful at all to them.

It will be quite a change from the buzzing pace of the Exploratorium. I’m very excited about the job — I’ve always found it interesting to understand how people learn and think about things. We usually think that other people learn how we do, by default, but it’s not true. “Metacognition” (or thinking about how we think) has always helped me as a learner — I tend to know what it is that I don’t understand, which helps me ask the right questions. Or, it used to. Before I was a “Dr” I asked much better questions. Now that I feel I’m supposed to know the answers I’m more shy about asking questions, which is a real shame.

I admit to some trepidation in returning to academia. I didn’t enjoy my graduate experiences, but the physics department at Boulder seems very friendly. Still, you walk into the halls of a physics department, and there is still certain quietness. After being near thousands of yelling and wide-eyed children, it will be a change. The other thing that is different about academia is the pace of life. At the Exploratorium, we have to create things that are pretty great, but there are a dozen other things waiting behind it, so we have to do it quickly. In academia, the standards are higher, the products must be much more meticulously polished. Will I have the patience to return to the slower pace after the fast-paced efficiency of the Exploratorium?

So, stay tuned!

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