In these tough economic times, waste not, want not, right?
So, an enterprising Explainer at the Exploratorium thought well, there must be some good use for all these cow eyes we dissect on the museum floor every day.
So, yup, you guessed it. Kudos to those crazy kids for the following recipe:
They just keep on coming! There are so many workshops for teachers, I wonder how useful it is to let you know about them. But, if there’s one in your area, and you’re available, it never hurts to dip your toes into an enrichment experience, right? See my previous post for other professional development opportunities (most of which are for the summer months).
Podcasts
Of course, if you can’t get away, don’t forget that podcasts are a great way to go to a conference without leaving the comfort of your home (or treadmill, or morning commute). My Science Teaching Tips podcast at the Exploratorium is, of course, fantabulously entertaining, but there are also a lot of other great science oriented podcasts, like WNYC Radio Lab, Naked Scientists (note especially their Kitchen Science portion), my NSDL Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears podcasts and many others.
For college instructors
The short course scheduled at the University of Oregon for June 29-July 1, Using Research-Based Curricula and Tools to Promote Active Learning in Introductory Courses is filling up, there still are a few openings. If you were thinking of registering, please do so soon. And also, please pass the word along to others who might be interested. (By the way, the reduced $50 registration fee has been extended.) You can find complete information and registration instructions at http://uoregon.edu/~sokoloff/chaut1.htm
Idaho National Laboratory
INL has a TON of different workshops and programs for teachers. If you’re in Idaho, check it out. Here’s their main education page, a 1-minute weekly podcast with their offerings that week. They also team pre- and in-service teachers with INL researchers in an 8-week paid summer intensive, which includes housing for out of state teachers. There is also a 10-week research experience for pre-service teachers. They also have two main annual events for students (one for Hispanic teens and Science & Engineering safety expo for teachers, students, and parents).
Research Experiences for Teachers
PTEC, a project led by AAPT, the American Physical Society, and the American Institute of Physics, maintains a list of Research Experiences for Teachers, or RETs. These programs give in-service teachers an opportunity to spend part of their summer participating in cutting-edge physics research. http://www.aapt.org/aboutaapt/updates/March2009.cfm#PTEC
Climate Discovery Online Courses for Educators at NCAR
Now accepting registrations for Summer Term! http://ecourses.ncar.ucar.edu
Are you seeking a K-12 professional development opportunity that will enhance your qualifications, competency, and self-confidence in integrating Earth system science, climate, and global change into your science classroom? The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) offers a series of six and seven week online courses for middle and high school teachers that combine geoscience content, information about current climate research, easy to implement hands-on activities, and group discussion. The courses run concurrently from June 19 through August 2, 2009.
• CD 501 Introduction to Earth’s Climate is designed to guide participants through the basics of climate science, integrating content, classroom activities, and community-building discussions to help middle and high school educators understand the answers to common questions about climate.
• CD 502 Earth System Science: A Climate Change Perspective explores Earth as a system from the perspective of climate and global change, describing the interactions between the various parts of the Earth system, including human activities, and how they all affect our climate.
• CD 503 Understanding Climate Change Today presents some of the current and predicted impacts of global warming on our planet and human societies. This course explores how climate models are developed and used to understand likely scenarios of future climate and how current scientific research is improving the quality of climate predictions.
There is a $225 fee per course (save $25 if you register by June 1st.)
In each workshop, teachers learn about the physics of weightlessness and what to expect on the zero gravity flight. They also design microgravity experiments that applied science, technology, engineering or mathematics principles to human activities in a weightless environment.
Their flight schedule for 2009 is below:
Albuquerque, New Mexico – Aug 22
Detroit, Michigan – Aug 1/Sept 24
Norwalk, CT – Aug 29
Washington, DC – Aug 15/Oct 2
I am a science education and communications consultant — view my website for my full range of services.
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
Here’s a problem most of us never have. How do you raise tadpoles in the classroom without killing them off? Which species are best? And then what about the resulting frogs? A teacher recently raised this on the Exploratorium teacher email list, and perhaps others can benefit from these words of accumulated wisdom.
First, you gotta get the egg sacs. These teachers were in the bay area, and recommended the vernal ponds near Merrit College in Oakland. It’s smart to make sure you’re in an area where collecting is allowed, and try to find out what you’re collecting in advance (and not, as one teacher recounted, an endangered species). One veteran teacher (who seems to know the answers to everything from physics to, well, tadpoles) says he uses spring water, mixed with a couple gallons of the water taken from the pond where he got the sacs. He also picks up some stray twigs and rocks that have growth on them, assuming they carry some of the tadpoles native food stuff. One teacher quoted a book (below) which remarked that you should have no more than 5 eggs per quart, between 62 and 72 F. What he ends up with are California tree frogs (small, noisy, and pretty). He used to feed them small crickets, until he found one of the crickets eating the tadpoles. Now he uses frog food (from Pet Mart), though a recommended book (below) suggests feeding them goldfish food. That teacher keeps the tank clean, and keep some of the native water and debris in the tank when he dumps some of the dirty water and adds spring water to replace it.
He adds:
They can climb anything, and are small enough to get out of tiny cracks. Your aquarium should have a good seal on the netting. They are also very smart so I usually put an open copy of Wind in the Willows by the tank for them to read (they move their little lips when they read) when kids aren’t around.
For those of you erstwhile teachers trying to become hydra ranchers, one teacher reported success using pond water and feeding them daphnia or copapods, adding pond water every week, and keeping the tank in a window without direct sun. Feeding them brine shrimp didn’t work for one teacher.
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
Firstly, I just have to say how beautiful the view is outside the airplane window right now. It’s been an extraordinarily bumpy ride on my trip from San Francisco back to Denver, and I’m a real nail-biter when it comes to turbulence. But now we are above the clouds and the sky is white with a band of blue and purple at the horizon. I’m thinking of light scattering and optics and it’s quite soothing.
But on to the meat of today’s post. There are a lot of ways you can slice the essential “messages” of education research, and what we know about how people learn. My colleague, Noah Finkelstein, slices it this way:
1 – Actively engaging students in learning is important
2 – What people already know affects what they learn
3 – Context shapes what students learn
4 – Teaching is an effective way to learn
I’m reading a paper right now that focuses on number 2 – learning depends on what people already know. There is a whole body of thought (that’s quite well substantiated by research) that learning isn’t just the addition of new bits of information, but rather the process of changing people’s existing conceptions. In that way, it’s important to know where you’re starting (what people’s naïve conceptions are) so that you can CHANGE them, rather than just trying to overwrite them. People have their existing ideas for a reason – they make sense, and they have some predictive power. So the new idea has to provide some advantage over the old idea in order for people to drop their old model. The same content might make perfect sense to one student, who doesn’t have a previous conception that conflicts with it, and yet be actively resisted by another student. The job of a teacher can be quite difficult, then! As if you, dear reader, didn’t know that already.
This is old work, from Posner in 1982. But realize, there is some debate as to how well-formed these ideas are. As this paper by Hewson argues,
because students have experienced and thought about the world, they do come to class with ideas, often hazy, ill-formed and inappropriate, but ideas nonetheless.
There’s some evidence that people don’t come to the table with well-formed “theories” of how the world works, but rather these sort of muddy “proto-ideas” which often shift depending on the context of the problem in question.
But anyway. An example of a misconception is that “mass / weight = “heaviness”” or that some objects have mass and others (like air or hair) do not). Scientifically, of course, all objects have mass, and mass is a measure of the amount of matter in an object. So, how can we work with those naïve ideas to help students arrive at the scientific understanding of mass (or density or anything else)?
The paper that I’m reading right now (Hewson and Hewson, J. of Research in Science Teaching, vol 40, p. S86, 2003) proposes four main ways that teachers can teach in a way that uses students prior knowledge.
1. INTEGRATE new conceptions with existing (presumably correct) conceptions
2. DIFFERENTIATE existing conceptions into more fine-grained categories or bins. This assumes that the student is applying a concept too broadly, and they can see that what was plausible in one situation is not plausible in a different, more complex situation. (For example, “heaviness” is an undifferentiated concept which includes mass and weight).
3. EXCHANGE one conception (presumably incorrect) for a new one. The new concept has to be shown to be more useful and predictive than the old one for the student to become dissatisfied and toss their old model.
4. CONCEPTUALLY BRIDGE the new idea with meaningful common experiences, to give the student a context for seeing why the new idea is plausible.
In this study, they wanted to see how these different techniques affected student understanding of density. In the control condition, they presented the main ideas in density and floating (eg., density = mass/volume, all matter has mass), discussed them, and did experiments to demonstrate these ideas. Pretty typical science class stuff.
In the other class, they took what they knew about students prior knowledge (eg., mass and volume of an object affects whether it sinks, density = “crowdedness”), and geared their discussion based off those ideas, arriving at the more scientifically valid ideas (density = mass/volume, density is the packing and mass of particles, all matter has mass and density).
They found that starting from the alternative conceptions was more effective in teaching students the ideas they wanted them to learn (as measured by a conceptual quiz), though it wasn’t as good as one would have hoped. But still, better than the standard “tell them what you want them to know” approach. But both groups still held on to their alternative/naïve conceptions that they started with, at least to some degree.
Hewson & Hewson, J. Research in Science Teaching (40) PP. S86–S98(2003)
So, the take-home message is, starting with students’ existing ideas may be more effective than the standard textbook approach of presenting the ideas that you want them to learn.
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
The National Academies has released another one of their stellar reports – On Being a Scientist. The report is a thoughtful look at the challenges facing scientists — ethics, personal, and professional issues. These reports are always so well-written, and serve as great guides for years to come. Here are some excerpts:
Scientific research offers many satisfactions besides the exhilaration of discovery. Researchers seek to answer some of the most fundamental questions that humans can ask about nature. Their work can have a direct and immediate impact on the lives of people throughout the world. They are members of a community characterized by curiosity, cooperation, and intellectual rigor.
However, the rewards of science are not easily achieved. At the frontiers of research, new knowledge is elusive and hard won. Researchers often are subject to great personal and professional pressures. They must make difficult decisions about how to design investigations, how to present their results, and how to interact with colleagues. Failure to make the right decisions can waste time and resources, slow the advancement of knowledge, and even undermine professional and personal trust.
The report discusses how to intellectual property rights, research misconduct, how to treat data properly (harder than you think!), conflicts of interest, and authorship and attribution, among others. Here’s a snippet of a story on a tough authorship decision:
A much-discussed example of the difficulties associated with allocating credit between beginning and established researchers was the 1967 discovery of pulsars by Jocelyn Bell, then a 24-year-old graduate student. Over the previous two years, Bell and several other students, under the supervision of Bell’s thesis adviser, Anthony Hewish, had built a 4.5-acre radio telescope to investigate scintillating radio sources in the sky. After the telescope began functioning, Bell was in charge of operating it and analyzing its data under Hewish’s direction. One day Bell noticed “a bit of scruff” on the data chart.
…
Many argued that Bell should have shared the Nobel Prize awarded to Hewish for the discovery, saying that her recognition of the signal was the crucial act of discovery. Others, including Bell herself, said that she received adequate recognition in other ways and should not have been so lavishly rewarded for doing what a graduate student is expected to do in a project conceived and set up by others.
You can read it online at the link below:
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A (sort of) recent story in the NY Times highlighted the wonderful work of Satre Stuelke, a medical student and former art professor who co-opted the CT scanner for his own aesthetic purposes. Below is just one of the images that resulted — a wind-up toy bunny:
Photo: Satre Stuelke
This is a tin wind-up drumming bunny toy. I was amazed with the complexity and ingeniousness of the internal mechanism. .
Also surprisingly beautiful is the Big Mac:
Photo: Satre Stuelke
Says Stuelke:
It was bought at the lunch rush hour and it is apparent from the placement of pickles, sauce and lettuce that the chef was under pressure.
What I love about this work is the revealing of the previously hidden (see my earlier post on Seeing the Unseen for the work of Ned Kahn, an artist who reveals the invisible through completely different techniques). All these aspects of these objects are there, but we aren’t normally privy to them. There is a ghostly aesthetic, even in the curvature of the box holding the Big Mac. One of my favorite exhibits at the Chicago Museum of Art was that of objects from the art deco period — a chair with graceful lines, a perfect plate, a table with ornate legs.
Image: Kent Wang
It’s easy to lose sight of the wonder of the ordinary, especially since everyday items aren’t made with the sleek lines of a Swingline stapler, for the most part, anymore. But I love getting a look at these items from a different point of view. I’ve always loved factories for the same reason, and tour one any chance I get. Modern industry is so curious in its intricate workings. Stuelke’s images just give us one glimpse of that wonder.
For that reason, I’ve always been curious to read the book The Design of Everyday Things
, but never got around to it.
The review on Amazon says it all — I’ve got to read this book sometime!
Anybody who has ever complained that “they don’t make things like they used to” will immediately connect with this book. Norman’s thesis is that when designers fail to understand the processes by which devices work, they create unworkable technology. Director of the Institute for Cognitive Sciences at University of California, San Diego, the author examines the psychological processes needed in operating and comprehending devices. Examples include doors you don’t know whether to push or pull and VCRs you can’t figure out how to program. Written in a readable, anecdotal, sometimes breezy style, the book’s scholarly sophistication is almost transparent.
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
We already know why polar bears don’t eat penguins, but what do they eat? In this episode, we’ll share a simple activity that opens a window to understanding a unique ecosystem as one example of a food chain – the Arctic Ocean. For more information on ecosystems and food chains, see Issue 13 – Tundra: Life in the Polar Extremes.
Photo by Ansgar Walk
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
Wow, I just stumbled upon this and it was so beautiful I had to share:
Thanks to Tibchris on Flickr for posting this (and making it available with Creative Commons).
If you’re looking for freely available images for presentations or in-class use, there are two great places to look:
Wikimedia Commons images are all licensed under Creative Commons, and some (typically those taken under the auspices of the federal government) are public domain. Lots of search capabilities.
Flickr also has a lot of images, but not all are Creative Commons. Go to the Advanced Search screen and select “Creative Commons” at the bottom.
Lots of beautiful shots on both these sites — I use them all the time for this blog and professional presentations.
Here are some more because they’re so pretty. Click on the link to see the license and original.
The Lena River Delta (Public Domain image by NASA)
And an image of snow crystals, also in the public domain (from the US Agricultural Service)
And a red-headed rock Agama (GNU license by Chris Huh).
I am a science education and communications consultant -- view my website for my full range of services.
I am a physicist, writer, podcaster, and educator in Boulder, CO. On this blog I get to wax on about science stuff I think is cool (like weird science, or stuff we think is true but isn't), K-16 science education, hands-on science activities, teaching pedagogy, and how to communicate science. Geek on. 8-)
In these tough economic times, waste not, want not, right?
which has a section on frogs.
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