This post is based on ideas from a presentation by Rachel Scherr of the University of Maryland and Seattle Pacific University.

Teachers, Rachel says, are disenfranchised.  Just as students who have no voice in what and how they learn in the classroom, professional development is often inflicted upon teachers who have no voice in the process.  Just like disenfranchised low-income students can be empowered, economically, by learning mathematics (see Radical Equations), science can be a gateway for teachers to become professionally empowered.

At Pacific Seattle University they do some rather radically different things for teacher professional development in order to attain this goal.  To start, they take them out of the classroom.  The kinds of conversations that happen once you’re out in the world are different.  Robert Moses, a teacher in Cambridge, takes his middle school students on a field trip onto the subway system.  The subway map can become an analogy for a number line, with the stops equivalent to positive and negative numbers.  (This is from the Algebra Project, a revolutionary project to bring math to inner city kids in a way they can relate to).  How can we create this kind of empowering revolution for teachers?

Their entire professional development curriculum is based on this idea — they ask teachers to create and represent physical ideas on their own.  This is basically interactive engagement, but specifically with allowing some freedom on the teachers’ part. For example, teachers came up with the primary features of energy, and decided on the most important ones.  They made drawings and diagrams to explain how energy is transferred from a person’s hands to a box to create motion when the box is pushed.  They did a little bit of “energy theater” where people played the role of different types of energy (so that teachers would start to see energy as a thing.

I like what they’re doing, and the point.  I don’t think that this is the only way to do it (“social construction of knowledge.”).  I think it’s really hard to do education in a way that is empowering and respectful for participants.  That’s why I’ve loved doing teacher professional development.  Science teachers are a very forgiving and curious group of people, and willingly engage in this kind of activity.  They’re so interested in it all.  Rachel was very enthusiastic about the amazing quality of the representations that teachers came up with, and how much they learned from constructing their own knowledge. They want teachers to both value development of rich content knowledge for themselves (and thus their students) and to recognize themselves (and thus their students) as intelligent agents whose ideas merit careful attention and who can figure things out.

Tough job for the teachers teaching these courses for teachers!  Kudos to Hunter and Eleanor Close.  But maybe even harder job for the teachers to implement these ideas in their classroom.  When they got their Foss Kits (kits for teaching a certain topic in the classroom) they went right back to their normal style of pedagogy – a tendency that a lot of professional development folks struggle with.  And one teacher explicitly said, “How much of this stuff am I expected to be able to do in my classroom before I get fired??”

Teachers need to navigate within the existing system, and doing these more open-ended activities is tough within that structure.  Of course, if students had learned their science better in 5th grade, then 8th grade teachers wouldn’t have to re-teach these topics, so they would end up saving time in instruction.  But, that kind of change will only happen after many years.  <sigh>  Reform is long and slow.

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Image from http://www.colorado.edu/MCEN/flowvis/

Our most famous fluids tend to be transparent — air and water, for example.  This makes it hard for us to imagine how fluids are moving as members of the general public, but also poses an interesting problem for budding engineers.  They need to know how to make fluids do what they want them to do.  So, Jean Herzberg in the Mechanical Engineering teaches a flow visualization course here at CU.  She does it in a fairly novel way, as a hands-on art and science course.

There’s a lot here.  Some of the things she covers are photographic techniques, flow visualization techniques, some of the physics and phenomenology of fluids such as fluid rotation.  She spends a lot of time on cloud physics.  “I’ll never be able to ignore the sky again,” says one participant.   But interestingly she also spends some time on the history of photography, which has evolved from a science to an art.

This is the only course in existence on flow visualization!  (and it shows up first in Google searches for “flow visualization”.) She gets some envy from colleagues when she presents her results at conferences, whose courses tend to be highly mathematical. It’s unusual to mix art and science in quite this way, in which art students are expected to document and experiment, whereas the engineering students are expected to create expressive images with impact.  The idea that engineers could learn something by creating something themselves is unheard of, and this enrages her.  And in the end, the engineers create images that are just as compelling and indistinguishable from those of the artists.

In the experiments that students develop at home, they use everyday household fluids, which are environmentally benign.  Usually toxic materials are used in laboratory courses, which is really unnecessary.  She finds that she can’t explain the unusual physics of some of their observations.  It’s also challenging because the exact properties of many of the materials used, such as food coloring and WD40.  Combustion and fluorescence, she says, are always popular (natch). For example, one group wanted to make green flame, so poured flaming methanol in boric acid.  Another made a negative image of smoke changing from laminar to turbulent flow as it exited the mouth.  The images she showed us were from her 2009 class which will be on the web shortly, but in the meantime you can see many amazing student images in their galleries.  The artistry of these images is astounding — the play of light and color, the use of humans as backdrops but using fluid flow as the main focus of the image.  The science of the images is also compelling.  One group of students discharged a fire extinguisher underwater, and saw three phases of matter (solid, liquid, gas) within that image.  A Tesla coil arcing through the air shows interesting patterns, showing discontinuities in the breakdown of air.

Students also take many images of clouds as part of their assignments, which are also on the gallery page.  Anyone who lives in Boulder knows that it’s an amazing spot for clouds — with the Rockies nearby and some interesting atmospheric conditions we get some curious clouds that I’ve never seen anywhere before.

What is the impact of this course on her students?  She finds, anecdotally, that students experience life-altering changes after the course, and her surveys show that students’ beliefs and attitudes change to be more enthusiastic about fluid flow and they notice fluid flow in everyday life.  (Why doesn’t she see this kind of change in her traditional engineering courses?)  She sees changes in students perceptions of the discipline and the physics.  Students feel better about the material — they see fluids as beautiful, interesting, useful, and fun.  Traditional fluid mechanics course students have negative responses on most of these — they see fluids as not beautiful, useful, and it’s not something they feel able to do.  This reminds me of my time at the Exploratorium, where I was first exposed to the incredible aesthetics of science, and the intersection between art and science.  I began to notice all sorts of little, beautiful things — the cracks in the sidewalk, light on a puddle, swirls of milk in my coffee.  I still do.  Life-altering experiences?  You betcha.

This is another kind of way of knowing fluid mechanics.  These students could probably point to the sky and explain things about fluid mechanics that those who learned to do the calculations can’t.  Note, however, that the engineering students in this flow visualization course have already taken the calculational fluid mechanics course.  I wonder, how would students in the traditional fluid mechanics course see that course differently if they took this visualization course first?

Note that this is not unrelated to my earlier post on Seeing the Unseen and Flow Visualization Video.

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I’m in a session by Sean Myers on email management and triage.  While this isn’t directly related to science education, it’s a piece of technology that we all use.  How to use it more efficiently can help our productivity as educators (or whatever we do).  This was a really great session, and I got a lot of ideas!

We make the wrong assumption, with email, that our time and attention are infinite (says Sean).  We look at our inbox and decide, we’ll deal with it later, move it to a folder, look at it another time.  However, our time and attention are finite, where as the distractions are infinite.

So, he advocates the use of inbox zero, developed by Merlin Mann.  Process your email regularly. Processing is more than checking but less than responding.  If you’re checking on someone’s house, for example, you check in at it, but if there’s a problem, you do something.  So, if you check your email, make sure that you have time to take action on them.  You don’t need to respond to every single email, most don’t require that you respond.

Here are the possible actions to take when you get an email:

• Delete (or archive). We keep things in our inbox thinking we need to keep it visible.  However, if it’s not relevant now, it’s likely not going to be relevant.  If you want to save it for later, archive it, but keep the folder structure minimal. Don’t complicate your life by making a very complicated folder structure.  One folder for each class, or for each project, makes the most sense.
• Delegate. If you don’t have time to deal with it, or aren’t the right person, delegate.  If you want to delegate it, be clear with your expectations.  Also follow-up with the original emailer to indicate the action that’s been taken.
• Respond. Go ahead and respond, and then delete.  Use the “sentenc.es” method — respond to emails with 5 sentences or less.  Get rid of the niceties.  You can put the sentenc.es link in your signature if you’re concerned about being too terse.  Also, beware of having a month’s worth of work in your inbox.  If an email contains a large amount of work, keep the conversation going.  Respond “OK, this is in my task list.”  That sets the expectations, and allows you to delete the original email.
• Defer. This can be dangerous.  If you don’t have time to deal with something, we often put it off until later. Keep your inbox for unread messages.  You can, however, create a “close of business (COB)” folder for messages that you don’t need to deal with immediately.  Go to that folder once a day to keep it clean.
• Do. You can do the piece of work or action required, or put it somewhere else (on a task list or on a calendar), and get it out of your inbox!

The chains of habit are to weak to be felt until they are to strong to be broken

- Samuel Johnson

It’s not going to be easy to move to Inbox Zero, but this is something that you will need to work on until you create new habits.

Some tips:

• Email less. Once an hour, three times a day, whatever works for your schedule.  When you are doing email, dedicate yourself to it until you’re done.  Don’t multitask.
• Use rules. Automatically move messages to COB folders.  If you don’t want to read it every day, then you can have an “end of week” folder.
• Be honest with yourself. Are you really going to respond to your email or will it just sit in your inbox? Will it really become relevant?
• Create email DMZ zone. If you don’t have time to clean up your current inbox, move it to a “demilitarized zone” folder, so you can start with a clean slate.
• Use templates. If you send the same information multiple times, create a template so you can send the information easily.

So, if you’ve now managed to achieve Netbox Zero, you still have to deal with communicating properly with the rest of the world via email.

Communication tips

• If you’ll be away, send a calendar invitation indicating when you’re going to be gone (if you have Outlook).  And use a ‘out of office” email message.  This can also be used if you’re doing email less, so people will have realistic expectations about when to hear from you.  Doing email less also helps limit peoples’ unmitigated access to you at all hours of the day.
• Be concise. See, again the sentenc.es method.  This reduces the noise, though it can seem terse and impersonal.  I have an old boss who used to put every sentence (which were short) on a new line.  That makes it clear what the main points are and lets you count sentences.
• Respond to question inline. That helps to make the conversation flow clear, as you’re answering just what they asked.  If the conversation changes, change the subject line.
• Keep it simple. No images, formatting, and only include the necessary recipients.
• Attachments. Consider using a link instead.  And when you get an attachment, save it somewhere, and delete the email itself.

Great ideas, thanks Sean!

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

The University of Colorado at Colorado Springs has been experimenting with using podcasts in their nursing courses, though it was four years ago so things might have changed.  They discovered several things along the way:

Students needed to be educated that they could listen to podcasts on any MP3 player or on their computer (and did not need an iPod).  Most listened to them on their computer.  How did they use the podcasts?  Did they use them to review, or as a substitute for attending class?  86% used them as a review, and only 14% used them instead of going to class.  These are consistent with other studies.  Most (79%) used them at home, as opposed to at the gym or on their commute.  So, they’re not using them as “mobile learning” per se, they’re sitting at their computer to listen to them, for the most part.  Also, they downloaded the podcasts as soon as they were available (51%) as opposed to right before the exam (12%).  Other studies, she said, have found that only 40% download immediately, and 60% later or before the exam.  Some preferred the audio podcast because it was easier, but a few students said they preferred having the powerpoint slides along with the audio.  These survey results are at www.uccs.edu/bethel.

It may be that recording the student lecture isn’t the best use of student time, to re-listen to the whole lecture.  However, most people are podcasting the entire lecture.  Some students specifically seek out courses where podcasts are being used.

Podcasts can be helpful in the following ways, found some studies:

• clarifying difficult concepts
• reviewing concepts
• repetition of material
• helping with note taking
• preparing for exams
• catching up on missed classes
• ESL students who need to repeat words

Lessons learned

• Check disk space and batteries before class
• Repeat student questions
• Start each ’segment’ of the lecture with a title
• Create multiple short files (15-20 minutes) as opposed to entire lectures
• Archive previously recorded lectures in case the current one has technical difficulties
• Ownership issues can be sticky.  Careful of using images from textbooks because you’re then distributing copyrighted content.
• One idea is to record the lecture in advance (though some faculty complain that this feels stilted without an audience) and require students to listen to it in advance.  Then use classtime for discussion.  Some instructors have found this to be a great alternative to the traditional class lecture.

I’ve been trying to figure out for myself what I think of podcasted lectures.  I could see it being helpful when you’ve spaced out for a moment, to go back and review what the instructor said.  It’s an alternative reference, like the textbook.  But it also seems that it requires a relatively sophisticated student to use such a resource to enhance their learning.  Learning doesn’t happen by transmission, and a freshman might think she’s studying by just listening to the lecture again.  They need to be going to the content with a purpose, to try to understand the material or answer a specific question or fill in their notes, I think.  I could imagine the podcasts being even more helpful with some sort of guiding questions to direct students’ engagement with the podcasts.

How did they do it?

• Used portable digital recorders (Olympus; $~70) which can record up to 6 hours and are easy to use.  However, the file then needed to be compressed to MP3 using Audacity ($free).
• They eventually started using the Zoom H2 recorder ($199), which records directly to MP3 and has omnidirectional recording (allowing students to hear their questions during class, not just the instructor).  They’re very pleased with this recorder.
• It’s been difficult to get instructors to break up their lectures into different segments.  Recordings of 15-20 minutes would be ideal.
• In the course website gave students instructions on how to download the podcasts from iTunes
• They then upgraded to Leopard and, with quite a bit of difficulty, got Podcast Producer configured.  Apparently the new Podcast Producer II will avoid many of the difficulties that they experienced, especially regarding workflows.
• They are also now going to iTunes U, but for now have just been using a “subscribe in iTunes” link on the course website (which is a wiki/blog site).  Each entry in the blog is a new audio file, but there is also a subscription link.

I would be interested to hear about iTunes U from people who have been using it.  I don’t quite understand what it is other than a central depot for university/education related podcasts?

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

Blogging from the Colorado Teaching and Learning with Technology (COLTT) conference.  This session, from Joni Dunlap, how to promote discussion in online courses.

How can we get learners to talk in online discussions, and how can we get the chatty students to shut up?  The results have been pretty disappointing so far.  Most instructors set up a discussion forum, and ask students to post an original post and to comment on two other posts.  But instructors complain that students are doing the minimum and the discussions aren’t exciting.  But what are they assessing?  They’re just counting how many posts each student gives.  The discussions, hence, are seen as tedious busywork.

So, there are three things to do to get good online discussion:

1. Relevance (what’s the point? Why are we doing this?)
2. Expectations (what are the rules?  How are we assessed?)
3. Preparation (what is an online discussion?  How do we talk online?)

Getting started.

First, she says, you have to create online community.  She asks them to share something special about themselves (eg., “I was held up at gunpoint”) or “what are your superhero powers?” or “share two songs that represent your present, past, and future”)  She uses Voicethread (an online tool for discussing images and ideas, which can be integrated with Moodle) and students can either add their comment as text (which appears under their picture) or as a small video.  These help get their collective feet wet in a playful way where they’re not being judged.

Provoking discussion.

A lot of the unsucessful ways that people start discussions are to ask, for example, give three comments on the reading on page 5.  How boring!  Discussion needs to be sparked with something provocative.  For example, “give three reasons why the author is dead wrong” or “students just aren’t as motivated as they used to be.  Comment.”  Don’t just ask students if they agree with the author where they can answer yes or no.  Ask them why they think the author wrote what he wrote and what their own viewpoint is.  Ask real discussion questions!

Guidelines

The guidelines for how to create online discussions are important to set up in advance. Setting up roles and responsibilities with a protocol can be helpful in making it clear what you expect of students, and makes treatment of students equitable and make the participation meaningful.

1. Group size. She suggests 10-15.  Though, I know that in small group work in class, the ideal size is 4-5, so I wonder if this holds online?
2. Assigned roles (eg., assigned reader, see below).
3. Limit number and length. This can keep a student to posting a certain number of words so that one student doesn’t come in an post an overwhelming amount of information, turning off other students from discussion.  She suggests 350 words per posted quotes and 250 word responses.  The originator can react to the comments ith up to 250 words.  This can be assessed by the instructor by eye rather than by actually counting words.  This helps students learn to share an idea in a short amount of text, as well.  Most students don’t have trouble writing enough words, but rather keeping it short enough!
4. Wait to step in. This can be a challenge!  The discussion can get truncated if the instructor steps in with their point of view.  She tells the students that the discussion starts Monday, she’ll monitor it, but won’t contribute until Thursday.  Then she can respond to themes that have been established (which is also a timesaver.)  Earlier, she can ask questions to promote discussion.
5. Allow learners to select topics. Not everything is interesting to every student.  Allowing students to choose which questions to respond to gives them some control.
6. Asking extension questions
7. Acknowledging contributions
8. Designated reader. Each learner takes on the role of the designated reader who does not contribute to the discussion (but can ask clarifying questions), but is responsible for summarizing the online discussion.
9. Rotating groups. You can also set up discussion forums with different issues to be discussed in each forum.  In groups of 4-5, students rotate to new forums each day.  Each group records their ideas about the issue, and students can then revisit the forums to see what other groups discussed.
10. Point systems. 0 points for idea that is not original or clear.  1 point for succinct, interesting, original argument or idea, and 2 points for a contribution that is creative and original, compelllingly argues a clear point, supported with evidence.  She has fellow students assign these points to each other, not anonymously.

Their slides are available on www.slideshare.net/plowenthal/

They also have an online handbook coming out from Lulu Press.  Not out yet, but it’s called the “CU Online Handbook” by the University of Colorado at Denver.  ID 7466014

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

I’m blogging today from another conference — the Colorado Learning and Teaching with Technology (COLTT) conference. The keynote speaker is Richard Katz, the VP of Educause.

It’s an old story by now that digital technology has completely changed how we access media — nobody under 30 reads newspapers, and newspapers haven’t responded with a new business model to allow them to generate revenue from online sources.  The advent of Craig’s List is the canonical example of this — the newspapers lost their classifieds revenue by not taking Craig’s List seriously.  They thought their corner of the market was secure.  As Colbert said, “Knock knock.”  “Who’s there?”  “The death of newspapers.”

Is that fair?  Will we see the death of newspapers in our lifetime?  It seems likely. News reporting as an enterprise won’t die, of course, but newspapers as an institution (not just an industry) seem to be going the way of the dodo.

We also have more computing power and functionality than ever before.  Consider the iPhone — it’s breathtaking when juxtaposed with the mainframes of decades before.  And digital technology has certainly changed how science communicates.  Think about how scientists communicated in the age of Einstein.  Ideas were communicated via handwritten letter, sent through traditional post. Nowadays we can get 10 colleagues’ comments on a paper, within a day, with tracked changes.  This has been very liberating for the exchange of scientific ideas.  We can advance faster, perhaps, today, with the ease of communication.  (On the other hand, it takes so much time to keep up with all the communication, much of which is watered-down in content because it’s too darned easy, so does it come out in the wash?).

Katz’ bottom line:  technology is reducing the amount of busy-work in the scientific enterprise by making things easier.  I’m sure that’s true, though there are some new kinds of busy-work that it creates.  I know that my brain often feels fragmented, it’s harder to focus with the huge streams of information flow — listservs, blogs, emails, and papers. I believe (and I’ve seen some research to suggest it) that technology is changing the way my brain works (and not for the better) resulting in reduced attention span and all that.  Katz cautions that now there is so much information, too, that we’re exposed to a lot of disinformation.  We use truthiness to intuitively sift among all the different stories out there.  It’s impossible to apply logical analysis to the entire internet firehose, so we have to resort to heuristics to decide what to believe.  We also resort to the wisdom of the crowd to decide what to believe (eg., ratemyprofessor.com).

Katz also says that we’re workig harder now, as academics, than ever before.  Academics are burning out at high rates, and we’re becoming less civil as a result.

What about our students?  I’ve posted before on the impact of the digital age on our classrooms.  Students aren’t coming to class as much, he says, and so we need to use new media to its best effect to help promote this declining engagement. Why haven’t we figured out how to use digital technology to do decentralized education, he asks?  Even in the Open University, (an entirely online university) students aren’t showing up in the organized chat rooms.  This is something we need to figure out how to do well.

The take-home message isn’t too surprising — digital technology is always getting better, and it’s allowing us to do profoundly big things.  However, the scholarship enterprise needs to adapt to the new technology, and the modern university will likely change to reflect these new technologies.  Universities are likely to be less about “place,” and more situated in virtual environments.

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