Web 2.0

Fun and free science!

June 19, 2008

Here’s a totally cool output from my old “alma mater”: the Exploratorium Digital Library Afterschool Project. This website has fantastically simple videos on how to do a selection of cool activities that the creative folks at the Exploratorium have come up with over the years. The point of this particular website is to promote activities [...]

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Blogs on education

June 13, 2008

Hey, I just stumbled upon this very useful list of blogs from the National Science Digital Library — all having to do with education, digital technology, and inquiry, among other things. If you’re a STEM educator (that’s Science, Technology, Engineering & Math education, definitely check out this list. What a find! Also check out the [...]

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Science 2.0

June 12, 2008

I’ve been hearing a little about Science 2.0… The idea being that it’s time to spawn a second-generation of science (like the second generation of the web…. web 2.0). This is part of the Open Access and Open Data science movement, like Public Library of Science (publishing freely available scientific works) and Science Commons (making [...]

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E = MC^shared

June 3, 2008

This just in… some physicists tried to negotiate a Wiki-friendly rights agreement with a big physics journal (Physical Review Letters). It seems that posting ones’ work on Wikipedia violates copyright agreements as currently written, because that counts as a “derivative work”. The journal decided not to publish the paper, but the physicists have gotten the [...]

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Science in Second Life?

February 1, 2008

There’s actually quite a bit of science in Second Life (the online virtual “massive multiplayer online role-playing game”). Second Life is a pretty popular place (42,967 online at the writing of this post), so in today’s age where it’s best to bring science to the people (because the people ain’t coming to science), having cool, [...]

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Erudite ecologists

August 6, 2007

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” [...]

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Wikimedia commons

July 27, 2007

I just have to add a plug for an amazing resource, the Wikimedia Commons. I try to use open-source images on this blog, and this is where I get them. They’ve also been really valuable to us at the Exploratorium in terms of getting images that we don’t have to pay to use — it [...]

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Love letter to the Exploratorium

July 20, 2007

I want to point out a neat-o blog, Cocktail Party Physics by Jennifer Ouellette. This blog has a lot of prolific material about physics, and is very popular. She recently visited San Francisco and here is her post about the Exploratorium. That post concludes, “where everyone was encouraged to discover more about the topic at [...]

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Interview on Podcast for Teachers

July 10, 2007

My podcast Science Teaching Tips won an award a week or so ago, for Best Professional Development podcast, through the Podcast for Teachers. They just posted a very nice interview with me, which I included in a new post on Science Teaching Tips. I talk about why I started the podcast, and why I think [...]

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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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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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Web 2.0

April 27, 2007

Part of the reason that I started this blog. I want to see what it’s like to participate in this “global conversation” — or, more pessimistically, to be one of a million voices in the wind. This is web 2.0, and it’s causing a lot of fuss everywhere. In the education world, everyone’s a buzz [...]

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