Pseudoteaching | Action-Reaction "Pseudoteaching is something you realize you're doing after you've attempted a lesson which from the outset looks like it should result in student learning, but upon further reflection, you realize that the very lesson itself was flawed and involved minimal learning. We hope that though discussion, we'll be able to clarify and refine this definition even further. The key idea of pseudoteaching is that it looks like good teaching. In class, students feel like they are learning, and any observer who saw a teacher in the middle of pseudteaching would feel like…

A Science Fair Project about Science Fairs | Wired Science | Wired.com "I can't say no. People ask me to be a science fair judge. If they have good food, I am there. Of course there are problems with the science fair. Students tend to focus on non-important things like the materials they used. There is often a lack of error analysis on any level. Students will take 1 data point and draw conclusions based on this. Don't get me started on "and so in the end my hypothesis was correct". But we all want science fairs to work. We want them to be awesome. Change is difficult. But that is not what…

I grew up in Broome County, NY, down by the PA border, and my parents still live in scenic Whitney Point. Broome County is one of the areas affected by a huge environmental controversy, because it sits on top of the northern bit of the Marcellus Shale formation, which contains huge amounts of natural gas. For years, this has been deemed too difficult and expensive to extract, but gas prices and drilling technology, specifically hydraulic fracture drilling where they pump large amounts of water down the hole to break up the rock and let the gas escape, have moved to a place where it's…

My talk yesterday at AAAS went well, if too long (the person who was supposed to be flagging the time got distracted, and never gave me any indicators that I was going on, and on, and on... But that's not really what I want to post about. The thing that triggered this is the speaker giveaway from AAAS, which is a combination laser pointer and 1GB USB drive. "Big deal," you say. Those are cheap." And, yeah, they are, but when you think about it, that's really kind of amazing. 50 years ago, the laser had barely been invented, and was still in search of a problem. Nobody had yet had the idea…

What Watson Can Learn From the Human Brain | Wired Science | Wired.com "Watson won. That set of microchips will soon join the pantheon of machines that have defeated humans, from the steam-powered hammer that killed John Henry to the Deep Blue supercomputer that battled Kasparov. Predictably enough, the victory inspired a chorus of "computer overlord" anxieties, as people used the victory of microchips to proclaim the decline of the human mind, or at least the coming of the singularity. Personally, I was a little turned off by the whole event -- it felt like a big marketing campaign for IBM…

Since I had to have the slides for my AAAS talk ready well in advance, I might as well let you look at them more or less as I give the talk. So, courtesy of SlideShare, here's the presentation I'll be giving right around the time this is scheduled to post: What Physics Knowledge Is Assessed in TIMSS Advanced 2008? View more presentations from Chad Orzel. the question I was asked to talk about is whether the released questions from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Survey test from 2008 do a reasonable job of covering what we want physics students to know coming in. The…

DISCOURSES OF THE DIGITAL NATIVE - Information, Communication & Society "Teenage delegates to the Blast workshops rarely validate interest based on technological facilities, enthusiasm or competency. Instead, it is peer groups and social alignments which shape declarations and, more importantly, enactments of interest. This suggests that while the concept of the 'digital native' may be pertinent for generational comparisons of technological use, or is a useful concept for the operationalization of creative media workshops, it is simply not recognized by teenagers to whom it refers, nor…

I'm leaving today for the AAAS meeting in DC, where I'll be through the weekend. The AAAS works much differently than the physics conferences I'm used to, most notably requiring speakers to upload their presentation several days ahead of time. This means that my usual night-before-a-talk process of fiddling with my slides is right out. I mean, I could fiddle with my slides, but any changes won't be reflected in the pre-uploaded ones I'll get to do the actual talk, so what would be the point? This puts me in the unusual (recently) position of having some time available to read fiction. I'm 50-…

News: How Class Dictates Delay - Inside Higher Ed "A new study to be published in the upcoming issue of The Review of Higher Education examines more closely the root of the reality of who delays going to college, and why. Not only are high school graduates of lower socioeconomic status more likely to delay college, but they also experience longer gaps and are less likely to graduate once they do enroll. "The popular press frequently writes about students who take a gap year and the many programs arising to serve them," writes the study's author, Sara Goldrick-Rab. "It is troubling that so…

Look, sir, look, sir, Mr. Knox sir! Let's do tricks with bricks and blocks, sir! -- Dr. Seuss Sadly, the only trick SteelyKid has really mastered with bricks and blocks is piling them into a gigantic obstacle in the middle of the floor. Well, that, and building tall narrow towers then knocking them down. And, I suppose, you don't need much more that that when you're two and a half...

We had an education talk yesterday afternoon, because today's colloquium speaker, Ann Martin from Cornell, has strong interests in that and wanted to talk to people about it. A lot of the discussion had to do with teaching students to write, and getting them to accept feedback. Martin spoke very positively of a writing-intensive introductory course she did about cosmology, and said she saw significant improvement in both students' understanding of key concepts and the quality of their written work over the semester. Those of us who teach a lot of introductory physics classes with labs all…

Career Advice: Why We Said No - Inside Higher Ed "My department has run a search for at least one faculty member every year for the last 10 years. I literally cannot remember how many search committees I have served on, let alone how many candidates I have interviewed. A few years ago I was the chair of a single search committee that hired four tenure-track professors at the assistant or associate level. This year we have two separate search committees going. Institutions and departments have different policies and cultures, so I certainly cannot speak for search committees everywhere, but…

Sean Carroll and Brad DeLong have each recently asserted that relativity is easier to understand than quantum mechanics. Both quote Feynman saying that nobody understands quantum mechanics, but Sean gives more detail: "Hardness" is not a property that inheres in a theory itself; it's a statement about the relationship between the theory and the human beings trying to understand it. Quantum mechanics and relativity both seem hard because they feature phenomena that are outside the everyday understanding we grow up with. But for relativity, it's really just a matter of re-arranging the concepts…

Did you ever want to meet one of the Calaquendi? : EphBlog "I don't remember exactly when I first read the Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and the Silmarillion, but it was at least 30 years ago. I've re-read them all (plus "Unfinished Tales" and the recently published "The Children of Hurin") dozens of times, and spent way more time than I would like to admit reading about Tolkien's world on various websites. None of this time has gotten me anything other than some personal satisfaction and a nagging guilty feeling. But I now have another place to feed my Tolkien obsession. One enterprising…

The Prodigal Academic: Quick tips for TT interviews "It is interview season in my fields, and we have a few searches going on here at ProdigalU (and keeping me out of trouble). I know I've blathered on about interviews here, here, and here before, but more tips can't hurt, right? Here are a few things I've been noticing this time around:" (tags: science academia jobs blogs) Cocktail Party Physics: It's a Demo Doozy "In college I volunteered to register students to vote (it was the year of a presidential election), but the alarming number of times I heard questions ranging from "You have…

Doug Natelson talks about a recent presentation on education: I recently heard a talk where a well reputed science educator (not naming names) argued that those of us teaching undergraduates need to adapt to the learning habits of "millennials". That is, these are a group of people who have literally grown up with google (a thought that makes me feel very old, since I went to grad school w/ Sergei Brin) - they are used to having knowledge (in the form of facts) at their fingertips in a fraction of a second. I can certainly agree about the Google part-- having graded a bunch of preliminary…

Zero Gravity: The Lighter Side of Science "In the July issue of APS News we pointed out that Einstein's field equations for general relativity appear unexpectedly under the opening credits of the animated feature film "The Triplets of Belleville," directed by Sylvain Chomet of France. We asked our readers for their interpretation, and offered copies of the book "Physics in the 20th Century" for particularly convincing explanations. We received many intriguing replies. We reprint some of them here, and, at the end, a communication that may, in fact, resolve the mystery of how those equations…

I picked up a few albums off "Best of 2010" list a few weeks ago, and have been listening to them on shuffle play a lot. These included Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Which is kind of a rough one for shuffle play with SteelyKid in the house-- I keep having to skip tracks when she comes into the room. And I eventually deleted whatever the track is with the interminable Chris Rock bit at the end, because, really, I don't need that. Anyway, the observation promised in the title is this: Kanye West is a really good producer. As music, most of these tracks are really impressive--…

As I've mentioned in passing before, I'll be attending the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science next weekend, in order to appear on a panel about the TIMSS Advanced 2008 test. I'm an idiot, and didn't submit an abstract in time (I thought there was a perfectly adequate placeholder abstract there, but I must've imagined it), but I'll be talking about how the physics questions on the test line up with standard curricula and conceptual tests and that sort of thing. The three-hour symposium format is not what I'm used to (presentations at physics meetings are…

The Literature of Ideas; or, please stop laughing at me - pornokitsch "I can understand the temptation - and seeing how widely used the phrase has become, clearly I'm not the only one. Being "the literature of ideas" gives science fiction the authority of science. Or broadening it out - it gives speculative fiction permission to speculate. Yours is the fiction of the kitchen sink, ours is the literature of the future. Your fiction cares only about petty, worldly things - Booker Prizes and the New York Times Book Review. Our fiction is concerned with more lofty matters - the future of the…