khannula | March 21, 2009Calls to arms:
Chris at goodSchist is looking for help to work on the wikipedia page on the mantle. Since he posted, some people have taken on the challenge, but someone who thinks the mantle is too cold to convect is arguing that the revisions violate wikipedia's neutral point of view.
Eric at Eruptions wants to see who can write a better volcano description than FEMA. It can't be too difficult. (In fact, this would be a good assignment to give to a class, I think.)
Maria at Green Gabbro notes that wikipedia's women in earth science category is "underpopulated." If you run across wikipedia…
khannula | March 18, 2009I've been blogging my way throug the redesign of my upper-level general education course, "The Control of Nature," using a course design tutorial from SERC. I've talked about what's gone wrong in the past, about who my students are and what they need from the class, and about my tentative goals for the class. I've been mulling over the problem (and also going back to classes after spring break), and I've finally worked through the next part... the course plan.
When it comes time to put a course together, I've got some bad habits. For instance, when I don't have any good ideas, I start by…
khannula | March 17, 2009From the Association for Women Geoscientists' e-news:
The deadline for applications for the 2009 AWG Chrysalis Scholarship has been extended to March 31st.
The Chrysalis Scholarship provides degree-completion funding for women geoscience graduate students whose education has been interrupted for at least one year. The awards are intended to cover thesis/dissertation costs such as typing or drafting expenses, child-care, or anything necessary to assist a degree candidate during those critical, final days.
More information and instructions on how to apply are available on the AWG website at…
khannula | March 17, 2009My other half and I are both working from home today. I'm revising the first draft of a paper that I'm working on, and he's doing remote network engineering. Last time I sat down with this paper, I realized that, if I plotted my data in a certain way, I would be able to see whether it really did match my model for what's going on. I looked at it again today, and yes, it really is the perfect way to make the argument.
I was so pleased that I needed to share it. So I showed it to my husband. And then I tried to explain what I was modeling. After several versions of the explanation, he had a…
khannula | March 16, 2009Callan Bentley has declared a meme:
What are ten things that every geology major ought to know about? The only restriction is you're not allowed to list anything that has already been listed by a previous geoblogger. You don't have to list everything, just ten important things.
Before I add to the list (which has already gotten quite long): Callan, I hope you're not planning to bring back the geology subject GREs or something. I took them. I swear I got maybe half of the questions right, and still ended up with a score in the 90-somethingth percentile. I'm glad they're gone. (And if we did…
khannula | March 15, 2009Geotripper got a new camera for his birthday, and has been taking pictures of mountains. I haven't posted enough pictures since I got my camera in December, so here's a view of my daily commute:
Here, let me label it for people who don't make a habit of seeing geology in landscapes (picture below fold):
The dreaded Mancos Shale, which is found on all the lower slopes in the background, was deposited near the western shore of the great interior seaway of North America, about 90 million years ago. My colleagues who are into fossils tell me that there are some massive clam shells in it, if you…
khannula | March 13, 2009I'm rethinking one of my courses, an upper level general education course called "The Control of Nature." I've been blogging my way through the course redesign process, starting with past problems with the course and with my various practical constraints (class schedule, physical space, student background). I'm using an online tutorial to guide me through the process, and now I'm finally moving towards thinking about the course itself.
Before I actually start redesigning lectures and in-class exercises and assignments, I need to figure out what I want students to be able to do when they get…
khannula | March 13, 2009Erik Klemetti's blog Eruptions has just joined ScienceBlogs. Yay!
Now you know that geology is the hottest science. (Well, except maybe for solar physics, but they go to American Geophysical Union meetings too.)
khannula | March 12, 2009I'm working on re-designing an upper level general education course called "The Control of Nature. Yesterday, I talked about the problems I've had in the past. Today, I'm going to start thinking about the context of the course, and what that means for improving it.
One of my commenters yesterday made exactly the same suggestion as the course design tutorial that I'm working through. Yes, I've been doing it all backwards, deciding what I want my students to read and discuss and write about before I've defined my goals. The first step is recognizing that things aren't working. The next step is…
khannula | March 11, 2009I've got a course that (IMO) is broken, and I'm working on fixing it.
I've been teaching a course called "The Control of Nature" (after John McPhee's book) for 16 years, after thinking of the idea on my way home from my first academic job interview. (Yes, that was a bad time to come up with an answer to a question like "what other class could you teach?" No, I didn't get that job.) I've taught it as an intro course for non-majors and as an upper-level interdisciplinary general education class, and I had plans, once, to adapt it for a freshman seminar and for a large-lecture gen ed class. It'…
khannula | March 10, 2009Spring has sprung in the geoblogosphere! In Virginia, Callan has been hiking on the Billy Goat Trail. In Colorado, Geology Happens has crocuses. And spring fever has even hit the New York Times - Andy Revkin is posting Youtube videos of Pete Seeger singing about maple syrup.
Hey, I can play, too. Look - I've got violets (pictures under the fold):
Actually, I took that photo on Sunday. If I go out this morning, maybe I'll be able to pick 148 more, and then I'll be able to start making that yummy-sounding violet custard pie that Janet made for pi day.
Oops.
khannula | March 9, 2009I had no idea there was magma beneath Socorro, New Mexico. When I read about it in this month's Geology, my first reaction was OMG WE'RE GONNA DIE!. (I've been occasionally using the electron microprobe at New Mexico Tech to look at rocks that were metamorphosed around a 380-million-year-old granite. I had no idea that the same kinds of processes were going on, right then, beneath my feet.)
The magma body is 19 km deep in the crust. That's about 2/3 of the way to the mantle - pretty far from the surface. But the effects are still noticeable, at least if you look at interferometric synthetic…
khannula | March 7, 2009Cr!key Creek invites bloggers to join him on World Water Day, March 22, and post about water basins and aquifers that cross political boundaries.
Here's what he said:
There are hundreds of water basins and aquifers that straddle our political boundaries, at both international and national levels. Neighbours stick their own straws into the same glass. This has historically led to both conflict and cooperation.
"Over the last 60 years there have been more than 200 international water agreements and only 37 cases of reported violence between states over water."
In the spirit of World Water…
khannula | March 6, 2009Earth is going to be here for the foreseeable future. Will there be geoscientists to help everyone else figure out how to deal with it?
The people who organize the Cutting Edge geoscience teaching workshops have another set of workshops, aimed at helping geoscience departments figure out how to grow and stay vibrant. This is particularly challenging for the geosciences, because we're on both sides of environmental issues. Our majors might end up looking for oil and gas or for ore deposits, or might monitor and clean up pollution. Our departments are also the place where college students learn…
khannula | March 4, 2009There has been a lot of cool stuff posted while I was getting this blog set up. From my Google Reader shared items:
Exotic rocks. There's an art exhibit in Oakland, California, that includes metamorphic rocks from Maine. Why? Because the schists sound like xylophone keys when they're struck. I knew there was a reason why I liked hitting metamorphic rocks with my hammer...
Fermi paradox meets the timescale. Why haven't we been visited by intelligent life? Well, if we had been visited by intelligent life sometime during Earth's 4.6-billion-year history, odds are that there wasn't any…
khannula | March 3, 2009I've got a question for all sorts of different scientists. What kind of skills do undergrad science/technology/engineering/math majors need in order to survive and thrive?
If you're a student, I've got some bad news for you. When you're not around, professors have a tendency to rant about the stuff you don't know how to do. Things like coming to class and taking notes and getting information from a book and starting homework assignments early. And, yes, I want to rant sometimes, too, especially when I'm answering complicated questions five minutes before an assignment is due. But I don't…
khannula | March 3, 2009I know it doesn't feel like spring on the East Coast of the US, what with the big snow day yesterday. But it's been in the 60's here for the past three days, and in the 50's before that. At my elevation (6800 feet), the snow is gone except in the shade and on north-facing slopes. It's nice, but worrisome: my mountains are the headwaters of the Rio Grande and part of the Colorado, and our snow is the water supply for cities and farms from Texas to California. March is supposed to be the big snow month here. We'll see.
In the meantime, I'm watching spring arrive. And this year, I'm going to try…