Academia
drorzel | January 28, 2009Over at Dot Physics, Rhett is pondering grading curves:
Should you grade on a curve or not? If you are student, the answer is clear: go by whatever the instructor does. Otherwise, you have a choice. I don't like to tell other instructors or faculty what to do because I respect their freedom. For my classes, there is no curve. Why? Well, the question really is: "why grade on a curve?" I don't know the exact reason for particular instructors, but I can come up with some possible reasons.
My first few years teaching, I worried about this quite a bit. I talked to different faculty in the…
drorzel | January 27, 2009Several other people in the department have started using WebAssign to handle homework assignments in the introductory class, because it provides a way to assign and grade daily homework without forcing the faculty member to do a ton of grading (the college has a policy against student graders). WebAssign takes textbook problems, randomizes the numbers slightly so each student sees something different, and automatically grades the answers as students type them in on the web.
I'm a little hesitant to use it (I'm teaching the class in question next term), for two reasons: one is that there's…
scientificactivist | January 26, 2009Last Friday the British Minister of Science, Paul Drayson, visited the science area of Oxford University to give a short speech and take questions. The audience was a fairly random assortment of a couple of hundred academics and students, mostly from the sciences. I was invited to fill one of ten graduate student slots granted to the Department of Biochemistry. It was a nice gesture by Drayson, and I think he was legitimately interested in hearing from scientists. Based on what I witnessed, though, I hope that he took some of it in.
Drayson spoke and took questions about his role and the…
drorzel | January 26, 2009Much of LiveJournal has been sunk in a sea of suck for the last couple of weeks, but there's a really interesting discussion of science education over at "Faraday's Cage is where you put Schroedinger's Cat." The first post has to do with the idea of "gatekeeping":
In my class today, a very brief discussion occurred between the teacher and another student about a topic which has bothered me for a long, long time: gatekeeping.
This particular student is a grad student in mechanical engineering, and she was talking about her personal teaching philosophy. She said it bothered her that in the…
drorzel | January 26, 2009FemaleScienceProfessor posted a few days ago about "intense" editing of scholarly writing, and the different reactions students have to the experience:
Although an individual student's response to being intensely edited can vary with time and mood, there tend to be typical responses from each student. These typical responses are no doubt related to very deep aspects of their psyches and stem from previous experiences with teachers, women (maybe even their mothers..), or anyone who has ever criticized their punctuation. Who knows from whence these reactions spring.. Whatever the source, it's…
drorzel | January 24, 2009Over at Neurotopia, the Evil Monkey is offering advice on how to earn extra money in graduate school:
The key to more than mere culinary survival in graduate school is to volunteer for research studies. I took part in more projects than I could count. Some don't pay squat. I once spent 2 hours a day for ten days sitting in front of an infrared tracking system that monitored shifts in my visual search patterns and movements of my finger as I followed a dot around a screen. I made about 100 bucks for that. At the time, I thought it a princely sum. Then I discovered where the real money was: in…
neurotopia | January 23, 2009My illustrious coblogger points out that by taking part in research studies, a graduate student can actually afford to do things like, well, eat. Normally relegated to scraping the crumbs off the post-seminar cookie tray, or sneaking into a urology luncheon and being forced to sit through an hour talk on ureter infections only to have the opportunity to pick through the dregs of the boxed sandwich choices (ultimately finding the pimiento cheese spread/sprout pita to be the sole viable option), graduate students eke out a meager existence where we're pitted against each other to fight for the…
drorzel | January 23, 2009The last course report covered the first six classes of the relativity unit. This week, we had the final two relativity lectures, and today was the start of quantum mechanics.
Class 7: This lecture was about how you can use special relativity to show that a magnetic field in a stationary frame is an electric field in a moving frame. The basic idea is that when you move to a frame that is moving in the same direction as the (canonical) current, you see the spacing between the negative charges decrease due to length contraction, meaning that the wire no longer appears neutral. This leads to an…
drorzel | January 23, 2009The Physics and Astronomy colloquium this week was by Jill Linz from Skidmore, talking about a couple of physics outreach programs she's worked on. This being right up my alley, I made it a point to get in early enough to see the colloquium (I spent the morning at home with the sick SteelyKid, and Kate was good enough to come home for the afternoon), before giving an exam in the afternoon.
Linz took a somewhat different approach to physics outreach than a lot of other projects, which tend to focus on high-school students taking physics. She pointed out that if you look at the full student…
sciencewoman | January 23, 2009SW Notes: This post was begun a few weeks ago...you know, in the break between semesters. But I've been delayed and delayed in getting it done, and today is a day of metaphorical desk-clearing. So I'm just going to put it up now, half complete and let you all finish discussing it in the comments section.
The scene: My car insurance office
Insurance agent: You work at Mystery U.? You're on break now for a couple weeks, right?
ScienceWoman: Well, sort of. Classes start back up in mid-January, but there's lots of work to be done before then.
Insurance agent: Oh.
That scene is hardly unique in…
clock | January 22, 2009From Center for Science Education:
When: Friday, January 30, 2009 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM
Where: LSRC B101 Love Auditorium
Description: Bruce Alberts, a prominent biochemist strongly commited to the improvement of science education, began service as Editor-in-Chief of Science in March 2008. He is a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco. Alberts has been instrumental in developing the National Science Education standards implemented in school systems nationwide. He is a major proponent of "science as inquiry" teaching that…
drorzel | January 22, 2009Here are the results of yesterday's poll, as of about 10pm Eastern. Blue bars are the fraction of respondents saying that a given behavior (wearing hats, eating in class, drinking in class, leaving class to go to the bathroom) was acceptable, red bars the fraction saying it was unacceptable:
You can also see the results broken down by whether the respondents were faculty or students (solid bars are student responses, striped bars faculty):
It's interesting to see how uniformly permissive my readers are, though that may simply reflect the science-y tilt of my readership. When the topic comes…
sciencewoman | January 21, 2009New blogger Mrs. Comet Hunter is in the latter stages of her Ph.D., and she's at the stage of trying to figure out how to break her work out into discrete publishable chunks. She recently wrote a post about the topic, and she sent me an email to ask some related questions. With her permission, here's the bulk of the email:
Dear ScienceWoman,
I've been reading the Sciencewomen blog for a couple of months now (I know, I'm new to the blog thing) - and find it very interesting! I especially like your shoe posts, and "Ask ScienceWoman". I have a suggestion for an Ask ScienceWoman topic: how to…
terrasig | January 21, 2009
Many thanks for some blog publicity go out to Karl Leif Bates, editor of Duke University's online research monthly magazine, Duke Research, and co-founder of Science Communicators of North Carolina (SCONC). Many of you who attended this past weekend's ScienceOnline'09 gathering may recognize Karl as he was in attendance.
Completely independent of any coaxing (Karl was *not* present at my free, Friday Fermentable wine tasting), my post is currently the February 2009 feature on the Duke Research section, Voices: Science in Conversation.
The backstory is that, during our December vacation, we…
drorzel | January 21, 2009I went to a panel discussion yesterday about teaching issues, and was struck by both the strength and the range of opinions regarding classroom atmosphere. Some people are very laissez-faire about what students can do in class, while others have very strict codes of classroom behavior. One colleague even referred to a "code of professional conduct" that he lays down in class.
So, I thought I'd throw this out to the ScienceBlogs readership, to see what people think of various student behaviors. I'm too lazy to set up actual poll software, so we'll do this the low-tech way: leave your answers…
omnibrain | January 20, 2009From the syllabus:
Why Psychology?!
Psychology 100 is the most popular course at nearly every university and there's a reason why. The science of psychology covers an amazing range of topics. After all, the mind can do many amazing things! Oh yeah, it also fulfils a GenEd requirement ;)
Nearly everyone probably has a different idea of what psychology actually is. That's not surprising since even people who have been in the field for many, many years still disagree what should be a part of psychology and what should not. Psychology covers topics ranging from depression, anxiety, and…
drorzel | January 20, 2009This is flagged as a ResearchBlogging post, but it's a different sort of research than I usually write up here, as this is a paper from Physical Review Special Topics-- Physics Education Research. This is, however, a legitimate and growing area of research in physics departments, and some of the findings from the PER field are really interesting.
This particular paper, though, is mostly kind of depressing. The authors, including Nobel laureate Carl Wieman, gave students in three introductory physics classes a survey about their attitudes toward physics. They asked the students to indicate…
drorzel | January 19, 2009Back in the "Uncomfortable Questions" thread, Thony C suggested that I should do running updates on the course I'm teaching now. I meant to get to this sooner, but last weekend's bout with norovirus kind of got in the way...
I like the idea, though, so below the fold are a bunch of comments on the classes I've had thus far this term:
Class 1: Introduction to Relativity. I do a quick recap of the two classical physics classes that are pre-requisites for my class, showing the various conservation laws, and Maxwell's equations. I then set up a version of the problem that led to relativity,…
drorzel | January 19, 2009Over at Biocurious, Philip is thinking about digital notebooks, and has found a system that works for him:
My computer algebra system of choice is Mathematica, and because of Mathematica's notebook system, it became extremely straightforward to include sufficient commentary among the analysis and calculations. The important "working" details of my day are recorded on paper that is heavy on scribbles, numbers, and comments on the minutiae of a particular instrument or measurement, followed by references to specific data files collected that day. The Mathematica notebooks where I visualize and…
drorzel | January 17, 2009I went to a meeting earlier this week with a bunch of other faculty members and students. Before the meeting proper got going, a few of the other faculty were discussing whether they should cancel their mid-day Tuesday classes because of the Inauguration.
This struck me as an obvious "No," but they seemed to be very fired up for it. Which I find kind of mystifying. I mean, yes, Obama is the first African-American to be elected President, but the exciting thing was the election, where there was actually some suspense about how things would turn out.
The Inauguration, on the other hand, is…