education
drorzel | January 25, 2009In his inaugural address, President Obama pledged to "restore science to its rightful place." Following up on that, the Corporate Masters have launched the Rightful Place Project, asking bloggers, readers, and scientists to define the rightful place of science.
Many of these responses will focus on narrow matters of policy, but as many have said with regard to the economic crisis, this is no time for timid measures. It's a time for big thoughts and bold action. With that in mind, here's my take on the question of science's rightful place, which, in the end, boils down to defining what science…
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…
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…
clock | January 22, 2009From a current freshman:
In college, one lecture class has about 250 students in it and the information goes by really fast. We would cover about 3 chapters in an hour, about three days a week. At first it took me a while to get used to the speed and the way the professors taught. In high school, the teachers are very careful about making sure the students understand and take in the subject but in college, the professors don't really care whether you're in class or not. This realization hit me like a ton of bricks because finally, after years of supervision from teachers and parents, it was…
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…
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…
sporte | January 19, 2009One of the newfangled ideas that's popped up in education in the past few years has been notion that more interactive methods of teaching will lead to better results.
There's an appealing logic to this notion.
Figure 1. A traditional lecture may not be the ideal way to transfer information.
Technorati Tags: education, active learning, clickers
To quote Eric Mazur (1) quoting D. Huff (2):
I once heard someone describe the lecture method as a process whereby the lecture notes of the instructor get transferred to the notebooks of students without passing through the brains of either…
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…
rskloot | January 17, 2009I'm giving a talk today with Tom Levenson at 4:30 today at ScienceOnline 09 titled "How to Become a (Paid) Science Journalist: Advice for Bloggers." Below the jump I've posted links to two handouts I've written offering tips for breaking into publication -- folks not able to make the talk might find them useful as well.
You can download my tips for writing query letters that sell and generally breaking into publication here (PDF).
And here are my Tips for Successful Book Reviewing ("Strategies for Breaking in and Staying in: Getting started as a critic,
building your reviewing portfolio,…
pontiff | January 16, 2009The Perimeter Scholars Institute is a Masters level course designed to prepare students for cutting-edge research in theoretical physics. It looks pretty cool with some outstanding lecturers. The application deadline is February 1. All accepted students will be fully supported. Details below the fold.
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) is a leading international research centre whose goal is to catalyze breakthroughs in our understanding of the physical world. PI strives to create a lively and dynamic research atmosphere where many approaches to fundamental questions, both…
drorzel | January 16, 2009A number of people have commented on the big New York Times article about the new intro physics classes at MIT:
At M.I.T., two introductory courses are still required -- classical mechanics and electromagnetism -- but today they meet in high-tech classrooms, where about 80 students sit at 13 round tables equipped with networked computers.
Instead of blackboards, the walls are covered with white boards and huge display screens. Circulating with a team of teaching assistants, the professor makes brief presentations of general principles and engages the students as they work out related…
drorzel | January 15, 2009Over at Dot Physics, Rhett is trying to learn his students' names:
I have students sitting at tables (in this class and in labs). As they are working on something, I go around and write down who is sitting where. Yes, this means that you have to actually ask each student what their names is (I hate that part). After I have a "seating chart" I just keep practicing while they are working. If a student talks to me, I make sure and use their name. I will look it up on the seating chart if I have to. This just takes a couple of class times of practice till I have them all (well, most of them)…
rallain | January 14, 2009I just finished my first class of "Physics for Elementary Education Majors". The maximum size for the class is 32 students and it is very interactive. I make it a point to learn student names as quickly as possible. This is something I am terrible at.
Should you memorize names? If it is a reasonable size class, I completely recommend it. Even in one short class, I noticed a difference in the atmosphere by knowing all their names. Here are my criteria for memorize or not:
Class size less than 40
Meets more than once a week
Not just a plain lecture class
Well, those aren't really the…
drorzel | January 14, 2009If you've been a student or faculty member at an American college or university in the past twenty years or so, you've almost certainly run across student course evaluation surveys. They're different in detail, but the key idea is always the same: toward the end of the term, students in every course are asked to fill out a questionnaire, usually a bubble sheet, assigning numerical values to various aspects of the course and the professor's teaching. Most schools also provide some option for free-form written comments as well.
These course surveys, particularly the numerical scores, figure…
drorzel | January 13, 2009The scare quotes in the title are to distinguish "Modern Physics" classes like the one I'm teaching this term from modern physics as a general subject, which, of course, all right-thinking people should study in depth. The question comes from a comment by Coriolis on last week's post about what "Modern Physics" is as a class:
Having passed through those classes (I'm now a grad student), I have to say I didn't see much worth in the Modern physics class (and your description of it is pretty much how I remember it, except without the relativity). It's basically in that middle ground trying to…
bioephemera | January 12, 2009
I went to a party the other day wearing the shirt above. I'd seen it online, expressed covetousness, and the staffer actually tracked it down and bought it for me (thus scoring major points for A) an early Christmas present, B) listening to my incessant stream-of-consciousness babble, and C) appreciating his girlfriend's geeky streak.)
Anyway, at the party, most of my friends couldn't decipher anything past "OMG, WTF." I was surrounded by "digital immigrants." In fact, I'm a digital immigrant myself: I didn't get my first email account until college, and I never IM'd until a year or two ago…
bioephemera | January 12, 2009Something I wanted to blog this weekend during the downtime: Chris Myers Asch's pitch for a public service academy to turn out well-prepared government employees. Asch doesn't have Barack Obama's support yet, but Hillary Clinton, Rahm Emanuel, and Joe Biden are onboard, according to the NYT.
A former elementary school teacher with black belts in two martial arts, Mr. Asch, 35, has labored with such ascetic focus and cheerful earnestness that even his plan's detractors call him a "sweet" and "admirable" guy.
He argues that American culture derides government work and dissuades bright young…
drorzel | January 12, 2009There was a mix-up in textbook ordering for this term (entirely my fault), and the books for my modern physics course were not in the bookstore when the term started. I made a spare copy available in the interim, and also half-jokingly suggested buying it from Amazon rather than waiting for the bookstore to get them in. After saying that, I went to Amazon, and found that the book in question sells for $150. "That can't be right," I thought. And, indeed, it's not-- the bookstore sells its copies at the list price of $180.
I had no idea the books were that expensive, and now I feel guilty about…