education
bioephemera | March 25, 2008Have you heard the song about Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle? Check out Jonny Berliner on yesterday's Guardian Science Weekly podcast:
Everett said that there are infinite realities
The Copenhagen explanations sound like insanity
With consciousness affecting wavy-particle dualities
The actualities are rather mysterious
gregladen | March 25, 2008You've probably already seen this: it is a bunch of crazy home schooling creationists demonstrating that they are utter, incurable morons. In this video, they are seen committing child abuse. Again and again and again.
I stole it from Pharangula, he stole it from Sandwalk.
DO YOU REALLY WANT TO APPEASE THESE PEOPLE, PEOPLE??????
Chris and Matt do.
drorzel | March 25, 2008EurekAlert provides the latest dispatch from the class war, the the form of a release headlined " Family wealth may explain differences in test scores in school-age children":
The researchers found a marked disparity in family wealth between Black and White families with young children, with White families owning more than 10 times as many assets as Black families. The study found that family wealth had a stronger association with cognitive achievement of school-aged children than that of preschoolers, and a stronger association with school-aged children's math than with their reading scores…
gregladen | March 24, 2008Myers? Myers? .... Myers? ..... Myers? (He's not here, Ben ... Your producer threw him out.)You know about the incredibly ironic dust up, whereby Expelled! producers kicked PZ myers out of line at a pre-release showing, but failed to notice that Richard Dawkins was standing right next to him. The evidence suggests that this major bit of bad publicity for Expelled! may have led to the movie being pulled from some pre-release showings. It it too early to be sure of this, and there may be several factors other than the utter embarrassment of this incident at play here. For instance, it is…
sb admin | March 24, 2008Teaching facts is easy. Medical students eat facts like Cheetos, and regurgitate them like...well, use your imagination. Ask them the details of the Krebs cycle, they deliver. Ask them the attachments of the extensor pollicis brevis, and they're likely to describe the entire hand to you. Facts, and the learning of them, has traditionally been the focus of the first two years of medical school. The second two years deals with putting facts into action. Teaching medical students and residents is very different from being a school teacher, something with which I have first-hand knowledge…
denialism | March 24, 2008One of the problems with medical education is that while you are intellectually trained to deal with medical problems and emergencies, actual experience with how to respond to emergent clinical situations is difficult to teach and usually only comes with experience. Further, real clinical experts make medical decisions almost by reflex. You see this in medical school that while you as a medical student have to actively think about what is going on in any given situation, medical experts act more by pattern recognition and have an instant reflexive response to clinical situations. And how…
mikethemadbiologist | March 22, 2008A few days ago, Timothy Egan wrote an op-ed for the NY Times about how universities should spend more on tuition relief:
Last year a record 76 American colleges passed the $1 billion mark in total endowments.
For all of that, you would think there would be some relief from tuition costs that have tripled in 20 years. Or that wealthy universities would be giving back, say, half as much as they are making every year. Or that they would not be charging $21,000 for an American student to live in a mud hut in Africa during a semester abroad. Or that they would give up their taxpayer-financed…
gregladen | March 21, 2008As you have undoubtedly heard, a group of evolutionary biologists and evolutionary biology supporters attended a showing of the movie Expelled, in the Twin Cities, last night. This group included the very famous Richard Dawkins and the only slightly less famous PZ Myers. PZ and Richard, in fact, were together in line, along with PZ's spouse, a daughter, and a future son in law. Other evolution supporters and at least one local evolutionary-type blogger were also in line.
While waiting in line and minding their own business, PZ was spotted by the Expelled! production staff, and EXPELLED…
drorzel | March 20, 2008Johan Larson asks:
How would you change the requirements and coursework for the undergraduate Physics major?
This is a good one, but it's a little tough to answer. I have ideas about things I'd like to change locally, but I'm not sure I really have the perspective I would need to be able to say how much of what I see is a problem with physics education in general, and how much is due to local quirks (our trimester calendar being the biggest such issue) that don't generalize well.
That said, my feeling is that most of the problems we have are with the introductory classes. I went to an…
grrlscientist | March 19, 2008tags: blog carnivals, Carnival of Education
The 163rd edition of the Carnival of Education is now available for you to enjoy. Wow, it's spring break already?
sporte | March 19, 2008The University of Virginia does.
They survey students every year to find out what they're up to tech-wise. Apparently 99% of their first year students own computers.
And, a large majority of those computers are laptops (3058/3113 or 98%).
And, what's on those laptops? Let's have a drum roll:
60% have Windows VISTA
26% have Mac OS X
12% have Windows XP
and, 2% or less have something else - like Linux.
This is why I really, really, want good web-based applications.
Just for the record, I don't care what operating systems students use. My concern how to help them use those computers to…
pontiff | March 19, 2008Last year, Google announced a set of resource to help students and faculty with CS education. They've revamped the set of resources and redesigned the web page and all the jazzy stuff to produce: Google Code University. Marty Stepp, whose courses are featured in the Google code university, has his office just down the hall from me. His name plate says "Marty Stepp++"
Being someone who teaches (pay no attention to the "research assistant professor" title), I often wonder about how the web and technology is going to change our educational system. While I certainly am sympathetic to the…
gregladen | March 19, 2008The fight continues in Texas; Homophobia is a punishable offense, yet legislators march on in opposition to the already underway 21st century; Some guy named Stephen on homeschooling.
Mary Helen Berlanga is the senior member of the Texas Board of Education. She is warning Texas citizens of impending fights on the board regarding a number of issues, including evolution.
She asked her constituents to travel to Austin next week to speak out against proposed amendments outside consultants are pushing for that she says exclude Hispanics and other minorities from classroom instruction.…
drorzel | March 19, 2008"A" asks:
Given the chance, would you take a job at a major research-university, or do you enjoy teaching a lot and doing some research at your small liberal arts college?
My first answer is "no," though I guess it would depend on the terms of the offer. In general terms, though, I'm very happy with my job.
I went to a small liberal arts college, and really enjoyed the experience, so I actually went to grad school with the idea of getting a Ph.D. and then teaching at a small college. I've ended up pretty much exactly where I wanted to be-- well, OK, I'd probably be even happier at a certain…
gregladen | March 18, 2008There are plans to build a new Bell Museum. The plans are fantastic, and we need this. But the State has to float a bond to pay for it. Things are happening in the Legislature right now, and if you want to support the Bell, you need to take action right now.
Visit this site and do whatever it says.
Quick, before it is too late!!!!
gregladen | March 17, 2008If you are interested in astronomy, you know that there are a lot of Planetarium applications that you can install on your computer in order to find your way around the night sky. Kstars is a well known standby for KDE (but of course it will run under Gnome as well). Search for "stars" in your package manager and you'll see quite a few other pieces of software as well.
But when you get to "Stellarium" ... stop and install that one.
Stellarium pretty much has all the stars. Well, not all of them. It has 120,000 stars (I understand there are billions and billions of them...). It has the…
drorzel | March 17, 2008Over at Physics and Physicists, ZapperZ is thinking about the intro curriculum, and offers a suggestion:
I believe that we should have a more open-ended experiment to be given to the students. So I'll give an example. Note that while thing is something that I've thought about for a while, I'm still writing this off the top of my head. So there may be other problems with it that I haven't carefully considered.
Give them a problem to solve such as something like this:
Construct a pendulum clock. To make this clock useful, it would be helpful if the pendulum can swing back and forth once as…
clock | March 16, 2008So, this post is almost ten days old, but I just now found some time to actually read the 35 comments on it as well as what others wrote about it on their blogs. I guess it is time to continue that conversation now.
First, let me be clear about the origin of that rant: I've been teaching for quite a long time now and always graded individuals without ever thinking about that assumption. The Facebook scandal triggered the new thought that perhaps all grades should be group grades. As a blogger, I put up a rant, spiced it up with strong language to elicit commentary (which bland stuff cannot…
gregladen | March 13, 2008There is an intersesting study being reported (at the annual Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness meetings in D.C.) on elementary school achievement gap dynamics. The study indicates that the usual "racial/ethnic" gaps are seen in early years, but that a lot of gap-closing happens by fifth grade.
"We found significant achievement gaps within racial and ethnic groups," said Pamela Davis-Kean, a developmental psychologist at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR) who conducted the study with U-M post-doctoral fellow Justin Jager.
"We also found a significant proportion of…
neurophilosophy | March 13, 2008
The Visible Body is a small application created by the Massachussets-based company Argosy Publishing. The software can be downloaded for free, and includes computer graphic models of more than 1,700 anatomical structures, which can be rotated in a three-dimensional 360 degree view:
The Visible Body consists of highly detailed, anatomically accurate, 3D models of all human body systems. The models were developed by an extensively trained team with decades of experience in medical illustration and biomedical visualization. All anatomical content has been reviewed for accuracy by our panel of…