education
jdupuis | July 5, 2012I'm on my annual summer hiatus for the month of July so I'll be only publishing my weekly Friday Fun posts as well as re-posting some of the interviews I did a few years ago on the old blog with people from the publishing, library and science worlds. Not that my posting of late has been particularly distinguishable from the hiatus state, but such is the blogging life after nearly ten years: filled with ups, downs, peaks, valleys.
This interview, with Eugene Wallingford, is from July 9, 2008.
I'm hoping to get these out weekly, but we'll see. They're mostly cobbled together in odd moments…
oracknows | June 27, 2012And now for something completely different.
Except that it isn't really. I say that it isn't really different because, although this post will seem to be about politics, in reality it will be about a common topic on this blog: Anti-science. And where is this anti-science? Sadly, it's in the platform of a major party of one of the largest states in the country. It also meshes with the anti-science inherent in a lot of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) and all comes together in one place: The proposed 2012 Platform of the Republican Party of Texas. It's all there, as you…
jrosenhouse | June 24, 2012Among the side effects of all the asinine hand-wringing over the phony problem of “scientism” is that it distracts attention from the real threat facing the humanities. I am referring to the corporate mindset that has come to dominate many aspects of higher education.
That threat is on full display in the current fracas at the University of Virginia, where the Board ousted the popular President, basically because she wasn't moving fast enough to gut the humanities. HuffPo has a useful run-down:
Members of the board, steeped in a culture of corporate jargon and buzzy management theories,…
esiegel | June 20, 2012“If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it.” -Frank Zappa
Inside of every student I've ever taught lives a passionate, curious mind that can either flourish or stagnate, both inside and outside the classroom. The teachers that get it -- that get you -- are the ones that help bring you there, but that is not all teachers, not by any means. I think everyone, by this point in their life, has had experience with at least one teacher that stands out…
jtoney | June 19, 2012
Kean University Graduates 2012
At my Commencement Speech to the Class of 2012 at Carteret High School this Thursday, I will deliver something like this:
Class of 2012: You need to fail more …. take chances …. Reach.
Let me explain.
After hearing my bio, some of you might think of that person who has succeeded at anything. You may know someone like that. He can earn A’s without much studying, letter in a varsity sport without much sweat. Life seems easy, because he never faces defeat or failure. I am not that person. I am lucky enough to be a leader in higher education because I…
jrosenhouse | June 19, 2012Over at Kevin Drum's blog, there is an interesting exchange between Drum and an unnamed college professor. In a post that was primarily about issues related to paying for a college education, Drum wrote:
The fact is that UCLA provides undergraduates with an education that's just as good as Harvard, and the country might be a better place if we all faced up to that and took Harvard and the rest of our super-elite universities off the pedestal we've placed them on. That pedestal has long since become corrosive and damaging to the public welfare.
Alas, the unnamed professor provides provides…
esiegel | June 9, 2012"Art has never been a popularity contest." -James Levine
Sometimes, you might feel like you've heard it all, seen it all, and that nothing's original anymore. But I beg to differ. Just because great things have come before doesn't mean that there aren't great things happening right now. While it might "only" be a cover of a Kanye West song (which itself heavily samples a Ray Charles song, at one time featured here), I encourage you to listen to the Automatic's brilliant version of
Gold Digger.
And while the stories of the Universe I tell you about here don't tend to be my personal, original…
esiegel | June 6, 2012"You don't use science to show that you're right, you use science to become right." -Randall of xkcd
In January of 2008, I began writing this blog, Starts With A Bang, both for myself and for all of you, because we all have something in common.
Image credit: © Stéphane Guisard, "Los Cielos de Chile", via astrosurf.com.
The same planet, the same heavens, the same laws of nature and the same Universe are something that we all have in common. And all of us, no matter how intrinsically smart, talented, or brilliant our instincts are, come into this world knowing absolutely nothing about it.
But…
drorzel | May 31, 2012In which I talk about the common complaint that we teach students physics that "isn't true," and the limits on that statement.
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Frequent commenter Ron sent me an email pointing to this post by David Reed on "What we “know” that t’aint so…. and insist on teaching to kids!":
he science we teach is pretty old. Mostly 19th century ideas about the world around us are taught as “facts” with little but anecdotal data to support it. We teach it via an ontology that replays the history of science, thus the newest and most powerful scientific understandings are viewed as “too advanced”. If…
jtoney | May 30, 2012
Robots are now commonplace for cleaning carpets (random walk), remote sensing, even swarming. But robot boogie? Fun for some, profound for others. Thanks, MIT!
At the beginning all the robots are waiting for my signal to start. While dancing, they are constantly synchronizing with each other, so if a robot lags behind they will wait for him and the late robot will accelerate. When I remove a robot from the choreography, the others continue dancing. When he stands up again and resumes his dance, he asks the others for a starting position. Then he goes to this position, and starts dancing…
drorzel | May 30, 2012In which we compare a couple of different systems for evaluating teachers, looking at what's involved in doing a fair assessment of a teacher's performance.
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Another casualty of the great blog upgrade, in the sense of a post that was delayed until the inspiration for it has been forgotten by most of the people who might want to talk about it, was this Grant Wiggins post on accountability systems:
[The Buckingham, Browne, and Nichols prep school where he taught in the 80's] had a state of the art teacher performance appraisal system back in the 80’s (we’ll need current or recent folks…
milhayser | May 24, 2012
On Denialism Blog, Mark Hoofnagle argues that unless homeschooling is better regulated, it should be banned altogether. He writes "universal primary and secondary education is part of why our country has been so successful." While Rick Santorum can teach his kids that global warming is a hoax and the earth was created in a day, other parents can withhold sexual education, or, in one example, forbid their daughters from getting a GED. Hoofnagle concludes, "for parents to say it's a matter of religious freedom to deny their children education, or a future outside their home, can not be…
gregladen | May 16, 2012First, a word about Nazis and Free Speech, and other matters: Catch up on the latest news about Repression of Nazis, and join the conversation about Free Speech and how sometimes it is better to shut up, over at the X Blog.
Today I am preparing a presentation and discussion for a course in AP Biology. Amanda and her colleague have been teaching AP Bio all year, and the test was just given, so there is nothing to live for any more as it were. I asked Amanda yesterday why the students even show up now that the test is over, and she looked at me funny and said "well, they're required to." ...…
jdupuis | May 10, 2012I'd like to extend a huge science librarian blogosphere welcome to Information Culture, the newest blog over at Scientific American Blogs!
This past Sunday evening I got a cryptic DM from a certain Bora Zivkovic letting me know that I should watch the SciAm blog site first thing Monday morning. I was busy that morning but as soon as I got our of my meeting I rushed to Twitter and the Internet and lo! and behold!
Information Culture: Thoughts and analysis related to science information, data, publication and culture.
I'm always happy to see librarians invading faculty and researcher blogs…
jdupuis | May 3, 2012The Canadian Journalists for Free Expression has just awarded the Harper Conservative government here in Canada a failing grade in promoting free expression.
Federal scientists' freedom of expression: F
Canada's control over the communications of federally funded scientists is alarming. Climate change science coverage in the media has plummeted by 80 per cent since 200, drastically reducing information available to Canadians. Some scientists have been denied permission to talk to the media about their research even after it was published in peer-reviewed journals.
Not to mention that the…
jdupuis | May 1, 2012A fantastic quote from Neil deGrasse Tyson:
The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation.
For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And along the way, lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.
The source of which seems to be…
drorzel | April 27, 2012This is apparently my day to be annoyed at the reporting of pieces about gender differences in STEM, because a bunch of people are linking to this PBS NewsHour article about women in engineering, which is linked to an interview with Maria Klawe of Harvey Mudd College, who I ran across a few weeks back thanks to a New York Times profile/article. While the general thrust of the piece is very good, there are a couple of areas where the reporting really breaks down, in a way that is pretty annoying.
One of these is just the usual breakdown whenever anything remotely quantitative comes up in media…
esiegel | April 16, 2012"Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it ain't so." -Mark Twain
"It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong." -Richard Feynman
Every day that you set forth in the world is a new opportunity to learn something about it. Every new observation that you make, every new test you perform, every novel encounter or piece of information you pick up is a new chance to be a scientist.
How so?
Image credit: Alan Chen.
You have a conception of how things work in this world…
drorzel | April 10, 2012Between unpleasant work stuff and the Dread Stomach Bug wiping out the better part of five days, I only got my student evaluation comments for my winter term class last week, and I'm only getting around to writing the post-mortem now. This was, for those who may not have been obsessively following my course reports, a "Scholars Research Seminar" class with the slightly cute title "A Brief History of Timekeeping," which is intended to introduce students to scholarly research and writing. The topic for my SRS was timekeeping, specifically the development of various timekeeping technologies and…
drorzel | April 5, 2012Two things I was forwarded or pointed toward this week, that interact a little oddly. First chronologically is from the New York Times, which has a story about how Harvey Mudd College has boosted the number of female computer science majors, by committing serious resources to reforming the intro course (which is required of all students there):
Known as CS 5, the course focused on hard-core programming, appealing to a particular kind of student -- young men, already seasoned programmers, who dominated the class. This only reinforced the women's sense that computer science was for geeky know-…