education
jtoney | May 18, 2011
Maybe it's just me, but I see beauty in this. Scientists at the University of Manchester have created high resolution images of a 49 million year old spider encapsulated in fossilized amber resin using X-ray computed tomography, typically used in medical imaging.
If the still image doesn't convince you, I invite you to watch this stunning video revealing 3D images of the little beast.
I wonder if this evidence would give those believing the world was created 6,000 years ago pause. Probably not.
See press release here.
Original citation:
Dunlop, J. A., Penney, D., Dalüge, N., Jäger, P.,…
bioephemera | May 18, 2011
Animated Anatomies, a new show at the Perkins Library at Duke University, explores the tradition of fold-out or pop-up paper anatomical diagrams:
Animated Anatomies explores the visually stunning and technically complex genre of printed texts and illustrations known as anatomical flap books. These publications invite the viewer to participate in virtual autopsies, through the process of unfolding their movable leaves, simulating the act of human dissection. This exhibit traces the flap book genre beginning with early examples from the sixteenth century, to the colorful "golden age" of…
drorzel | May 17, 2011As I noted the other day, we're entering graduation season, one of the two month-long periods (the other being "back to school" time in August/September) when everybody pretends to care deeply about education. Accordingly, the people at the Pew Research Center have released a new report on the opinions of the general public and college presidents about various topics related to higher education. The totally neutral post title is copied from their report.
So, what do they find about general public attitudes? The usual confused muddle:
Cost and Value. A majority of Americans (57%) say the…
jdupuis | May 17, 2011So, here's the story. A week or so ago, McMaster University Librarian Jeff Trzeciak gave an invited presentation at Penn State, tasked by the organizers to be controversial.
To say the least, he succeeded. Perhaps the most controversial idea in the presentation was that he would basically no longer hire librarians for his organization, only subject PhDs and IT specialists.
As you can imagine, the library blogosphere and Friendfeedosphere has had a field day with this one.
You can see the slide in question here and get a bit of a background on the situation of librarians at McMaster here.…
bioephemera | May 16, 2011They're doing exactly what we always complain our brightest students don't do: eschewing the easy bucks of Wall Street, consulting or corporate law to pursue their ideals and be of service to society. Academia may once have been a cushy gig, but now we're talking about highly talented young people who are willing to spend their 20s living on subsistence wages when they could be getting rich (and their friends are getting rich), simply because they believe in knowledge, ideas, inquiry; in teaching, in following their passion. To leave more than half of them holding the bag at the end of it all…
jtoney | May 16, 2011
Source.
The Art of Science Learning is a superb blog about STEM education. Their posts provide us with insights from experts in science education. What would a young science student have to say?
An avid reader of Science cover to cover, this Letter to the Editor is one of my favorite pieces, written by a young High School student from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. What do you think?
I believe that Mr. Krolik is off to a great start!
As published in the May 6 issue of Science:
Letters
Bringing Research into the Classroom
As a high school student looking to pursue science, I was happy to…
jdupuis | May 16, 2011From the University of Toronto Academic Librarians' blog:
In response to McMaster University and their Library's recent treatment of their academic librarians and the notable gender imbalance at the May 17 conference at McMaster University (given that 80% of librarians are women), entitled "The Future of Academic Libraries" and which does not include McMaster University librarians, CAUT has produced a button which the UTFA Librarians Committee is urging all who support the role of academic librarianship to wear when attending the May 17th conference. For those from other universities who…
drorzel | May 16, 2011Physics is a notoriously difficult and unpopular subject, which is probably why there is a large and active Physics Education Research community within physics departments in the US. This normally generates a lot of material in the Physical Review Special Topics journal, but last week, a PER paper appeared in Science, which is unusual enough to deserve the ResearchBlogging treatment.
OK, what's this paper about? Well, with the exceptional originality that physicists bring to all things, the title pretty much says it all. They demonstrated that a different style of teaching applied to a large…
mikethemadbiologist | May 15, 2011A couple of years ago, regarding the typical charter school model, I argued that the model of overworked, undercompensated, and under-'resourced' teachers was not sustainable:
One of the things that I've long suspected about charter schools is that they're an unsustainable model: they rely on incredibly motivated teachers (who I think are a pretty motivated lot to begin with) who are willing to work even longer hours for essentially the same pay (or sometimes less). I'm not sure how to scale that up. Even if there were a significant number of teachers who fit this description, it's not clear…
drorzel | May 14, 2011SteelyKid is, as I have noted previously, half Korean, a quarter Polish, and an eighth each Irish and German. Her parents are irreligious, the extended family is Catholic (more so on my side than Kate's), and she goes to day care at the Jewish Community Center. In other words, a thoroughly American sort of upbringing. I can't wait to see what she finds to rebel against when she hits the teenage years.
For no obvious reason, three of the four kids she's most likely to play with on the playground when I pick her up in the evening (we play at the JCC for a while before going home, to give Kate…
esiegel | May 13, 2011"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." -Antoine de Saint-Exupery
For me, personally, it isn't the endless immensity of the seas that calls. It's the endless immensity of space, the Universe, and the stars.
Image credit: NASA, ESA and A. Nota (STScI/ESA).
And I try to not just share my passion for it with my readers and students, but to encourage all of you (and all of them) to follow their passions. Perhaps it's physical science that excites you, like it…
hcarmena | May 13, 2011There are many ways that the Art of Science Learning manifests at our different institutions. This is my
story, and one example of what this can look like.
The concept of art and science integration became a laboratory for two institutions located in San
Francisco, located right across the street from each other. Education staff at the California Academy
of Sciences and the de Young Museum, part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, explored
the connection of art and science through the similarity between common themes, the process of
development, the way information is conveyed, and the…
jdupuis | May 13, 2011This past Saturday I spent the afternoon at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival at the Toronto Reference Library. It was a blast, I met a ton of great comics people, spent way too much money and supported a lot of great artists and writers.
The highlight was discovering the new collection We Are the Engineers by former University of British Columbia engineering student Angela Melick. The book is an expanded collection of strips from her webcomic Wasted Talent.
Here's a bit from the Info page:
Welcome to the site! Basically, this is all you need to know: JamJAM, or Angela, is a mechanical…
jtoney | May 13, 2011
May 12 was a glorious day for our graduates, some 2,730 students celebrating the completion of their undergraduate education. Our Commencement Speaker John Legend, a Grammy Award Winner, shared an important message in both speech and in song: equal access to quality education is a right, not a privilege.
Mr. Legend acknowledged the recent brouhaha highlighted on FOX news about rapper Common, with whom he has performed. Common was recently invited to the White House to participate in a Poetry Jam, generating push back due to offensive lyrics in some of his songs. For example:
...the New…
drorzel | May 13, 2011Back when I was an undergrad, we did a lab in the junior-level quantum class that involved making a dye laser. We had a small pulsed nitrogen laser in the lab, and were given a glass cell of dye and some optics and asked to make it lase in the visible range of the spectrum.
My partner and I worked on this for almost the entire lab period, and got nothing more than the occasional faint flicker of a green beam. We got the TA to help us, and he couldn't do any better. The TA went to get the professor teaching the class, but he was helping other students with one of the other experiments (this…
mikethemadbiologist | May 13, 2011Recently, I described how unreliable value-added testing is when used to determine teacher performance. Whenever I write about that subject, inevitably someone raises the suggestion, either in comments or email, of developing a better method of evaluating teachers, such as more frequent tests. But I think that's missing the point--or, more accurately, the flawed assumption underlying the value added testing movement (aka 'education reform').
The basic assumption the reformers make is that most teachers could perform considerably better, if given proper incentives. And that assumption…
bioephemera | May 12, 2011
I was playing The Fracking Song last night about midnight, and my boyfriend was grooving to it. At the end he asked, "what was that about?" "Uh. . . fracking."
"Which kind of fracking?"
Yes, we are a BSG household.
Anyway, it may be an explainer, but it's actually quite a nice little piece of music too. And I'm a sucker for good typography any day.
Is your fracking attention span longer than 2:33? Then go dig around in ProPublica's fracking investigation. "The Fracking Song" is by members of Jay Rosen's NYU graduate journalism class. Nice work, guys!
drorzel | May 12, 2011The title is a .signature line that somebody-- Emmet O'Brien, I think, but I'm not sure-- used to use on Usenet, back in the mid-to-late 90's, when some people referred to the Internet as the "Information Superhighway." I've always thought it was pretty apt, especially as I've moved into blogdom, where a lot of what I spend time on involves the nearly random collisions of different articles and blog posts and so on. It's also as good a title as any for this tab-clearing post, which consists of pointing out two pairs of articles that, in my mind at least, seem to have something to say about…
kbonham | May 10, 2011Over at the Cambridge Science Festival blog, there's a great write-up of the science journalism event that Heather and I attended last week. Author Jordan Calmes* has good summary and a lot of praise for the panel discussion, but also notes some potential shortcomings:
The panel convinced me that social media is helping both journalists and scientists. And yet, I never felt like they delivered on the second half of the title. How is the Internet changing science writing? What is it really accomplishing in terms of reaching out to a wider public. The panel mentioned that social media is often…
mikethemadbiologist | May 10, 2011Last week, E.D. Kain took Megan McArdle to task for promoting the use of student testing as a means to evaluate teachers. This, to me, was the key point:
....nobody is arguing against tests as a way to measure outcomes. Anti-standardized-tests advocates are arguing against the way tests are being used, and the prioritization of tests. If you really, truly want to measure outcomes, you should not create a system that incentives teaching to a test. Teaching to a test not only narrows the curriculum, it means that teachers prepare students specifically for the test. This skews the outcomes of…