education
jdupuis | September 2, 2010Peter Brantley has a provocative post up on his blog Shimenawa: Get in the goddamn wagon. It's basically a call to arms -- specifically for younger librarians to seize a greater role in discussing and shaping the future of libraries.
The problem is that a lot of the public, official discussion about the future is restricted to senior administrators -- a huge problem in the insanely hierarchical world of libraries:
I was intrigued when I saw an announcement for an ARL-CNI meeting, "Achieving Strategic Change in Research Libraries", to be held in mid October, because Lord knows this is a good…
rallain | September 2, 2010The first thing that I saw was this article from nola.com (The Times-Picayune) "New teacher evaluation method being proposed in Jefferson Parish". Let me summarize this article.
Basically, one of the local School Board wants to use a learning tool (Interval Testing) as a teacher evaluation tool. The Interval Testing program gives students spaced out evaluations through out the year to help them (and teachers) assess the preparedness of the students. These are non graded assessments and have been shown to help students. Note - the purpose of the implementation of Interval Testing is to…
drorzel | September 2, 2010Over at Inside Higher Ed, there's a list of "survival tips" for women entering grad school in the sciences. It's a pretty good and pretty typical list of advice-- you can find more or less the same advice posted somewhere every fall.
What's striking about it, though, is that if you stripped all the specific gender references out, it would still be a good list of advice, for students of either gender. Here's the list with gender-specific terms removed:
Be realistic about support from faculty. As a general matter, faculty of either gender want to see their students of either gender succeed.…
jdupuis | September 1, 2010The last little while has seen an amazing proliferation of science blogging communities. Scientopia, Guardian Science Blogs and PLoS Blogs are only the three most recent that I know of.
I think it's great -- the more the merrier I say. Of course, as networks take up more and more space in the science blogging ecosystem it seems to me that independent bloggers might feel isolated or under pressure or neglected some how. I don't think that will be a huge problem as independents will continue to thrive in niches large and small and will continue to draw audiences to what they have to say.…
drorzel | September 1, 2010There's been a lot of energy expended blogging and writing about the LA Times's investigation of teacher performance in Los Angeles, using "Value Added Modeling," which basically looks at how much a student's scores improved during a year with a given teacher. Slate rounds up a lot of reactions, in a slightly snarky form, and Kevin Drum has some reactions of his own, along with links to two posts from Kevin Carey, who blogs about this stuff regularly. Finally, Crooked Timber has a post about a recent study showing that value-added models aren't that great (as CT is one of the few political…
rallain | September 1, 2010This is something I use at the beginning of a semester. I ask the class: "How are you an expert?" What is an expert? Let me call an expert someone that is comfortable answering questions about that particular topic.
If students are too shy to share (especially on the first day of class), I will start it off. I am an expert in:
Some (but clearly not all) physics stuff. In particular, classical mechanics, physics education, numerical modeling (though not really an expert - but I could answer questions).
I can play the clarinet and saxophone - but I haven't practiced in a long while
I…
gregladen | September 1, 2010When I go to meet the teachers or administrators at my daughter's school, I whisper these words to each of them:
"I just want you to know that I'm involved in a number of organizations that seek to protect the quality of science education in our public schools. If you ever need any support, if you are ever getting any trouble from parents, administrators, whatever, you can rely on me to help, to put you in touch with whom you should speak, to talk to anyone you'd like me to talk to, or anything else you need."
This recieves a nod and a side long glance that I try very hard to interpret but…
drorzel | August 31, 2010Back in July, I did a post looking at how the fountain in our ornamental backyard pond shoots higher when the level of the pond drops. I set up a simple model of the process, which worked surprisingly well, but I said at the time that I really needed more data to say whether that agreement was real or accidental. Well, yesterday, I got some extreme data:
The leak in the pond has gotten worse, I think, and the water was barely covering the top of the pump box at all. A very rough calibration of this image, using the fact that the brick is 2in high, gives a height of the spray of about 62in,…
rallain | August 28, 2010Ghostbusters is old enough that I don't mind giving away some spoilers. If you haven't seen it, I doubt you are going to.
In the movie, the Ghostbusters capture some ghosts. They keep these ghosts in some "containment grid" device. Someone from the city doesn't like this and comes to turn it off. After much searching, I found the clip.
I am going to talk about Louisiana education and tenure, but first I will look the players in the above scene. What were they thinking? Here is my guess.
Walter Peck: These Ghostbusters are a bunch of frauds. They are just stealing money from people…
drorzel | August 27, 2010Via Thoreau, a paper from a physicist in Oregon that's pretty much a grenade lobbed into the always-explosive grade inflation discussion:
We use four years of introductory astronomy scores to analyze the ability of the current population to perform college level work and measure the amount of grade inflation across various majors. Using an objective grading scale, one that is independent of grading curves, we find that 29% of intro astronomy students fail to meet minimal standards for college level work. Of the remaining students, 41% achieve satisfactory work, 30% achieve mastery of the…
rallain | August 27, 2010It would be nice if I could come up with a good rhyme for grade to fit this title.
One of my brothers is a biochemistry faculty at Appalachian State University (hint - he is the one with the same last name that I have). We were talking (and surprisingly agreeing) that grades were dumb. What would happen if we stopped grading? Wouldn't that be awesome?
So, what would happen if there were no grades? Here are some thoughts.
We would only have one job in the class - help students learn. The second job of evaluating student understanding would only be there to help them learn more.
It would…
jdupuis | August 26, 2010Here's a list of the reasonably active Science & Technology library blogs I know about. I've not included medical library blogs in this post because it's not a field I'm all that knowledgeable about. That list would make a great post in it's own right, but it's not this one.
My definition of "scitech librarian blog" is pretty loose (even on the librarian part of it), but in this case I think casting a fairly wide net is probably the best plan of action.
In no particular order:
Science Intelligence and InfoPros by Herve Basset
Christina's LIS Rant by Christina Pikas
Book of Trogool by…
esiegel | August 26, 2010"You have four years to be irresponsible here. Relax. Work is for people with jobs. You'll never remember class time, but you'll remember time you wasted hanging out with your friends. So, stay out late. Go out on a Tuesday with your friends when you have a paper due Wednesday. Spend money you don't have. Drink 'til sunrise. The work never ends, but college does..." -Tom Petty
With Labor Day just around the corner in the US and summer winding down, it's nearly time for the school year to start up again.
Only this time, I get to advise the incoming Freshmen. Of course, the most important part…
jdupuis | August 25, 2010The latest issue of ISTL has just been released and, as usual, it's filled with very interesting-looking articles.
The table of contents is below:
Metrics and Science Monograph Collections at the Marston Science Library, University of Florida by Michelle F. Leonard, Stephanie C. Haas, and Vernon N. Kisling, Ph.D, University of Florida
Zoo and Wildlife Libraries: An International Survey by Linda L. Coates and Kaitlyn Rose Tierney, San Diego Zoo
How Much Space Does a Library Need? Justifying Collections Space in an Electronic Age by Nancy J. Butkovich, The Pennsylvania State Universitty…
drorzel | August 23, 2010While I'm still trying not to think about the new academic term that starts in two weeks (yes, the first day of class is Labor Day, grumble mutter grump), it's beginning to impinge on my consciousness. Thus, this poll on a frequent and annoying phenomenon that recurs with every new academic term:
Students who miss the first day of class in a new academic term should be:online survey
You can choose one and only one answer in this poll. Attempts to submit multiple answers will be given a failing grade, and reported to the Dean as a violation of the Academic Honesty policy.
sa smith | August 21, 2010Montys project was officially funded, so he is spending today on Ustream, thanking his supporters with videos and songs and getting a chocolate cake smashed in his face at 7 pm Central:
Online TV Shows by Ustream
Thank you all so much for spreading the word and donating, guys!
EDIT 4.55 pm-- One of my readers made A Very Large Donation O.o
This person (I dunno who! Tell meeeee!) lives overseas, so they cant collect on their personal concert prize, so they are giving it to me! WHOOO! Maybe we could have it down at the Sam Noble Natural History Museum next to the huge HIV-1!
ALSO! We are…
jdupuis | August 21, 2010From the Eligibility and Submission Requirements page:
The annual Lane Anderson Award will honour two jury-selected books, adult and young reader, published in the field of science by Canadian-owned publishers, and authored by Canadians. The winner in each category will receive $10,000.
Two three-person jury panels drawn from the Canadian academic, publishing, creative and institutional fields will review submissions in the two categories, and the jury will be announced with the winners at an event in Toronto on the 15th September.
The two shortlists will be announced on August 16th, 2010.…
drorzel | August 20, 2010Johan Larson emails a suggestion for a post topic:
How many profs would it take to offer a good, but not necessarily excellent, undergraduate physics degree?
I can give you an empirical answer to this: Six.
I say that because in the course of my undergraduate physics degree at Williams, I took classes from only six different professors. Five-and-a-half, really, because one of those was half of a team-taught course. I had three-and-a-half classes with one professor, and two others for two classes each.
Of course, that's not a hard lower bound. Some have even suggested that the number could be…
rallain | August 20, 2010I am not normally a book-review-kind-of-guy. However, in this post I will make an exception. My wife (who clearly knows me very well) bought me this book - Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World (amazon link)
The basic idea of the book is to look at how the author (Mark Frauenfelder) started doing more and more Do-it-yourself type stuff (DIY). He goes through his efforts to grow his own stuff, raise chickens, build guitars and stuff like that. Very enjoyable read. It wasn't so much about how to do stuff as much as it was about making stuff rather than buying stuff. (do…
drorzel | August 20, 2010It's nearly time for classes to resume, which means it's time for a zillion stories about Beloit College's annual Kids These Days List, listing off a bunch of things that this year's entering college class, who were mostly born in 1992, have always taken for granted. A sample:
1. Few in the class know how to write in cursive.
2. Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail.
3. "Go West, Young College Grad" has always implied "and don't stop until you get to Asia...and learn Chinese along the way."
4. Al Gore has always been animated.
5. Los Angelenos have always been trying…