Science Education
clock | August 14, 2009Science Online London is next week. I really wanted to go this year, but hard choices had to be made....eh, well.
For those of you who, like me, cannot be there in person, there are plenty of ways to follow the meeting virtually. Follow @soloconf and the #solo09 hashtag on Twitter. Join the FriendFeed room. Check out the Facebook page. And of course there will be a lot of blogging, including in the Forums at Nature Network.
And for those of you who have computers with enough power and good graphics cards, another option is to follow the conference in Second Life - check that link to see how.
gregladen | August 14, 2009The following are links to selected posts on this blog that are related to science education or the evolution-creationism 'debate.'
The Wedge Strategy
Teaching Creationism in Social Studies: The Wedge Strategy, Plan B
Teachers Under Fire
Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design
Is Blood Ever Blue? Science Teachers Want to Know!
Drs Myers and Decker: Advice on Teaching Evolution
Ken Hubert, Hero of Life Science Teaching
Major Blunder in Science Reporting will Fuel Creationist Claims
Review of SMM Exhibit on Race and Racism
How fast does evolution happen?
Creationism and…
gregladen | August 13, 2009Chris Comer was the Director of Science with the Texas Educaiton Agency until she was forced to resign in November of 2007. That happened because she disseminated information about an upcoming talk that would likely be critical of creationism. She was fired because the TEA (hee hee he said .... "tea") claimed a "neutrality" policy and claimed that Chris had broken the policy. Her reference, via email, to the upcoming talk was an endorsement of ... OMG! Evolution! Evolution over Creationism!!!
Yes folks, you read that right. Chis Comer was effectively fired from her job as director of…
revere | August 13, 2009Science Based Medicine is a site we highly recommend with experienced scientists and practitioners in charge. In other words, it's run by adults. But scientists often disagree about things. This is apparently a secret to non-scientists and many reporters who assume that when two scientists disagree, one is lying or wrong. But it's true nonetheless. Whatever the subdiscipline, there are disagreements. If you pick up almost any issue of Science or Nature you will find plenty of them, usually (but not always) couched in polite language in the Introduction or Discussion section of a paper or in…
gregladen | August 12, 2009.... Have you ever had this happen: You are minding your own business, teaching your life science course, it's early in the term. A student, on the way out after class (never at the beginning of class, rarely during class) mentions something about "carbon dating." This usually happens around the time of year you are doing an overview of the main points of the course, but before you've gotten to the "evolution module"...
Jeanne d'Arc was a very influential 10th grader. I understand she gave her Life Science teachers a very hard time. This is the only contemporary depiction of Joan of…
gregladen | August 11, 2009Hot off the presses from the NCSE:
Are state science standards worthless? Are kids learning about evolution or being spoon-fed creationist pseudoscience? What's the proper role of state science standards in American public education, anyway?
To get some answers, the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) conducted an in-depth survey of 50 states and the District of Columbia.
The good news: Current state science standards cover evolution more extensively than they did 9 years ago.
According to the report, 40 states received satisfactory grades for the treatment of evolution in their…
clock | August 8, 2009Clifford Johnson of the Asymptotia blog is working on some cool movies explaining science! Here is the trailer
And this is the first clip - Shine A Light:
gregladen | August 8, 2009I wish I coulda been there ... by all accounts it sounds like the Creozerg visit to the Creation Museum went well. A couple of kids were thrown out because they said things or whatever, which is good because it shows that the whole point of the creation museum is to express, secure, and protect a particular point of view and to supress others. For your entertainment, I've collected a handful of links from the event. Please visit these links, and if you are a social neworking kinda person, digg-em-up or stumbleuponthem or whatever. It would be very nice, would it not, if over the next few…
clock | August 7, 2009The World is a radio show co-produced by WGBH Boston, Public Radio International and BBC. You can probably hear it on your local NPR station - if not, you can find all the shows recorded on the website.
You may remember that I went to Boston a few months ago, as a part of a team of people helping the show do something special: use the NSF grant they recently received to expand their science coverage and, in collaboration with Sigma Xi and NOVA, tie their radio science coverage to their online offerings.
The result is The World: Science website, a series of weekly science podcasts with Elsa…
clock | August 5, 2009North Carolina Snakes: Facts and Fiction
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
6:30-8:30 pm with discussion beginning at 7:00 followed by Q&A
Location: Tir Na Nog 218 South Blount Street, Raleigh, 833-7795
Did you know that North Carolina is home to almost 40 species of native snakes and all but six of them are non-venomous and considered harmless? Of the six venomous species found in our state, only one, the copperhead occurs statewide and is likely to be encountered in Wake County. Unfortunately, snakes are often feared and misunderstood, with many harmless species being misidentified and killed.…
gregladen | August 5, 2009..that even when you try diligently to separate the politics of religion vs. creationism and to say again and again that religion can go along its merry way as long as it stays out of the science classroom, people like Casey Luskin will still find the words in your rhetoric to accuse you of attacking religion.
Back in May, Genie Scott appeared with me and Lynn Fellman on Atheist Talk Radio, where we discussed science education. Genie is the director of the National Center for Science Education.
In a recent posting on the Discovery Institute web site, Casey Luskin makes the contrast between…
sporte | July 26, 2009I've just returned from two conferences that focused on educating students for careers in science and technology and what do I find here at the home fort? There's Chad writing a very nice series on science careers!
I was a little puzzled by PNAS acryonym in his titles since to me, PNAS stands for "Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists" and is a high impact scientific journal. But then I realized that Chad is a physicist and he might not know this. It's quite possible that PNAS isn't as big in the physics community as it is in biology.
Anyway, this is a very nice series, so way to…
sporte | July 24, 2009I don't remember learning about plasma when I took physics, but it's amazing stuff. Last week at the Hi-Tec conference in Arizona, I got to learn how an electromagnetic field can be used to push plasma around a tube. Community college students get to play with the coolest toys!
Here's some plasma contained in a small area.
Figure 1. Plasma on the table.
Here's some plasma getting pushed around a tube.
Figure 2. Plasma getting pushed around.
Wikipedia has a very nice article on plasma and plasma displays that occur in nature, such as St. Elmo's fire. I guess if you want hands-on…
gregladen | July 24, 2009From the NCSE:
Three historians of science are unhappy about their treatment in a creationist movie about Darwin, as they explain in a note in the July 2009 Newsletter of the History of Science Society. Peter Bowler, Janet Browne, and Sandra Herbert write, "We have recently been featured in a documentary film, 'The Voyage that Shook the World,' produced by Fathom Media of Australia and directed by Stephen Murray of Synergy Films, New Zealand. We were led to believe that the movie was being made to be shown as an educational film on Australian broadcast television and possibly elsewhere.…
gregladen | July 22, 2009There has been some recent discussion on the blogs and on Facebook about the tension an adviser might experience between paying attention to graduate students and doing the other stuff you are supposed to do, or from the student perspective, how to deal with getting that quality time from your adviser.
Much of this discussion is in the area of standard NIH funded lab-ratty science which is a world that I am only marginally familiar with. But that is not the only kind of science that is done, and these issues permeate academia beyond the sciences. There are built-in tensions between doing…
sporte | July 21, 2009Liveblogging from the Hi-Tec conference
I'm currently at the Hi-Tec conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. (If you follow me on Twitter - www.twitter.com/@digitalbio - you may have seen me complaining about the temperature). It's an interesting conference, so I'm going to share some of the things that I'm learning.
Dr. Travis Benanti and Dr. Steve Fonash from Penn State University are presenting an interesting session this morning on nanotechnology.
Luckily, you don't have to know anything about nanotechnology to find the session fascinating.
If you're interested in learning about nanotechnology…
gregladen | July 17, 2009This week we celebrate the anniversary of the first time human beings walked around on the moon, and as part of that celebration we find NASA releasing improved versions of the original scratchy black and white low resolution images of the first steps taken on the moon by Neil Armstrong. I'm worried that the youngsters out there do not understand the momentous nature of this event. So stand still for a minute while I force some wisdom on you.
Back in those days I was hanging around a lot with Bob Miller, a classmate who wanted to grow up and be an oceanographer. Bob had a pool in his…
gregladen | July 13, 2009I was sick Sunday, and I'm a bit off today, so everything is 36 to 48 hours off. So, my review of Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future will be delayed. In the mean time you can have a look at these items:
1) An interesting post by David Dobbs places the current discussion regarding religion and science in an historical context: PZ Myers, Chris Mooney, Asa Gray, and the religion-science divide
2) Stephanie Zvan at Almost Diamonds discusses the Mooney/Kirshenbaum strategy.
3) Stephanie also addresses this issue a bit more circumspectly in a post on "Mere…
gregladen | July 12, 2009Physioprof recently posted some comments on science and religion that I basically agree with.1 But I want to add an observation that I've been thinking about since this Pew Research report came out.
The current issue is that the average American thinks that an electron is larger than an atom, and some other stupid stuff. Back in the 1980s, the poster-concept for the stupidity of Americans was an exam given to school children in which the plurality of individuals placed Boston firmly in the middle of Tibet. This exam was given in Massachusetts. In those days, Geography was the bugaboo of…
sporte | July 11, 2009There aren't many reports of 14 year-olds making scientific contributions. Even in the field of astronomy, Caroline Moore, the youngest person to discover a supernova, is a bit unusual.
This supernova comes from Astronomy Picture of the day. Photo credits: High-Z Supernova Search Team, HST, NASA
HT: National Science Foundation
The National Science Foundation reported that Moore has found an supernova candidate that may be as unusual as she is.
"It's really a strange supernova," said Moore. "A supernova is a huge explosion deep in the core of a star, whereas a nova is an explosion on the…