Science Education
tsmith | September 4, 2006Minnesota has a new group: Minnesota Citizens for Science Education (MnCSE).
They already have an excellent website put together, and have an event upcoming on November 11th:
Science Education Saturday
November 11, 2006
Bell Museum of Natural History
9:00 AM - 2:00 PM.
Some of the most popular and dynamic professors involved with evolutionary biology at the University of Minnesota - Mark Borrello, Randy Moore, PZ Myers and others - will join a panel of public school K-12 educators to present practical suggestions for the classroom, useful resources for teachers and ideas for working with…
clock | September 4, 2006If you need ideas how to help various science-related causes, Nick has collected a lot of information you can use.
clock | September 4, 2006From November 28, 2005, a post about teaching...
There has been literally an explosion of new knowledge about malaria in the last ten years or so. It is an amazing disease. Looking at all the new findings coming out almost every week makes me salivate because of...teaching! Malaria is a fantastic case-study to keep mentioning over and over again throughout the course. Let me backtrack for a moment....
I teach general biology to adult non-science majors at a community college. It is a speed course, lasting only eight weeks. In eight meetings, one has to deliver an enormous amount of material…
scientificactivist | September 4, 2006In the comments of a recent post, one reader asked for recommendations of good science-related causes to donate to. Not having much (or any) disposable income myself--being a poor grad student and all--I realized that I didn't have many suggestions myself. So, I asked around, and I found, not surprisingly, that there are a ton of worthy causes and organizations out there that need funding. In particular, some of my SciBlings here at ScienceBlogs.com were very helpful with their own suggestions. Although I've compiled quite a list here, I know that this just barely scratches the surface,…
sporte | September 1, 2006If we compare sections 1, 2, and 3, we see that section 2 matches very well in a number of different samples, and that there are differences between the sequences in sections 1 and 3.
We also learn something about the people who did the experiment.
At first it appears somewhat odd that there are many matching sequences that are all shorter than the genome and all the same length.
What's up with that?
It turns out that information doesn't have anything to do with the fraction of the genome that matches our query. These short segments are PCR products. They're the same size because the PCR…
clock | September 1, 2006 In light of the recent cases of researchers quitting animal research under the duress of threats and attacks by Animal Rights groups, e.g., Dr. Ringach at UCLA, this may be a good time to repost this old rant from May 23, 2005 (originally here, then reposted here on January 16, 2006):
The story about the class dissection of a dog stirred quite a lot of controversy, including heated exchanges in the comments of these two posts on Pharyngula.
I joined in late to that discussion, not because I missed it, but because I did not know what to say before I knew more about the case, and also because…
sporte | August 31, 2006Have you ever wondered about Cheeze Whiz? why new cars have a distinctive smell? or what makes golf balls so springy?
Chemical and Engineering News, published by the American Chemical Society, has a wonderful section that you will certainly appreciate.
"What's that stuff?" is a collection of entertaining stories about the stuff we encounter in everyday life. Each article combines chemistry with history and fun facts in a way that entices the reader to stay awhile and read every one.
Since the stories are written for non-chemists, they make a perfect companion to chemistry courses ranging from…
tsmith | August 31, 2006I have an article up over at Skepchick on Science for kids. These are just a few things I did as a kid, or do with my kids, but feel free to chime in with other suggestions.
jlynch | August 30, 2006Long-time readers may remember that over the summer my SciBlings and I raised funds for K-12 science projects using DonorsChoose.org. With the start of the school year, we're hearing back from the teachers. Below are two notes I recently received:
Dear Dr. Lynch, I cannot thank you enough for funding this project for my students! I told them that our new aquarium is on its way, and they can scarcely contain their excitement. Your generosity will enhance their learning and growth throughout the entire year. Thank you for giving my children this opportunity. Joyfully, Cheryl Bommarito Klein (…
clock | August 30, 2006Now that the school has started, we (meaning 'ScienceBloggers') are getting feedback messages from science teachers who were able to buy supplies for their classes because you, our readers, pitched in back in June and donated mountains of money through the DonorsChoose program.
I want to thank you all again for doing such a good deed. And, as far as I can see, none of us has removed the DonorsChoose button from our sidebars, so you can always add some more to the science teaching projects of your choice.
P.S. The first note I got very early and do not have it any more in my mailbox The last…
clock | August 30, 2006
Re-post from May 17, 2006, under the fold...
When teaching biology, one has to cut up the syllabus into edible and digestible chunks, and it makes sense to cover various subdisciplines in separate lectures. As you know, I strive to find ways to make connections to students so they don't leave with a sense that all those subdisciplines are disconnected from each other, almost like separate sciences.
One obvious way to do it is to place everything heavily into an evolutionary context. Another way - and the two go hand-in-hand - is to find really cool diseases, like malaria, in which findings…
clock | August 30, 2006The school has started and I have not yet met my son's teachers, but he brought home his science textbook yesterday. Of course I had to take a look....and I really liked it! It is North Carolina Edition of McDougal Littell "Science" for 8th grade.
While I am still stunned that all of science is bunched together this late in schooling (I had physics, chemistry, earth science and biology as separate subjects from 5th through 12th grade every year), but at least the way this is bunched looks good. It is divided into five units, each taking, I guess, about two months to cover. The first unit…
clock | August 29, 2006Previously unopposed, "...the most notorious creationist on the Ohio State Board of Education, Deborah Owens Fink, has a challenger in the Novemeber 7th election." The election is non-partisan and the serious challenger is Tom Sawyer. You can get all of the details from Ed Brayton (as well as additional views by Chad, John and Kevin). Ed writes:
"Sawyer is the former mayor of Akron, a former state legislator and an 8 term US congressman from Ohio. Sawyer's bonafides for a board of education seat are impressive. He is a former school teacher, and husband of a school teacher. He was the…
clock | August 29, 2006From quite early on in my blogging endeavor, I was interested in exploring science blogging, what it is, what it can do, and what it can become. So, check out some of my earliest thoughts on this here and here.
Then, over about a month (from April 17, 2006 to May 17, 2006) I wrote a gazillion posts on this topic, and many science bloggers chimed in in the comments or on their own blogs. The repost of all of them together is under the fold. Check the originals (and comments) here:
April 17, 2006: Publishing hypotheses and data on a blog - is it going to happen on science blogs?
April 20,…
tsmith | August 29, 2006 As has been mentioned elsewhere on ScienceBlogs, Ohio creationst Deborah Owens Fink is facing a challenge for her seat on Ohio's school board this coming November 7th. Fink has been one of those who, when I've contacted the Board members to urge them to support good science, I've not even bothered with--it's a waste of keystrokes. Ed has the lowdown on the situation, and the Columbus Dispatch has more:
This year, pro-evolution members prevailed in efforts to strip a provision from highschool science standards that they said promoted the teaching of intelligent design.
"They got what they…
scientificactivist | August 29, 2006For such a small planet (or non-planet now), Pluto sure has been making waves the last couple of weeks. I haven't really weighed in and instead deferred to the experts. I'm not going to really say much now either, but, hell, I'll admit it. I'm going to miss Pluto. A lot. Losing Pluto shakes the foundation of the worldview I grew up with, and this seems to be a widespread phenomenon.
Along those lines, Monday's Washington Post featured an article by Shankar Vedantam that placed the loss of Pluto into a broader context, using it as an example to shed light on more general social phenomena…
jlynch | August 28, 2006The maintenance of intellectually sound K-12 science standards involves the work of people at many levels - scientists, educators, school board members, and the general public. I have been privileged to work with numerous great people over the years here in Arizona on just this issue, one such individual being Steve Rissing who is now at Ohio State University. Steve continues to fight the good fight, and if you are in Ohio, you too can help him and the people at Ohio Citizens for Science.
If you're in Ohio, please read this post by Ed Brayton and act on it. As Ed notes, school board elections…
sporte | August 28, 2006One of most wonderful things about the Internet has been the emergence of research projects that involve the general public. Universities like Cornell, Kansas University, and the University of Minnesota, to name a few, have established web sites and on-line databases that encourage both students and amateur biologists to participate in biological field studies. Not only do these projects extend the potential for good science by collecting more data, they give visibility to the research process and allow the public to take ownership and contribute to the store of scientific knowledge.
Monarch…
clock | August 27, 2006Educators, i.e., science teachers, are not too unhappy about the change in taxonomy of planets. Some argue they can use it as a lesson in the way science always changes.
tsmith | August 26, 2006If you're interested in biology and not reading Sandra Porter's Discovering Biology in a Digital World, you should be. As she notes in her profile, her passion is "developing instructional materials for 21st century biology," and it shows--she provides all kinds of little online experiments you can run yourself, even with minimal knowledge of molecular biology. She's recently finished a 4-part series on HIV. The experiment in a nutshell, as she notes:
We are going to compare a protein sequence from a wild type, drug-sensitive, HIV virus with protein sequences from HIV samples that were…