teaching
sporte | November 12, 2007I had some strange notions when I made the jump from working at the lab bench to teaching at the white board. I thought good teaching meant interesting lectures. And I was completely unaware that people actually conducted research in science education. If I had been asked about education research, I would have replied that it was largely anecdotal, probably limited to sociologists and primary grades, and as far as I was concerned, useless.
And, honestly, to me it was useless.
I never saw any of science education articles or journals. No other instructors every discussed them and…
sporte | November 9, 2007Last year I wrote about an experiment where I compared a human mitochondrial DNA sequence to primate sequences in the GenBank. Since I wanted to know about the differences between humans, gorillas, and chimps, I used the Entrez query 'Great Apes' to limit my search to a set of sequences in the PopSet database that contained gorillas, bonobos, chimps, and human DNA.
A week ago, I tried to repeat this experiment and...
It didn't work.
All I saw were human mitochondrial sequences. I know the other sequences match, but I didn't see them since there are so many human sequences that match…
grrlscientist | November 9, 2007tags: hawk-headed parrot, red-fan parrot, Deroptyus accipitrinus, clicker training, streaming video
As some of you know, I recently added a four-month-old hawk-headed (red-fan) parrot, Deroptyus a. accipitrinus, to my household. I plan to learn how to clicker-train this bird (I already have the necessary tools and books). Below the fold is an example of another young Hawk-headed parrot, named Scooter (owned by Jeannie), who was approximately six months old in this video. This training session focuses on teaching the bird how to pick up and retrieve a small ball. [8:52]
grrlscientist | November 2, 2007tags: hawk-headed parrot, red-fan parrot, Deroptyus accipitrinus, clicker training, streaming video
As some of you know, I recently added a four-month-old hawk-headed (red-fan) parrot, Deroptyus a. accipitrinus, to my household. I plan to learn how to clicker-train this bird (I already have the necessary tools and books). Below the fold is an example of another young Hawk-headed parrot, named Scooter (owned by Jeannie), who was approximately six months old and had only been clicker-trained for two days in this video. This training session focuses on reinforcing the bird's earlier training…
grrlscientist | October 29, 2007tags: hawk-headed parrot, red-fan parrot, Deroptyus accipitrinus, streaming video
I just added a four-month-old hawk-headed (red-fan) parrot, Deroptyus a. accipitrinus, to my household. Since I don't have a camera or video camera at my disposal (yet) I decided to share a video with you of another young Hawk-headed parrot, named Scooter, who was approximately five months old in this video. Scooter had just come to his new home four days prior to this video. [1:51]
I am bringing my own Hawk-headed parrot home on the subway from the airport this afternoon. This video appeared at the time when…
sporte | October 28, 2007Metagenomics is a field where people interrogate the living world by isolating and sequencing nucleic acids. Since all living things have DNA, and viruses have either DNA or RNA, we can identify who's around by looking at bits of their genome.
Researchers are using this approach to find the culprit that's killing the honeybees. We're also trying to find out who else shares our bodies, and lives in our skin, in our stomachs, and other places where the sun doesn't shine. Craig Venter used metagenomics when he sailed around the world and sequenced DNA samples from the Sargasso Seas.
In this…
sporte | October 27, 2007The simple fact is this: some DNA sequences are more believable than others.
The problem is, that many students and researchers never see any of the metrics that we use for evaluating whether a sequence is "good" and whether a sequence is "bad."
All they see are the base calls and sequences: ATAGATAGACGAGTAG, without any supporting information to help them evaluate if the sequence is correct. If DNA sequencing and personalized genetic testing are to become commonplace, the practice of ignoring data quality is (in my opinion) simply unacceptable.
So, for awhile anyway, I'm making a…
sporte | October 24, 2007Would you like to have some fun playing with chromatograms and helping our class identify bacteria in the dirt?
This quarter, my bioinformatics class, at Shoreline Community College, will be working with chromatograms that were obtained by students at Johns Hopkins University, and graciously made available by Dr. Rebecca Pearlman. (See see "Sequencing the campus at the Johns Hopkins University" for more background.)
We are going to do a bit of metagenomics by using FinchTV and blastn to identify the soil bacteria that were sampled from different biomes and then use an SQL query that I…
sporte | October 23, 2007It's hard to teach bioinformatics when schools work so hard to keep us from using computers.
Anecdotes from the past
Back in my days as a full-time instructor, I fought many battles with our IT department. Like many colleges, we had a few centralized computer labs, tightly controlled by IT (aka the IT nazis), where students were supposed to go to do their computing. Instructors also had a centralized computer lab, but over the years, we gained the right to have computers in our offices. Our major battle was whether or not we'd be allowed to use Macs.
There are certainly advantages in…
sporte | October 17, 2007If like me, you were a little disoriented and confused when you visited Second Life and traveled through orientation island, then you may like this.
The Wired Campus (from The Chronicle for Higher Education) led me to an interesting post from the New Media Consortium and a new place to visit once I get a bit of time to do so.
The NMC has set up a special orientation island for educators. From the photos, this island looks like a unusually clean and artistic rendition of San Francisco, complete with the Golden Gate bridge and a few Bay area landmarks.
Unlike the usual orientation, though,…
sporte | October 14, 2007I've been reading quite a bit lately about Universities setting up virtual classrooms in Second Life, so when Bertalan Meskó from ScienceRoll invited me to come give a poster, I decided it was time to take the plunge. Besides, I'm going to be teaching an on-line bioinformatics course this spring for Austin Community College, so this seemed like a good time to find out what the fuss is all about.
Tomorrow, Bora Zivkovic (A Blog Around the Clock) and I will be the first ScienceBloggers (that I know of) to give poster presentations in Second Life. Our talk will be at 4 pm GMT, 12 noon EDT, and…
jlynch | October 1, 2007Regular readers will remember that last year we here at Scienceblogs undertook a bloggers challenge for DonorsChoose.org, an organization that helps K-12 teachers. In two weeks we raised over $34,000 for deserving teachers and their students. This blog alone raised $1,000. This year, we’re aiming to be bigger and better, and given the extra time (and my increased readership), I’m setting our goal at $4000.
So, go here and donate. Choose a project if you want, or just donate to the general fund ... it’s all good.
Oh, and keep the email that you will receive from DonorsChoose - there will…
sporte | September 26, 2007For the record: Chlamydia is NOT a virus.
I am bummed. I like the little MicrobeWorld radio broadcasts, and the video podcasts are even more fun.
But I was perusing the archives and I found this:
I could ignore this if it came from a different source, but MicrobeWorld is produced with funding from the American Society for Microbiology!
Microbiologists are supposed to know the difference between bacteria and viruses. It's part of our training and big part of what we do.
I know, as scientists we're always supposed to follow the mantra of "buyer beware" and "be skeptical of…
sporte | September 25, 2007Biology as a second-language: the immersion method
Language teachers say the best way to learn a language is by total immersion and even better, spending time in the country where it's spoken conversing with native speakers.
See it, hear it, speak it, use it!
Put yourself in a position where you must do these four things to survive (or at least find the restroom) and you will learn more rapidly than by any other method.
Graduate school serves a similar purpose for scientists. You go from an environment where your fellow students and co-workers spend time chatting about TV shows and…
sporte | August 17, 2007One time I was watching a football game on TV and they had a short quiz, called "You make the call" or something like that, and you had to watch a play and pretend to be a referee. A short video clip showed football players falling over each other. Then you were three possible calls that a refereee might make and asked to chose which was correct. After the commercial, the announcer would tell you which choice was right and explain why it was correct. I suppose this was a trick to make us watch the commercials, but I thought the game was kind of fun.
My SciBling "Mike the Mad" had a great…
purepedantry | August 8, 2007Vindication at last. I catch a lot of hell because I tend to talk with my hands.
However, Susan Wagner Cook for the University of Chicago has shown that when teaching math problems kids who repeat the hand gestures of the teacher are more likely to get the problem right. In other words, practicing gestures aids in retention:
Kids asked to physically gesture at math problems are nearly three times more likely than non-gesturers to remember what they've learned. In today's issue of the journal Cognition, a University of Rochester scientist suggests it's possible to help children learn…
sporte | July 23, 2007Last week I found a bug in the new NCBI BLAST interface.
Of course, I reported it to the NCBI help desk so it will probably get fixed sometime soon. But it occurred to me, especially after seeing people joke about whether computer science is really a science or not, that it might surprise people to learn how much of the scientific method goes into testing software and doing digital biology.
tags: blast, software testing, scientific method, science education
What happens when the scientific method isn't used?
I wrote earlier in January about applying scientific principles from the wet…
grrlscientist | June 11, 2007tags: teaching, streaming video
Everyone knows that "those who can, do, while those who can't, teach". Right? Wrong. This streaming video of Taylor Mali, slam poet and teacher, speaks his mind regarding what teachers make. While it speaks to the traditional foundations of the teaching role, it also speaks to the heart and soul of it. Congrats to all of the teachers who have just finished up for the year, are on the home-stretch, or are about to get started again for another program this summer (or another phase of their year-round program)! [3:08]
sporte | June 4, 2007Do course evaluations have to be a popularity contest? Or can they be useful tools for improving a class?
tags: teaching, student evaluations
A few days ago, evolgen lamented that his students weren't giving him useful information on their end-of-course evaluations.
I'm not surprised.
When I first started teaching, I was a given a copy of the standard-teacher-evaluation-form-that-everyone-used.
The questions read something like this, with ratings between always and never:
1. Does your instructor show up on time? (to what? coffee dates?)
2. Does your instructor dress appropriately…
grrlscientist | May 19, 2007tags: physics, Large Hadron Collider, Higgs field, streaming video
Will the Large Hadron Collider finally find the elusive God particle? Watch this streaming BBC video to find out! [7:38]