This coming January I will have the pleasure of speaking at two discussion at Science Online '09; one on the history of science, and the other about using the web to teach science in college. You can have a look at the wiki pages for both talks here (history) and here (college science), but they will certainly change during the coming days and weeks.
I want to make sure the things that I will be talking about with my esteemed colleagues will be interesting and relevant, so if you have any ideas about what you would like to be discussed during these sessions, please chime in via the comments. I have some ideas about what to cover, but I don't want to miss anything that attendees (and those watching from elsewhere) might want to know.
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It's bad enough when your comment doesn't get through first time and you end up with two of them.
To manage it with blog posts takes real skill.
Hmmm, I don't seem to be able to post a blog entry of my own about this, so I'll just leave a quick comment here (in the hope that this'll work marginally better).
At the conference, I'm going to back people into a corner and bore them with my diatribes about mathematics on the Web. "You can't teach a quantitative science like physics at the college level without doing math for real," I'll say, "as you'd be cutting out the connective tissue of the subject, leaving only lumps of gristle. The same can even hold true in biology, thanks to allometry, population genetics, et cetera. The problem of representing equations as text strings was essentially solved by Donald Knuth in the early 1980s, but the Web is noticeably deficient in this arena: we are forced to work with technologies like MathML, which can render quite pretty formulas at the price of struggling with browser plugins and software configuration. . . ."
"Zzzzzzzzzzzz. . . ."
"Hey, come quick, everybody! PZ is painting communion wafers with the American flag and lighting them on fire!"
"Wait for me! I need to liveblog this!"
"Or, we can render equations as GIF or PNG images, a suboptimal technique which hasn't even been implemented on major blogging platforms. . . where did everybody go?"
Woohoo! All the COOL kids are on our panel!
So, why blog history of science?
How about museums, zoos and botanical gardens, making pictures of their specimens and putting them online, putting all their documents online?
How about the history of science as an evolutionary tree? It would give you a metaphor to hang the discussion on.
Y'know, branches of inquiry meandering this way and that, false starts and stops, the occasional blossoming of knowledge and practical fruits...