khannula | July 28, 2009Last month, another structural geologist came to town to check out possible sites for a future field class. While we were out looking at one of my favorite teaching sites, he commented that geologists seem unusually willing to share their secrets with one another. (We had met at one of the Cutting Edge workshops, where great teaching ideas are free for the taking, technically unpublished but shared online and in person.)
A few weeks ago, I learned about another example: Outcropedia, a project of the International Union of Geosciences' TekTask group. From the organizers' e-mail:
The…
khannula | July 23, 2009I'm going to take a vacation tomorrow. I'm going to get up early in the morning, ride my bike to my office, and hunker down in front of my computer, putting some of my collaborators' contributions into a grant proposal.
What? That doesn't sound like your idea of a vacation?
What about last week, when I spent a glorious two days in my office while my husband and six-year-old went camping and swimming in a hot spring? No?
They actually do feel like vacations to me. See, I'm spending this summer at home with my six-year-old. There are a few options in town for summer childcare, but I decided not…
khannula | July 23, 2009Jim Lehane at Dino Jim's Musings has posted the call for the August Accretionary Wedge: Time to think OUT of the box:
So your mission is this: "What out of the box ideas do you use to teach people about geology or geological concepts?" No need to limit yourself on ideas you have actively used. If you have used it and you think it is good, great. Is it an idea you have worked up on and gotten ready but haven't had the chance to use it yet, also great (this is pretty much my scenario). What if it is just a theory that you think would be something different and cool, even better. Anything works…
khannula | July 16, 2009Volcanista is hosting the July Accretionary Wedge at her Magmalicious Blog. It's all about how people became interested in geology. There are some great stories - check it out!
The next Accretionary Wedge will be in August, hosted at Dino Jim's Musings, about unusual teaching methods, tools, or ideas.
We're looking for hosts for September and the fall. If you're interested, leave a comment on this post.
khannula | July 15, 2009While I was teaching my reworked upper division gen ed class earlier this summer, I decided to use a discussion technique that I hadn't used before: the
"http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/gallerywalk/index.html">gallery walk. It worked so well that I'm trying to figure out where else it might be useful.
The idea behind the gallery walk is pretty simple: students are divided into several groups, and work their way around a series of stations at which they add to a list of answers to a question (or whatever the task at each station involves). I had used the technique as a participant in a…
khannula | July 13, 2009Chuck at the Lounge of the Lab Lemming has a good Monday-morning meme: bad geologic habits. What things do you forget to do - or do when you know you shouldn't?
I am probably an embarrassment to everyone who ever taught me*. Here's an incomplete list of my bad habits:
- Leaving gear at outcrops. (I've actually put bright-colored tape on my rock hammer, to make it easier to see. I also have cultivated the habit of carrying my hammer and my map in my hands, rather than in a pack or attached to my belt, so that something feels wrong if my hands are empty.
- Forgetting my camera. Argh. Never go…
khannula | July 9, 2009Geophysicist Marcia McNutt, currently President and CEO of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, is going to be the next director of the US Geological Survey. She will join this group of people, who (as Andrew Alden pointed out), are all men. (Cian Dawson points out on Twitter that the current acting director is also a woman - but it's still cool to see Marcia McNutt in a list with John Wesley Powell!)
Andrew points out that Dr. McNutt will also be the first geoscientist to be the science advisor to the Secretary of the Interior.
(And check out the profile published by Geotimes in…
khannula | July 8, 2009Five students (three from the US, two from Brazil) were arrested last month while doing paleoclimate research in Brazil. They were collecting sediment cores from lakes and wetlands, in order to understand past climate change in western Brazil. The charges were based on Brazilian laws dealing with unauthorized extraction of mineral resources. (The group had research permits which they believed to be valid, but apparently they did not cover all members of the group.) The students have been released on bail, but the American students have to stay in Brazil until the legal process is complete -…
khannula | July 6, 2009One of the tricky things to convey about rocks, especially in a lecture or in a textbook, is the way geologists can see such different things at different scales - from thousands of kilometers to a few micrometers - and the way that all those observations fit together to understanding the processes that shape the Earth. Static photos, whether on paper or projected onto a screen or on a computer, don't convey all the information that one can get from a single outcrop - standing back from it, climbing up close to it, crawling over it with a hand lens. (And that's leaving out the perspective of…
khannula | July 5, 2009Ed Yong went to the World Conference of Science Journalists, and came back with both an award (yay!) and some thoughts on embargoes and science journalism. What's got me thinking is not so much the issue of embargoes - I'm not trying to compete with science journalists, and wouldn't have time to read all the interesting papers that are out there, even if I had access to them (before or after they're officially published). Instead, I'm thinking about a side issue (which Mike the Mad Biologist also picked up): "investigative science journalism."
I'm not sure what Ed and the other journalists…
khannula | July 1, 2009If you haven't been reading Photo Synthesis, which features a series of science photographers... well, you've been missing out. The latest photographer, BJ Bolender, has a series of gorgeous mineral photos from rock and mineral shows in Arizona. Go look!
(I've been out of town at a family wedding. I'm back now, but I've got a lot of e-mails to read before I get back to blogging...)
khannula | June 23, 2009The American Geological Institute's latest Geoscience Workforce Currents says that undergrad enrollments are up 8% this year:
Eight per cent actually isn't that much - one or two students, in most of the geology departments that I know. We've got nearly twice as many students registered for my sophomore mapping class this year as we did two years ago (29 vs 15). And that makes me wonder - are there big differences between different types of schools (public versus private; undergrad vs research university) or between different areas of the country?
And is this a blip, resulting from last year…
khannula | June 21, 2009Two summers ago, the extent of Arctic sea ice reached a historic low. What's it going to do this year?
Chuck at Lounge of the Lab Lemming has opened a betting pool. No money involved; winner gets to make him blog on a topic of the winner's choice. (This is a good prize; Chuck is funny.) Bets are in the form of extent and uncertainty, and Chuck's got a useful graph that illustrates how he plans to judge the winner. (It also includes all the sea-ice minima since 2002 in a handy graphical form, which is useful for those of us who prefer pictures to words and numbers.)
He's also interested in…
khannula | June 20, 2009The call for posts for the July Accretionary Wedge, hosted by volcanista's Magmalicious Blog, is up!
So July's topic is about your inspiration to enter geoscience. Was it a fantastic mentor? Watching your geologist parents growing up? A great teacher, or an exciting intro field trip? How did it happen?
The deadline for posts is July 10. Go to volcanista's announcement and leave her a permalink there when you've got something to add.
(Yes, I am shamelessly posting the same thing here and at the Accretionary Wedge blog. But ignore that, and go read volcanista's call for posts instead.)
khannula | June 17, 2009Science has an award for online education resources (cutely named "SPORE"), and they want nominations by June 30.
Here are their criteria:Rules of Eligibility for SPORE-2009:
* The project must focus on science education.
* The resources described must be freely available on the Internet.
* The project can be targeted to students or teachers at the precollege or college level, or it can serve the informal education needs of the general public.
* The Internet resources must be in English or include an English translation.
* Nominations are welcome from all sources. Both…
khannula | June 16, 2009When I was designing my summer session class, I ran into a problem. If I really wanted my students to achieve the course goals, they would need to spend a lot of time on a computer. In a 3-times-a-week lecture course, I might expect them to do that work outside of class, but we were going to be meeting for two hours a day, four days a week - they wouldn't have much time between classes (especially if they were taking other classes and working). And I didn't want to lecture for two hours a day. So, if I wanted them to get in-class practice doing things that related to their goals, I needed to…
khannula | June 14, 2009The June Accretionary Wedge, "Let's Do a Time Warp," is up at Outside the Interzone. It's a crazy time-machine ride from before the Big Bang all the way into the tectonic future. Come along with the geology bloggers to a few of our favorite times.
(And, no, the Cretaceous-Tertiary Paleogene boundary didn't make anyone's list. But you'll have to go to the post to find out what did.)
khannula | June 14, 2009I've got a question for women readers, especially those in the geosciences, environmental sciences, or field sciences: what do you get out of reading blogs? And if you have a blog yourself, what do you get out of writing it?
I'm asking because there's a session at this year's Geological Society of America meeting on "Techniques and Tools for Effective Recruitment, Retention and Promotion of Women and Minorities in the Geosciences" (and that's in the applied geosciences as well as in academia), and I wondered whether blogs (whether geo-blogs or women-in-science blogs or both) help. Although…
khannula | June 10, 2009There's a meme going around about plans for summer reading. While I was reading Sciencewoman's list, I realized that I was avoiding the meme. See, I didn't even manage to finish my spring reading list, so I'm not ready to talk about big plans for the summer.
I had good intentions. I read Dirt: the erosion of civilizations. I bought Last Child in the Woods, and brought it along on my spring break travels. And... I didn't finish it.
Here's the gist of the book: kids should go outside and play in wild, overgrown places. Really, they should. They'll be happier and healthier and more creative and…
khannula | June 10, 2009The deadline for the reactived geology blog carnival, The Accretionary Wedge, is coming on Saturday, June 13. The theme is Let's Do a Time Warp: if you could travel in space and time, to see the geologic past or the geologic future, on this planet or somewhere else, where would you go and what would you see?
Comment on Lockwood's announcement post with the url of your submission.
It should be fun. Join us!