Facebook & Mobile access

reading: Facebook for Educators (pdf)

I'm interested in using Facebook in my classes, I've tried using Twitter in the past, but very few of my students actually have it. But it turns out nearly every one of them uses Facebook. So its time to get with the times!
I had thought that what I would be doing was making a profile, 'friending' their profiles, and communicating through that. Fortunately, that's not necessary at all. Apparently I can create Groups and Pages on the class and subject, and they can like them which will put updates into their newsfeed. They can also edit and share information directly on the Groups and Pages, all without us having to 'friend' one another.

A particularly curious bit of information from the above brochure is this:

your students are already using Facebook on their mobile phones while at home or when riding the bus. Your teaching can reach them at these moments. That opens new doors for teaching and learning....for many urban and minority youth, a mobile device is their primary access point to the Internet.

"Urban Minority Youth" describes a huge section of the student community that we serve, and yet our campus has its WiFi access completely locked up. If you go to any of 20 NYC Parks soon, you can get free WiFi, but on our Campus, you need to bring a laptop to the IT department, and they will install a program that will negotiate wireless access. You can imagine that this doesn't always work, and more importantly, you can't access the network with anything other than a laptop. No phones, no smartphones, no iPods or iPads. As a faculty member I can't access the WiFi network on my phone. I have a laptop on loan from the IT group itself and it doesn't connect even though its supposed to. The only time I've been able to access the schools network is through a hardwired office in my computer, the Podiums bolted to the floor in the classrooms, or by taking my loaner wireless laptop and plugging it into an ethernet jack.

It'd be really great, just from a class-functional perspective, if we could do things like remind students which room Academic Scheduling has dropped us into today, or when we've moved to a computer lab or different science lab-room. If they could quickly get WiFi on their phone, we could do this. I could send a message from the classroom. They could message me as they're walking through the front gate. We could exchange electronic documents in the classroom and verify right there that it went through. These perhaps aren't critical things, but its just strikingly odd that we have our network caged up like this.
Our campus isn't very large, but its larger than a wireless router's broadcast range. So why can't we just have open-access to our network? You'd have to actually be on campus to use it, so only our students and faculty and staff would be able to do it, its not like people would be coming in off the street just to use our WiFi. If Starbucks can do it, why can't we? Heck, if all of the Parks in NYC can do it, why can't we? We already have the infrastructure, and I seriously doubt that our campus has some sort of internet traffic cap, so maybe its time we did this.

via Storify

E-Portfolios and Cats

re: http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/2011/06/eportfolios-all-thats-wrong-with-ed-tech.html

The crux of the above post is that e-portfolios were all the rage, but the fell out of favour because they add unnecessary complications, are de-socialized, have a steep learning curve, and often quickly just became ways to submit student work.

They are still alive at our campus. I don't use them and don't know anyone that uses them, but I occasionally see campus-wide-list-emails about them. Development of e-portfolios is managed by our 'Center for Advanced Technologies Training', along with many other systems, like BlackBoard, Blogs, and Wikis. Most of our faculty doesn't have their Faculty Profile webpage set up though, so I suspect that these resources are under-utilized. I know the people at our CATT and they are great, extremely helpful, so I have to think that what the above post suggests is true about a lot of electronic systems.

One comment on the above blog is interesting:

So e-portfolios are problematic if you're talking about education and learning, but in the context of schooling - the real world in which most people live, they work just fine (or as well as anything does...).

This highlights the difference between Actual Learning and Scholasticism. On the one hand our students, and this seems to be true everywhere regardless of what people say, are expected to basically jump through a set of hoops. And they approach it as such, tasks to check off in order to move up.

I was at a graduation ceremony this weekend at a high level private high school. The Valedictorian actually said just that, that they learned nothing in their school other than to use things like cliff and spark notes, and that putting work off until the night before was actually better than doing it ahead of time, not merely acceptable or sufficient but preferable because they can focus on other things to learn that are important (and he did not mean academic matters).

So it sounds like e-portfolios are great, as long as you want the same-old-same-old, or as long as you want 'top performing students' who are doing nothing.

I'll have to actually try to verify that though, maybe I need to talk to the guys over at our CATT.

Quantification of Qualitative Data

Reading: Libarkin, Kurdziel, & Anderson 2007 College Student Conceptions of Geological Time and the Disconnect Between Ordering and Scale. J. Geoscience Ed 55(5) November

In this study Libarkin and co. continue their work on learning about how students learn. And importantly, learning what the students don't learn. They use questions from the Geoscience Concept Inventory (GCI) to evaluate a range of students from a range of colleges. One pretty neat thing they did was to give the students complete a timeline. The timeline had Earth Forms at the bottom and today at the top. They were asked to put in the following events in order and record the time that those events occurred:

1. First Life on Earth
2. Appearance of the Dinosaurs
3. Disappearance of the Dinosaurs
4. Appearance of Man

Most students did pretty good on the sequence of events, only a few did crazy things like have dinosaurs appear, then Man, then dinosaurs disappear. They did OK on getting the dates in. Nearly all students failed to get the scale correct, even when given the timeline on graph paper. They'd do things like have dinosaurs appear and die out in the middle of the time line, have humans appear way too far down the time line, etc. Interesting enough of a result on its own.

But then Libarkin et al went a step further and mapped the timeline results to a Ternary diagram.

A Ternary Diagram is basically a chart, like any data you can chart you find out the x-axis value, the y-axis value and plot a point where they intersect. Here, instead of two axes, there are three and they cross each other. The diagram itself looks like a triangle, the axes run through the corners of the triangle. The other neat thing about a Ternary diagram is that the three axes need to all sum together to make a whole, so a Timeline naturally lends itself to this sort of analysis.

The authors set out to plot each student's timeline on the Ternary Diagram. They determined the percentage of the total timeline for three intervals:

1. Earth Forms - First Life
2. First Life - Man
3. Man - Today

Each of these intervals make up an axis in the diagram (well, technically the percentage of the whole that each interval is makes up an axis). So now every student timeline has a value for each axis and can be plotted on the diagram. This allows the student timelines to be compared and analysed further. Typically, in geology, Ternary Diagrams are used to represent phases: phases of minerals, types of sediment, etc. A geological Ternary diagram will usually have several areas mapped out on it that correspond to, say, K-feldspar, or biogenic ooze, depending on the diagram. Here the authors feel that they've discerned a few 'phases' of student concepts. The creationist students tend to plot together, the students in an "Honors Natural History Field Course" mark out a phase, and between lies a wide space where other students fall into.

Fortunately, the point that represents reality, the scientific concensus on the issue, falls within the same 'phase' as the Honors Students. BUT, the Honors students phase is really large. Their answers aren't ALL over the place, they don't cross into Young Earth Creationist (YEC) territory, but a helluva lot of them are just completely wrong.

It might be better to think of the diagram as having three phases, a small circular phase around the correct answer, meaning that there is an agreed upon answer, and some error is allowed for amoung students. A second YEC phase, just like in the paper, and a third phase, everything else. Viewed that way, you can see that the Honors students DO NOT cluster in the "Correct" phase. The smallest spread (but also a very small sample size) is from "Students in a small elite private University in the Northeast (and they were enrolled in a gen ed bio coure)", and following that, to me it looks like a "Large State University in the SouthWest". So you might think that small elite Universities are faring better in their geoscience education, except that he "Honors College, Natural Science Field Course" students were from a "Large State University in the East".

As far as demographics go, they were typical of what I've seen in geoscience courses (keeping in mind that these weren't all students from geoscience courses in the first place), that is to say, a buncha white kids. Couple of other ethnicities represented, but no black students. Thats probably another issue best examined at another time.

I don't know if this is standard practice in the social sciences either but in the demographic section, one student abstained from reporting their ethnicity, and was counted as a Caucasian. For some reason I find that humorous; is it expected that non-whites will always fillout demographic information, or is it expected that only white people wouldn't bother to do it (or is that the same thing)?

By the way, most of the above blather about the procedure and results is distilled into its essence in the paper as:

"The timeline distance between three pairs of events, normalized to the sum of these distances, generates a ternary diagram from which conceptual zoning can be identified."

I think that the Lacodaemeons would've loved scientific writing.

Library Shitstorm

Apparently there is much internet-drama in the world of Libraries and Librarians. Many of the librarians actually have a name for their world of Library-related blogs, the biblioblogosphere, that's cute. The problem seems to have started more or less when a 'big shot' librarian at a Canadian University said that, 'rather than hire new Librarians to replace those retiring and others that will be forced out, we're going to replace them with PhDs and the like. No more librarians at the library'. This drove the biblioblogosphere berserk.

On the one hand, this sounds fine, replace people that specialize in whatever librarians do with subject matter experts. But there's such an uproar amoung the 'glasses on a chain' crowd, that I have to wonder, have I not been making use of my librarians? The librarians I've had contact with are great people, they are helpful. At Adelphi, one of the librarians actually met with our class, all pro-active like, and distributed a book-let she had written on using the library for science research, and also included proper citation methods. I still have it, it's useful. The librarians at Kingsborough are also really good, I usually have my students do a research project, and I insist that they learn to use the library databases, rather than google, for their research. One of the librarians there meets with my class, usually for two sessions, showing them how to use the database, how to come up with a research project, rather than just making up some idea and 'googling' it.

But clearly that sort of thing doesn't require a Master's in Library Science, so why insist on Librarians?

I don't know why, so I think I need to find out what else the librarians can be doing for me.

Pre-Grad School

I'll be starting in the CUNY Grad Center's PhD Program in Earth & Environmental Sciences this fall. I need to sort some things out before that. I've already been through a Master's degree program before, at Adelphi University; the MS was through their Biology Department where I was lucky enough to work with Dr. Beth Christensen on paleoclimate-paleoceanography. So on the one hand I have some idea of what Graduate School is like, keeping in mind that a PhD program is going to be different. I know I do good work in a lab and do good research and that I have some trouble writing up that research; I never published my Masters as a separate article in a journal, but I have done poster presentations on my subject matter, and I've done an oral presentation at an AGU conference. Clearly the big hurdle I need to make it over here is actually submitting and publishing in a journal.

I've done research, and I've applied for and obtain small grants, and I was also lucky enough to be responsible for equipment purchasing on a big grant where I work. But I haven't obtained and administered a big grant on my own. That involves a lot of paperwork and management, its not the sort of thing that you normally think about as being associated with doing science. Business, sure, that can be expected, but you tend to think of the work of science being spent either looking down a microscope or pouring over research papers; if a spreadsheet's involved its for tabulating data, not doing accounting. I'm expecting to see lots more of that as grad school progresses; I'll need to obtain funding just for taking credits/tuition, if that's doable, or maybe I can get a fellowship or some sort of grant for doing research while at school. I don't actually expect much 'support' in that sense from the program. In some ways, they shouldn't be providing that sort of support, students need to develop those skills, and sink or swim is a way to do that.

So I understand that scientists spend a lot of time doing things other than science. How much, I can't really say. I'd hope that the program can help make that clearer, but its not what we usually think of the doctorate curricula are.

Just finished reading Klein and Edgar's "The Dawn of Human Culture" (2002). The crux of the book is that there is a gap between the appearance of anatomically modern humans and the appearance of fully human behavior. The authors suggest that anatomy, at least the type of anatomy detectable in the fossil record, does not account for human behavior but rather language does; it was the acquisition of language after anatomy that allowed humans to create new behaviors and build up human culture. Prior to that, human culture, whether among Neanderthals, erectus, or even Homo sapiens, was very limited, extremely un-inventive, and almost exclusively utilitarian; no art, decorations, etc.

The book is short, and the actual presentation of the core argument is very short. Most of the book reads like a review of the human-like fossils that are out there and the earliest 'stone industries'. The focus is sometimes on Africa, sometimes on Europe, rarely on the rest of the world. And then mostly on Indonesia. The authors excuse this focus on the grounds that there aren't many remains from elsewhere to work with, noting that this is laregley because the focus has been on Europe (by Europeans) and Africa (by Europeans, as part of the African Origins idea). The review seems excellent to me, but they really don't spend much time on their own ideas vis-a-vis language and their putative "dawn of human culture".

The authors also don't care much for a lot of things in paleontology. Relationships between hominid fossils aren't important, behavior is what they care about. Dating-techniques would be more important, if only they weren't so prone to hard-to-correct-for-error. Relationships and time are usually the foundations of a paleontological study, so I was surprised to see this. Its not that the authors reject dating-technology, its not that they don't discuss relationships, its just that they don't really figure into their interpretation of the history all that much.

The authors also don't discuss human genetics very much. To be clear, they do discuss it, but its only import for them is that it supports the out of Africa hypothesis. It doesn't add anything to the timing of human migrations out of Africa, it doesn't help in looking at the spread of humans once out of Africa, it uninformative on the behavior of Neanderthals and erectus, and it doesn't help us to look at the spread of culture once it develops. Human 'paleo-genetics' certainly can inform of about all these things, but the authors don't seem concerned with any of it. True enough, the book was written in 2002, but thats hardly the Dark Ages.

As far as their hypothesis, it ends up falling rather flat. On the one hand, they make a very good case that there is a gap between anatomy and behavior, and it requires a special explanation. But their explanation is simply that fully developed language would appear quickly, undetectably, and that it would necessarily result in the development of culture, art, drawing, complex society, etc.

They don't offer anything in the way of how language developed. They mention that some people have a 'defective' gene, and because of this they have trouble processing language, but are otherwise intelligent. So we're left to conclude that they believe human culture is the result of one or two, maybe a few, new genes 'for language'. They require us to assume that culture comes after language, and that language is the necessary and sufficient ingredient for culture.

For those reasons, this book was disappointing, that is to say it disappointed me on those topics. On others, it was quite satisfying. The review of the actual fossils that have been collected was great, and the review of the earliest stone cultures/industries was also great, they make the book well worth the read.

Reading

Reading Federica Raia's "Students' Understanding of Complex Dynamic Systems" Jour. Geoscience Edu. 53. 3. 2005.

The author gives three short response question to sixteen of her undergrad geoscience students, whom have varying majors and levels of education, in an attempt to determine if they are thinking linearly or complexly. All but two fail to think complexly. Dr. Raia used her own scoring criteria, culled from multiple resources, to categorize parts of student responses 12 ways, 6 ways in the Linear thinking type, and 6 corresponding ways in the Complex/Systems approach type. Even though the three questions the students responded to were given as both pre & post test, they still generally failed to attribute complex/Systems type of analysis in their answers.

The first question showed a hypothetical marine strat sequence and asked them to describe the events that caused it. Rather than reference plate tectonics and the movement of the part of the plate in question into different depositional environments, the students though there was at one time ridge (or just a basalt supplying volcano for some students), and then later a volcanic island (which provided ash and sands). Raia felt that the responses, aside from being wrong, showed that the students could only think up 'accidental' causes, not driving forces that aren't specifically written out in the column itself (iow exegent forces).

In the second question they were asked to describe glaciations in New York and their causes; they didn't talk about Milankovitch scale changes or ocean circulation changes. A bunch of them thought she meant 'glaciers', and they just tried to diagram how glaciers move. Others felt that a comet or meteor struck the Earth and tilted its axis, another that 'something' moved the Earth further away from the Sun (in fact they cited 'god' as having done that!!). At least they recognized that changes in the Earth's tilt and orbit can drive climate change. But since the concern here is how they are thinking, that doesn't really offer any reassurances. Those responses still show that they are looking at accidental causes or intelligently directed causes, so again no complex thinking/analysis.

The last question was a simple one, explain why geese fly in a V formation. Most students thought that either a lead goose directed the others or that the goose genes directed them. Some of the students even specifically said that it was the King Goose that directed them, and one student was quick to point out that a Leader, though not necessarily a male, directed them. Funny that she was able to point that out, but still not think about real causes. Two students did realize that it had something to do with air dynamics and ease of flying (c.f. 'drafting'). Raia notes that these same two students were answered the original question by referencing plate motion, away from spreading centers and torwards a subduction zone, AND that these two students were amoung the least educated in the group (they had met the prerequisites, but had no advanced classes). In terms of complex thinking, the students generally didn't consider that properties the whole emerge from actions of the parts, they felt that there had to be a leader, whether a goosey Malik Taus or "the genes", and that they also importantly glossed over many connecting levels by jumping from genes, which code for proteins, to position within the flock.

Dr. Raia concludes by making some comments on the import of complex thinking in relation to evolution education and the environment. With particular respect to evolution, since there is no 'leader', no King Goose directing things, Dr. Raia speculates that non-complex thinking, the linear thinking common to even upper classmen, pre-determines that they will have a particularly difficult time and end up with poor overall understanding.

That last point is particularly interesting, especially because Complex Thinking seems like it can very easily fit into a evolutionary curriculum. Raia defines complex thinking as havin a few characteristics, such as: the recognition of mutual interactions between components, which to me sounds like genes operating on and being influenced by the genome; distinguishing between micro and macro levels, just like micro evolution within a species and speciation; and emergent properties, which could work in as something like Gould's ideas of higher hierarchical levels in the structure of evolutionary theory. Emergent properties ala complex systems also makes me think of the shape of a cladogram. We have the individual species as the parts, operating under their own 'atomic laws', their particular particle properties, but then there is the branching pattern of the whole cladogram emerging out of it. I think that the contingence factor here, the effect of fairly random or at least non-'Darwinian' events on the pattern of extinction and radiation, actually strengthens teaching this as a 'complex system'.

Indo-European Poetry and Myth

Reading "Indo-European Poetry and Myth" by M.L. West, on pg 132-3 he discusses that there may have been an indo-european idea that when gods disguised themselves as men, their eyes were unblinking and their feet glided, not touched, over the ground. He cites Mahabharata 3.54.23 & Heliodorus's Aethiopica 3.13.2 as specifically saying this. But, he notes, instead of being derived from IE, they could be late transmision, even, he specifically proposes, Alexandrian. But countering that he supposes they probably are derived from an IE source, because Homer in Iliad 3.396 has Helen recognize Venus/Aphrodite disguised as an old woman, because of her sparkling eyes, and in 13.71 Ajax recognized Poseidon because of his leg movements.

But the problem that I keep coming to in a lot of these issues of derivations from IE is, how was it passed along? If Heliodorus wrote about the god waving shining eyes and their feet not touching the ground when they are disguised as humans, from where did he learn it? Was it passed down from early IE speakers in 6,000 BC to Heliodorus in 400/600 AD without any other of the millions of people that must've heard it writing it down? Its one thing to say that the old bards and orators learned to write about gods taking human form, but seems like another to say that they learned about the shining eyes and gliding feet, without writing it down somewhere.

Student Evaluations of Teaching

I just got the results of my Student's evaluation of my teaching for my Fall 2010 Oceanography course. The students are given a survey near the end of the semester that asks the students to respond to 12 statements, to which they can fill in bubbles on the form indicating how strongly the agree or disagree with the statement. There are 5 degrees of agreement : strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, and strongly disagree. They can also bubble in 'no response', which isn't scored. Additionally, they can write in a short response. On the back of the form they can write a longer comment for my teaching overall.

My average overall score was 4.3 out of 5. My lowest score one a particular statement was 3.8 out of 5; I received that in response to 'the instructor holds my interest in class' and 'the instructor keeps my informed about my academic progress'. I also received an average score of 3.9 for 'the instructor encourages students to ask questions and participate in class'. It was a bit surprising to see a lower score for that last question, because I, well I thought at least, that I was frequently asking them if they had any questions. Rarely does anyone bother to ask. I'll have to assume that they want to ask questions but just need more invitations.

One statement they have to rate is 'the instructor has increased my knowledge of the subject matter'. Now, my problem here is that, if they don't answer 'strongly agree' here, then doesn't that mean that they should've failed the course? Its not asking to indicate how much you've learned even, so that you can agree, but not strongly agree, and unless a person is saying that they already knew everything that we covered, they must be saying that they didn't learn anything we covered, which is a little hard to believe. I know that most people aren't going to look at the question that way, but still.

Amoung the comments they've made are things like 'He talks for long periods of time by himself', 'hard to stay awake', 'don't shut the lights during powerpoint', 'goes back and forth between slides too much', 'doesn't stop & interact'. Now, the problem is that this is a class that meets 3 times a week for two hours a session, so, yeah, there are going to be times when I have to talk for a while. I'll absolutely admit that I can make the course more interactive, and I'm trying out some new things in the new semester, so its, of course, a valid criticism, they're all valid criticisms. But at the same time, surely they realize that there will be periods in a lecture when the instructor is, well, lecturing. Not pontificating or droning, but lecturing. We can't break out a coloring book every 40 minutes.