Since President Obama’s announcement of the Educate to Innovate program in November 2009, an encouraging number of technology and media companies, non-profit organizations and government agencies have been working in concert to strengthen the nation’s approach to science education. But the reality is that the lion’s share of transformation must come from within: from school systems, in the case of K-12 education, and from the academy, in the case of higher education.

A position paper recently issued by the Nature Publishing Group illustrates this point in the context of higher education. A significant majority, 77 percent, of the 450 faculty surveyed for the paper consider their educational responsibilities to be equally as important as research responsibilities. Only 6 percent consider research more important than education. Yet when asked to appoint a hypothetical candidate to an open tenure position in their department, the majority chose a star researcher with poor teaching skills over both a star teacher with little research background and a candidate equally skilled, though not notable, in both teaching and research.

The ripple effects of this mindset in the academy are damaging to the goals of universities.

Never forget who the true enemy is, from Abstruse Goose

Ray Comfort’s inanity over on U.S. News & World Report comes to mind:

We don’t find a half-evolved cow or bee. None of the 1.4 million species on the Earth has half an eye.

Such deliberate cluelessness and misrepresentation – it’s unfortunate the U.S. News & World Report will publish nonsense generated by someone who’s clearly only using half a brain.

We're not quite ready to abandon classroom learning in favor of on-line education.

It’s an interesting study, and likely to spur a whole new slew of interest in on-line courses, but it’s really not clear what it means. I’m sure there are a zillion ways I could pull together data showing an education advantage of X over Y, for a zillion Xs and Ys, but one would have to be very careful in the interpretation. I’m willing to bet that most of my colleagues here at UMM would teach better in English than Chinese, and most faculty in China would teach more effectively in Chinese than English, but that hardly means one is a better teaching language than the other. Context is everything, and it’s not clear (at least in the survey study) what the contexts are.

A few possible issues:

• 12 years is an eternity in the history of the web and web-based teaching. Are the studies from 12 years ago even talking about the same things as those now?
• What are we actually comparing? Face-to-face courses have all kinds of variance, and their effectiveness changes with the instructor, the students in a particular running of the course, and external events. Presumably on-line courses will as well. Are we comparing the best to the best? The median to the median? I can easily imagine that an on-line course of a few dozen people can be a vastly better experience than a huge lecture hall of 800 students, even if the latter is still called “face-to-face” instruction. Similarly, one person struggling to manage 150 on-line students is not likely to look good compared to an energetic classroom discussion section of 12 people. The meta-survey doesn’t make it easy to see clearly what the comparisons are in the individual surveys, and I suspect that they probably vary widely, ranging from the pretty reasonable to apples-vs-kumquats.
• How much of this is simply a function of novelty, both in faculty putting a lot of effort into a cool new thing, and students being impressed by the shiny new toy?

Etc., etc., etc.

I think the question isn’t, and can’t ever be, whether on-line is better than the classroom. In the end it’s about finding a way for a particular instructor and a particular student (or group of students) to work well together, and that’s going to depend on an awful lot of things and almost certainly change over time as teachers, students, and the world changes. On-line education and classroom education augmented with on-line components are clearly going to be an important (and probably increasing) part of that, but there will probably always be circumstances where a group of people are better served by some face time than by an on-line experience.

This study also looks at courses as isolated experiences. At a residential university like ours, the courses are crucial, but hardly the whole picture. Students learn a ton from simply living together, eating, doing laundry, volunteering, going to the movies, dating, being in clubs, and generally making all sorts of vital transitions as they move from 18 to 22 (give or take). Look at the important differences between someone’s who’s 16 and someone who’s 26, and an awful lot of that has nothing do to with courses. A good university experience can play a critical role both in and beyond the classroom, and a heck of a lot of that is tied up in physical presence.

Teaching kindergarteners is like herding kittens

Timna Wyckoff (one of our biologists and mother of a kindergartener) arranged to have all the local kindergarten kids comes to the science building for 90 minutes to learn a little bit about science. They were divided up into groups of about twelve, and each group spent about 30 minutes at three of the six stations we’d set up.

I talked with them about their experience using computers at school (mostly “playing games”) and how the computer did things like draw pictures on the screen. (We determined that it wasn’t elves or fairies or tiny mice with little glasses and hats that took coffee breaks when you turned the computer off.) We then talked about how computers are machines, like their fridge or a car, and let them look inside a couple of old boxes destined for the scrap heap. This led to a bit on how computers are general purpose machines instead of single purpose machines (“Can you drive your fridge to the store?”), and how what the do is determined by the program they run. It turns out that computers are in fact machines specifically designed to follow lists of instructions, and programs are lists of instructions created by computer scientists that tell the computer how to do certain things (like draw dinosaurs on the screen). We then headed into a semi-tangential (but concrete for 5 and 6 year olds) discussion of recipes as a instructions, and people as machines for following those instructions. Finally, if and as time allowed (and it varied quite a bit across my three groups), they all got numbers, stood in a line, and pretended they were a computer running through the bubble sort algorithm. (Yeah, bubble sort. Don’t shoot me – it’s easy to run through with little kids.)

I spent a total of 90 minutes doing this three times, plus some setup at the beginning and tear down at the end, and I’m exhausted. If nothing else, this reinforced my belief that a good teacher of young kids is a real treasure. These are bright, enthusiastic kids, but they don’t always focus real well, and my short morning is enough to send me scurrying back to teaching adults. (To be honest, my students don’t always focus well, but they’re much less likely to distract everyone around them in the process.)

This was my first time doing this, and my little script was an amalgam of lots of ideas from KK, Timna, and WeatherGrrrl, and various students and alum responding to my request for ideas on Twitter. Many thanks to all of them for their ideas and feedback!

But I’m here to tell you that the real reason we teach is for the cool drawings!

This gem was just penned by Tyler Hutchison for possible use as an illustration for a UMM piece on the paper Tyler and I wrote with Brian Ohs that won the best paper award at EuroGP 2008 in Naples earlier this year. I’m the distinguishedly disheveled fellow in the middle, Brian is steering the ship up front, and Tyler is the terrified fellow on the back (which is in stark contrast to his cool, composed presence at the conference!).

I’ve been fortunate enough to have students generate quite a few cool drawings of me over the years, ranging from notebook doodles to projects for art classes. I really need to pull all that stuff together sometime and post a little “show”. In the meantime we can all bask in the glory of the three of us riding the wondrous “Geneticorn” off into the sunset!

Thanks to Brian and Tyler for their fine work on this research project, and thanks to Tyler for the super cool drawing!

Without the science base, you cannot build an industrial base.

Second, science requires long term vision and public and private support in in basic research. It typically takes decades for culture changing technologies to move from the basic idea to ubiquity; Rosen gives as examples railroads, airplanes, transistors, computers, the internet, and lasers. The question then is

How do you convince the politics and the public that that lag in fact is real and that if you don’t make the investments … today … we’ll be lagging things that other folks that are making the investments

Rosen is (quite reasonably) focussed specifically on the question of support for science, but points out that this is part of a larger trend of irrationality in the U.S.:

But we all know that in the United States there are long traditions of anti-intellectualism, of what the Times today also refer to as anti-rationalism, the idea that there really are no facts, it’s all opinion, the idea that scientists [are] just playing their sand box and don’t connect with anybody.

What it really comes down to is a distressingly common failure for Americans to see any form of education (science or humanities, K12 or university) as a necessary investment in the strength and future of our society and country. For me this has become a useful litmus test to separate sensible conservatives (who understand the economic necessity of investment in key areas) from the wingnuts that have come to dominate the Republican party (who spout anti-intellectual nonsense while shredding schools and lining the pockets of themselves and their friends).

Eisenhower understood the practical necessity of an interstate road system, and encouraged and supported that investment. All Shrub can seem to invest in is Halliburton and their ilk.

Things to think (and ask) about in this happy election season.

Thus it is with very mixed feelings that I am considering changing my FYS topic for next year when I return from sabbatical. I’ve taught this for a long time and feel like I’m running out of steam on it. I also continue to struggle with lifting the subject from being about “entertainment” to being about human life and culture; I’ve found it difficult to convey my belief in the vitality of the subject. Another issue I’ve struggled with has been critical thinking. FYS replaced a course called Inquiry that had critical thinking as one of its core elements; I always thought that was very valuable, but never really felt like I included that in a consistent way in my roots music course.

So I’m considering changing topics.

In particular I’m thinking of something like “Climate change: Global crisis, or a tempest in a teapot?”. I think this is one of the (if not the) major questions of our age, and that it can be damnedly difficult to make sense of all the contradictory things said on the subject. My vision is for the class to be an exercise in critical thinking, using climate change as the underlying source of questions and material.

In a one semester, two credit course it’s clear that there’s only so much that we’re going to be able to address, so they’re not going to become experts on the subject (just as I would never claim to be one). Hopefully, however, they’d have a better understanding both of this subject, and of how to approach complex subjects like this in the future.

Thoughts?

Thanks in advance.

There’s a YouTube group devoted to this thing, and the number and variety of little clips there also speaks well to the Phun’s flexibility. We even have one person building a binary adder, and another a working pinball machine. Very, very cool.

The sad, sniffle, miserable bit is that Phun doesn’t run on Macs at the moment. It supports for Linux and Windows, though, and there are people working on a Mac port, so my fingers are crossed. It just seems like it would be too damn much fun to play with.

• They have a fancy new redesigned web site.
• You can check out cool photos like the one above in their new gallery.
• They have the schedule on-line so you know who you’re listening to!
• They’re way cooler than the lame radio station that those other people are listening to.
• You know you want to listen to a station where the DJs have that many CDs to play with.
• We’re in Britain, so you’ll almost guaranteed not to hear our voices for several months. (It’s not 100%, though, because the promo spots that we’ve done over the years have a habit of turning up now and then.)
• Cory Funk (a mighty and wondrous KUMM alum) is back on the air and has a killer 1 hour show at 5pm (Central time) on KUST. (Yeah, I realize that I’m plugging another station here, but Cory wouldn’t be that amazing without all his KUMM experience, now would he?)

I enjoy listening at what are very odd hours back in Minnesota and then IM’ing requests. It really messes with their heads to have profs listening at 3am…

It actually took me a second to get it – how annoying that a web comic would actually be subtle enough to challenge a little :-).