Physics Outreach

Moon thru cell, originally uploaded by NDeRC2.

The moon was lovely tonight. Having missed the astronomy party on ND’s north quad–can’t do everything–I pulled out the 8″ dobsonian with my daughter, and we tried our hands at capturing the moon through cell phone cameras. Pretty fun stuff. Jupiter and its moons were visible, but those single point objects are hard to capture cleanly with a hand-held cell phone camera. Here’s our best bad attempt:

The obvious purpose of blogging is to share your experiences with others. You can wait until others wander into your blog, but a more efficient system is to get others to subscribe to your blog. Since turnabout is fair play, you ought to consider subscribing to their blogs, as well. You can subscribe to NDeRC blogs via RSS feed, and if you know what that is you probably don’t need a “how to” on subscribing. But subscribing by email is another good way to gain notification and easy access to other peoples blogs. Below is a screencast reviewing how to bulk subcribe to NDeRC blogs, for those who have NDeRC accounts. If you don’t have such an account, you can subscribe to blogs one-at-a-time by entering your email address in the appropriate box in the right margin.

(By the way: this screencast was made using Jing, but the free level of Jing service provides shockwave videos, which our NDeRC blog doesn’t support for some reason I’ve yet to explore. So I used the pro level of service, which allows mp4 videos to be uploaded to YouTube. The free versions play inside our wikispaces wiki, so anyone in NDeRC can make free screencasts using Jing and embed them in the wiki. I’ll provide some notice if I get to the bottom of our shockwave problem.)

From Boulos and Wheeler:
The emphasis on social learning stands in sharp contrast to the traditional Cartesian view of knowledge and learning—a view that has largely dominated the way education has been structured for over one hundred years. The Cartesian perspective assumes that knowledge is a kind of substance and that pedagogy concerns the best way to transfer this substance from teachers to students. By contrast, instead of starting from the Cartesian premise of “I think, therefore I am,” and from the assumption that knowledge is something that is transferred to the student via various pedagogical strategies, the social view of learning says, “We participate, therefore we are.”

An interesting quote I ran across. In my research class at Saint Joseph’s High School, we’ve migrated to public interaction. One phrase we use is “If it’s not on on the wiki, it didn’t happen.” There’s something intriguing about the idea of learning in public. Who is learning for, anyway?

(Just click on the image to go to the full article.)

This comment, linked to the eSchool News web page featuring a story on a new report from the National Governor’s Association (NGA) on what should be done in US education–this time, adopt national STEM standards based on the best international practice–is a nice indication of the sort of clash of cultures that exists in education circles.

By the way, I extracted the image containing these comments using Jing, chose the “embed” option, and then changed the hyperlink from the flickr image to the original eSchool News source. Here’s the code: <a href="http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/index.cfm?i=57443/" title="Photo Sharing"><img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3545/3328690728_a4c1735df9.jpg" width="500" height="305" alt="2009-03-04_1024"/></a>

I’m heading to this conference on the gap in quality of global education this October. Should be a great opportunity to learn what others are doing and how we can learn from one another internationally. STEM community is international, global, and STEM culture should reflect that reality. But as we learn from our friends in place-based education, STEM community is also local; relationships begin at home. There’s an interesting tension here we’ve got to learn to manage well. Worth thinking about.

Always on the hunt for new ways to communicate, I’m a sucker for a new widget. This one enables you to add your voice (and, the makers claim, easy updates to it, though I’ve yet to test this) to your web site. It bears watching (and listening:)

Reading NDeRC Fellow Kate Rueff’s latest blog, I was reminded of how big a role the study of rocks and minerals played in the development of my own love of science. From the kits I worked with as a grade school student to my freshman year Earth Science class, the beauty of rocks and minerals captured my interest. My first substantial computer program (a project in my second-semester introduction to the Basic programming language) was an interactive classification key for all rocks and minerals found in the state of Connecticut. (In the mid-1970’s we used yellow ticker-tape to store the program, since the hard disk had not yet been invented; the user interface was just a series of yes or no answers to short questions typed on a computer terminal.) Those were good days.

If astrogeology were as developed in my high school days as it is now, I might well have chosen to major in that area (rather than chemistry, which was my undergraduate major.) Check out this interactive introduction to solar system geology (courtesy of USGS) by clicking on the image below. Way cool.

This is a test on audio blog from my cellphone using dial2do.

Powered by . Mp3

This test worked: both the audio file, and the transcription (the first line, above) were posted correctly, just by touching a speed dial number and giving a single audio command to dial2do. Next in line is to figure out a way to do pictures from phone with text via audio. Stay tuned, as we continue to explore tools we might use for building STEM community.

FWD:, originally uploaded by NDeRC2.

This is to test blogging directly from cell phone to this blog by email through Flicker 🙂

The test worked. What is new here is that no intervening steps are required (once the system is set up) to blog here directly from a cell phone, including pictures and text. This is a good step toward real-time sharing of experiences, which could strengthen the connections among members of the STEM community (if we all subscribed and managed notifications. More on this soon.)

The calligraphy is courtesy of Justin Loughran, who placed this work of art on my office white board more than a year ago. It’s too good to erase.

Casual observations + cell phone (camera +picture messaging) + photo editing software (picnik from flickr) + blog = an extraordinary age of exploration and sharing. This guy lives (at least for now) on my front porch, but now also in your imagination. The first three images are highly processed (but easily, in minutes) using the picnik web application.