Physics Outreach

MicihianaSTEM, originally uploaded by TomLoughran.

Here’s the home page of the MichianaSTEM wikispace. The site was launched to foster continued conversation of the sort begun at the Partnering for Education and Research Forum II. All those who registered for the forum have been (or soon will be) invited to join, and any STEM professional in Michiana can join if membership is requested. Come visit the site, and see what you think.

Add 175 teachers, 25 parents, dozens of University faculty and administrators, a dozen teacher professional development programs and a world class facility, and you’ve got the makings of a good day for STEM education in Michiana. Images below were taken by photographers Jeff Marchant and Joe Ribaudo. You can see the agenda, etc, at MichianaSTEM.wikispaces.com.

Optical Decoder Unit for CMS Hadron Calorimeter, originally uploaded by NDeRC2.

High School students at the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center assembled some 500 of these Optical Decoder Units for Hadron Calorimeter of the CMS detector. High school teachers helped design the units, which are currently installed at ready for LHC startup at CERN. The ODUs are simple adding machines for light; output from each tower–a sequence of absorbing and detecting materials–are added together, transformed from photons to electrons, amplified, and then back to photons to make the trip to trigger computers, where decisions will be made–every 25 nanoseconds–whether to store the signal.

I uploaded this picture using flickr uploadr, and edited it using flickr’s online editing tool, picnik. These are good tools to have in place for blogging: images already stored on your computer are more efficiently uploaded to flickr (in bulk) and then sent directly from flickr to your blog.

Picknic’d Adler Milkly Way, originally uploaded by NDeRC2.

…Couldn’t resist trying Flickr’s’ new Picnik add-in with the full Adler visualization. A very cool toolset: easy to use, reasonably powerful. For those who want to take a run at producing their own astroimages (as I’ve done with cell phone from Adler’s somewhat nicer images:), go to sky.google.com, browse until you find something you like, worm your way through to the Aladin applet, upload multiwavelength .fits images, and use the image processing tools in the applet. See some student-created images of this sort here.

downsized_0107091327.jpg, originally uploaded by NDeRC2.

This visualization of the center of the Milky Way is just a small subsection of the large visualization of our home galaxy at the Adler Planetarium, captured and uploaded via cell phone camera. Visualization is amazing. It’s worth asking: is this a REAL picture of the milky way? Does it really look like that? To whom, and when? Who took this picture, anyway? If you close your eyes quickly, you can still see it: how did that image get in your head? Who put it there?

I was at the Adler for an I2U2 meeting, and couldn’t resist….

downsized_0105091723.jpg, originally uploaded by NDeRC2.

This image of a voltage control box for a QuarkNet cosmic ray detector was taken for inclusion in a student logbook. We had just worked out the details…well, that’s their story to tell. Mine is just that you can take an image using your cell phone, email it to Flickr, and set up a direct feed from Flickr to your blog. (Flickr can store your blog’s username and password, or you can have it prompt you every time.) Flickr provides templates for the blog posts, one of which I’ve chosen, or you can customize your own templates. Pretty cool.

The light is still dim, but it is dawning on me that blogs are about acting in public. In this age of collaboration, acting in public is pretty complex: it is possible to do a great deal, with a great many partners, and thus have a great many stories to tell. Blogging, as far as I can tell, seems to involve a change of mindset, so that others–your readers–become somehow present with you in your experience of daily activity: an element of your awareness is that others will want to experience what you are experiencing, too. So you become an agent of experience for others. You become a storyteller, by habit, and a public storyteller: almost a publicist. This cuts against the grain of a lot of folks, and I’m one of them. But I’m determined to make the transition, if I can: that’s the way the wind is blowing. Or to put the matter in the language of Plato’s Republic, this change is both possible, and good: it is possible, because the lowered cost of collaboration and communication makes it relatively easy to bring others into your world, your experience; it is good, for the same reason that friendship is good. (Let’s leave that as an exercise for later:)

All that is a preamble to an experiment: I need to learn to upload and share images not just generically, but in collaboration bins, so to speak. Tagging photos (or anything else) is one way to put them into bins, and it allows readers to sort them as they like. But if that were enough, we’d need just a single blog, with lots of authors and tagged messages. That would take too much of a reader’s time. So we have other methods: blog titles, for example, help convey information to interested groups. The Notre Dame extended Research Community (NDeRC) is organized by interest groups, which we call collaborations. So I need to figure out how to take and quickly upload images–worth a thousand words apiece–so that they are dropped into collaboration bins. Flickr makes it possible to “bin” your images into sets, and to embed just that set. So here’s an Astrophysics image set. As soon as I figure out how to send images to that set directly, I’ll be able to more efficiently tell astronomy stories to people interested in astronomy: my astronomy collaborators.  A work in progress….

Watching cosmic rays is at least as much fun as watching it rain. [Now that the live feed is down, all that’s left are videos, such as the one below.]

The community of science educators who started NDeRC have been working together at the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center for about 10 years.  During that much time, we’ve picked up a lot of collaborators.  For the past four years, we’ve sent a number of members to the Supercomputing Education Program series.  This year was the first year we’ve included a graduate student–Ryan Connaughton–in that mix. Ryan, Washington High School science department chair Tim Hardt, Pat Mooney and myself made the trip to Austin.  Together we helped put on a number of the presentations to K-12 teachers:  see Tim Hardt’s on using mashups in a classroom, and mine on collaborative tools for k-12 eScience, for examples.  One of the conference highlights for us was the remote participation of Adam Frey, co-founder of Wikispaces:  see the presentation, with screencasting of the event, embedded here.  Although we experienced a significant delay in the Q & A part of the remote session, on the whole we succeeded in designing an environment for a remote and interactive presentation, held live on the web and archived for posterity, using only tools which are free to K-12 educators.  (The tools we used were Wikispaces, uStream, Google docs, Flickr, and a screencast program…well, alright,  I used Camtasia Relay for the screencast, which has a cost associated with it, but that was only because I hadn’t yet come across “screencast-o-matic.com”, which provides a free screencasting service.)

Below is a Flickr slideshow of images I took at the conference, including many images of conference sessions, the exhibit floor, and a walking tour of downtown Austin, all in no particular order.

Hi, all.  Welcome to my NDeRC Blog. I’m Tom Loughran, in case you’re keeping track.  I help to manage NDeRC.  I’m also a classroom teacher, and I help develop online research activities for students who aren’t yet in college.

Blogs are a big deal for NDeRC.  Our interaction with one another–the stuff that communities are made of–won’t be very substantial unless we know what others are doing.  Blogs are one very good way to let others know what you are up to.  Below is a widget I installed, just by cutting and copying code from a Flickr slideshow.  That slideshow contains pictures I take on a cell phone and email to flickr.  They get sent here automatically.  This is an example of a technology that can help the local STEM community keep many of our activities right out in public, so others can see and choose to interact as they like.

NDeRC Flickr Photostream (updated “on the fly”)