Instructional Designer Sharing

This was great! We all know there are so many different ways of learning, you all provided a variety of useful tools and why you like them! It was great to see the variety of ways that all of you keep current in your fields and manage your time. I saw somethings that look like they will be helpful for me and ways to find other information that will help me work more effectively.

I really like the idea of using the Science Friday Island in Second life as an assignment. However, I can't find a schedule of topics anywhere on their page, Talk of the nation's page or NPR's page. I would want to send them when there would be a topic pertinent to the specific class. I sent an email & will post if I get a response.

Time management is a huge issue in teaching lab classes at the community college level. All my classes are lab classes. I teach 3 classes. Each class I teach is 3 hours of lecture & 3 hours of lab a week. Which means I basically prep two different classes for each subject. I create most of my own labs, sometimes they are based on labs others have done but often I can't find anything that meets learning outcomes I have. Then I have to obtain the material, set it up, conduct the lab and clean it up. I asked for, and received, student teaching assistants but being freshman or sophomore students they sometimes require almost more supervision than the help they provide. Kinda like getting your kids to do something they don't want to do! All of this can take 10-20 hours per week, for 3 hours of lab, which counts for 1 hour of 'teaching time'. Much more work than for 1 hour of lecture time. The inequality of this is a post for another time. It just makes time management all that more important.

Effective learning activities?

I use the same lab for several different courses with slightly different twists to it. It has always been highly effective. Its a lab where students mimic the spread of HIV by indiscriminately sharing 'body fluids' with others of the same and different genders. One unidentified tube has a substance that will react to a testing reagent. As they share fluids with each other this substances spreads across the student population. We then try to trace it back to the original source. It is always fun and successful in teaching the concepts of epidemiology and a lead in for discussions about HIV, and safe sex. It also gets the point across that a virus, like HIV, can spread extremely fast & easily in relatively closed populations. The smaller the population of the class, the faster and more completely it spreads.

A poorly effectively activity I used was to demonstrate the process of gel electrophoresis as a way of understanding one way that molecular information can be obtained. There was no by-in to this and it wasn't meaningful. I tossed the demonstration then had them do the process themselves as part of a lab that also allowed them to isolate their own DNA from their saliva.

Class homepage

I will be using Blackboard for my class homepage.
Click here to access Blackboard

Pro's and Con's of public Assessment in Natural History

I have been playing with the idea of having my natural history students blog their field notes. Although all students will be at the same sites, each student will be bringing their personal knowledge into play and each will experience it differently. As I write the list below, I can see that it will be an awesome tool for learning & assessment.

• Cons of public assessment
• Fear of making a fool of one's self
• Risk of being shut down or rejected
• Using other's blogs as way of comparing oneself to others negatively
  
• Difference between public vs private identity
  
• Pros of public assessment
• Teaching is an awesome way of learning
• Ability to communicate knowledge (to peers)
• Feedback is essential
• Awareness that it is OK if you don't know everything
• "Thats a really great question for a grad student to undertake"
• Encourages creativity
• Using other's blogs as a way of looking at the same experience differently
• Teacher proofs evaluation!
• Could use clickers or other ways that allow evaluate/give feed back to each other
• Could build in collaboration
• Public feedback can increase confidence
  

Enduring question

Enduring understanding: We are more than the sum of our parts. How does your brain work.

Enduring question: Give an example that demonstrates emergent properties of a complex system, such as the brain.

Carol says: If the answer is "it depends", its a good enduring question

Reflection on Case Study#1

Wow, quite an ambitious undertaking. I like the "lets try it & see where it goes" attitude. I've done plenty of that! I like that she didn't put her agenda onto what they wrote and allowed them to receive guidance from others. Her goals fit well with preparing students to be successful after school by involving them in this activity.

I've thought about doing this with one of my classes but know nothing about using wikipedia. It sounds and bit overwhelming. I did a bit on looking around wikipedia and found the process daunting. Maybe I'll try it on blackboards wiki first.

I do have to admit that I've used Wikipedia as a "quick & dirty" first resource then searching from there.

Asperagus, peaches and grapes....oh my!

One thing I'm getting from being in Fairbanks this week is the ability to go to a large grocery store and purchase real fruits & vegetables. It's very exciting. At this point, Valdez has one small grocery store. The town joke is that we get the produce that won't sell in Anchorage. Moving here from the PNW where fresh organic fruit & vegetables can be bought at farmers markets...I refused to buy fresh produce for the first 6 months I was here. It is all old & it costs a fortune. Finally, I relented but the choices are so few, the prices remain exorbitant and the quality is poor.

So here, I will happily munch on fresh produce for the entire week. Yum!

Firefox add ons

Being visually oriented, I really like the color tabs!

I'm using ScribeFire to write this and will having to use it more with other pages to see if I will find it worthwhile. I see that it opens across all tabs that I have open which is kind of cool...cuz I often have 15 or 20 tabs open at once! On the otherhand, if I close it on a single page...such as my webmail...it closes it everywhere, but the content is still there when I reopen it.

I can see that the tray scientific calculator will also be invaluable as I hate the MS calculator & often need to check a calculation while I'm online.

Finally, I'm going to try out stumble upon but am not sure I really have the time to look through random sites.
I still have to explore Zotero,

Chris's Big Picture

• Most intriguing
• Brain changes (physiological or anatomical) as we connect. The biologist in me wants to see a functional MRI that shows where & what is happening!
  
• Emergence of participatory culture
• New multi-culturalism
  
• Most irritating
• The pace was a big irritating but I was able to keep up, take notes & follow what Chris was saying so it must not have been too fast.
  
• Headscratcher
• Amount of information in world is staggering.
  

Teaching is learning

My grandmother used to say: "When I stop learning, I may as well be dead." She continued to learn until she went into a nursing home at 100yrs of age! I hope I can learn so long! To some extent I've been teaching folks for most of my adult life. Many years ago, in nursing school, I learned techniques by the "see one, do one, teach one" method. As a nurse, I did patient & family education but also peer education. When I started teaching labs as a TA 20 years later, I learned so much by teaching it surprised me! It was a surprise to me that I enjoyed being a TA and was very effective at it. Many of my classes are prereqs for health care programs and its helpful that I can apply real life experiences to the concepts and processes.

The two biggest bonuses to teaching, for me, are continuing to learn & seeing their eyes light up when they can use information in a different way than I've presented it.

If information was food....

If information were food, I be morbidly overweight! I devour whatever I can find. I just like learning and am a perpetual asker of "Why and how" questions. These are two of the main questions asked by Ethologists and are firmly based in evolution. I started this quest at an early age...my Mom bought every "Why?" book she could find when I was two. My questions were not about why did she want me to do such & such, but things like "why do birds fly?" and "why is the sky blue?" Fortunately for me, she didn't just answer "because thats the way it is". At age 7, I found a wild pig skeleton and reconstructed it with wire and elmer's glue.

I'm a natural history fanatic. I once drove a semi-truck (18wheeler) across country for a year. I kept my field guides in the rig with me & stop for nature walks in regions unfamiliar to me. Since arriving in Valdez 18 months ago, I have been gorging on Alaska's natural history. Dave, be prepared for lots of questions!!

Refreshing course content

I use a tablePC for my lectures. Most of my lectures are updated each time I teach them. I prepare powerpoint slides for my lectures prior to each lecture. The tablet PC allows me to update course content as I am teaching by writing it into the powerpoint. This way I can incorporate breaking news that is pertinent to the concepts we are discussing. When I find a part of the lecture students aren't "understanding" (there's that word!), I can elaborate & jot down notes to remind myself that I wasn't clear and need to revise. Because I have some short term memory issues, it helps me remember what I said in the 3 hour lecture.

There are many topics that I can adjust based on what's happening in the news. For instance, when the Mars Rovers first got to Mars, my Introductory Biology class followed their search for evidence of life based on the requirements for life on earth. This year, Introductory Biology and Natural History of Alaska has the latest on climate change and known solutions. My chemistry class made hydrogen fuel cell cars, with the hydrogen being produced by solar power breaking down water. The cars ran a distance race...the winner ran for 30 minutes on 15cc of water!

Welcome

Hello all,

I teach biology at a small community college, Prince William Sound CC, which is affiliated with the UAA system, but an independently accredited CC. We have about 100 full time students. There are two branch campuses and a number of outreach sites. We serve a very large geographic area. I use Polycom (ITV) to reach my students at as many as 3 different sites, while teaching out of Valdez. My courses are all Blackboard enhanced. I've used Blackboard at 3 different colleges for the last 5 years and have done 2 online classes using it. The biggest challenge I have currently is how to teach live science labs at the outreach campuses, where there are no facilities and I may only have one student. I'm hoping to learn many new skills in this class.

Julie