Some time ago, I received this email from a grad student:“Do you know the blog zombies ideas in ecology?? I think this is the kind of ideas that could interest you. After reading all these chase papers I just find myself completely lost in the meaning and use of words such as stochastic, random and neutral…. This text kind of help me (it’s a critic of the use of these terms in community ecology) http://oikosjournal.
Never too old to learn: I was only aware of the “site:” and “”“” trick.
Created by: HackCollege
One of the items in the grading rubric Marianne Staempfli and I developed for concept maps is the importance of cross links in the arrangement of the concept map:
“Cross links show complex relationships between two or more distinct segments of the concept map”It is one of the reasons why I am currently involved in a collaboration (among some others) on genome (or transposon) ecology by co-advising Brent Saylor with Ryan Gregory, and on anthropology in ecology by co-advising Ingrid Ng with Bob Jickling.
One of the best spent $200.00 are not for a fraction of my laptop or desktop, or for my favourite books on R code, or for part of the cost to an exiting conference, but for my giant whiteboard in my office. I use it daily for doodling:
“To make spontaneous marks to help yourself think”
Another great TED talk, this time by Sunni Brown.
For me, one of the biggest mysteries of the scientific method (see e.g. this post), is that it provides such a rigid structure, yet at the same time so creative. It turns out that constraints actually lead to more global, conceptual, and maybe thus more creative thinking.Jonah Lehrer in Wired provides some excellent context for a recent study that investigated this link explicitly. Highly recommended.
At the same time, this could also explain one of my other pet peeves: why concept mapping is such a powerful method.
According to Christopher Booker, there are seven basic plots. I had always the intuition that the scientific method was an example of “the quest”: the scientist (i.e., hero) goes looking for something, often with collaborators. But I never thought that the link between story telling and the scientific method would be so obvious. I recently read an article in Wired about Dan Harmon, the creator of and screen writer for Community.
Creating a concept map as a teaching/learning tool is all about what Chris Orwig refers to when he describes the poetics of pictures: it is not only about reducing and simplifying, but also (especially) about deepening (or synthesis in teaching terms). It is this last part that makes it very difficult, and rewarding. And to make this deepening work, it is all about dialogue and collaboration, which is why I believe that class room interactions are crucial in this day and age of moving more and more to digital interactions.
Infographic by College Scholarships.org
This is an article in the Globe and Mail that struck a cord with me, "Ten years that shook, rattled, rolled and helped repair the world" by Doug Saunders. If you do not have the time to read the full article, you can click on this shortened version with most of the salient points summarized in a concept map structure (make sure to click on it to see the bigger version so that you can actually read the text ;-):This article provides a very nice example of the 10th Cottenie Commandment: Thou Shalt Listen to thy Intuition, but Follow the Data.
Learning (be it as a scientist, a teacher, a student, or any combination of the above, this will be the topic of another blog) is a difficult process, as any scientist, teacher, or student will tell you. However, sometimes you get struck by lightening, by an experience that makes you wonder, “How did I ever function without this?”. 3 years ago, I was introduced to concept mapping by Steve Crawford, but I am not exactly sure how we got on this subject.