Recently, I found myself eavesdropping on two elderly fellows debating an age-old question: does size matter? Yes! declared one. Small ones have never satisfied anyone. It needs to be big!You’ve got it all wrong,countered the other. Proper use of a small one can be just as good as having a big one. And what good is a big one if you don’t use it properly?/o:pIn a nearby lecture theatre the Costa-Rican Mermaid was preaching the power of long distance swimming to promote big ones.
I also had the opportunity to attend a conference this week, the 5th annual meeting of the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution, held at the Universite Laval. It was a well organized conference with a lot of energy and some very interesting talks and posters. Quebec City served as a wonderful setting for the conference and I was impressed by how the conference was truly bilingual. I was also impressed by vieux Quebec and the beauty of the St.
Tom Nudds and I co-taught community ecology for the first time together last semester (and Amanda was one of our wonderful TAs). Despite our differences ;-), we share a very similar teaching philosophy. And as a result of some crazy ideas, we decided to completely remodel community ecology. Tom’s rallying cry:
Out with rote learningTo implement this, we cut out all “normal” aspects of grading in our course, and instead we implemented 3 research projects in a problem-based learning framework.