What do these four, apparently very unconnected items, have in common?
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/02/lake-vostok-drilled/
http://www.thecleanestline.com/2012/02/cerro-torre-deviations-from-reason.htmlStar wars: the clone wars
http://www.vpacademic.uoguelph.ca/fys/seminars/My life used to be easy.
I was a scientist, climber (a long time ago), father, and a teacher. And now suddenly these separate aspects of my life got sucked into a vortex, all thanks to reading some passages of Aldo Leopold’s “The Land Ethic” for the First Year Seminar course Ingrid and I have designed. These items literally came across my desk (RSS reader, watching TV with the kids, teaching a course) in a 2 day period.
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.
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.
While I am aware of my tendency to discount anything older as 10 years as ancient in science terms, I do try to sketch a brief historical of each issue I discuss in (most of) my research articles. However, I am always surprised by the lack of “history” in quality reporting on scientific progress. A recent story in Nature, “Can conservation cut poverty”, investigated the link between preserving biodiversity and positive influences this might have on the local inhabitants.
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.
In March 2009, the Women’s Studies undergraduate program (among others) was cut at Guelph. I wasn’t involved in the issue myself, but knew a few people who rallied against this decision. They cited it as ironic evidence that feminism is far from being a finished movement. At the time, I only saw a superficial link between the Women’s Studies program cut and feminism; I didn’t know what feminism really was.
Intelligent persons have written wonderful books about creating good graphs. Today, I received two graphs in my Google Reader, and they make such powerful/funny statements that I had to show them, especially since they are visually so comparable.
In the funny category:
In the powerful category (click here for the original article with more powerful visuals):
It’s very unlikely that anything in my research career will produce anything that funny, or could influence the voting behaviour of a whole nation, but we can only try.
Here is a great post, over on ProfHacker, about advice to new grad students: An open letter to new graduate students, by Brian Croxall. While I agree with most of these topics with varying degrees, they did not include the most important piece of advise, probably because it is so obvious: ask questions. Our role as advisors is to advise, but we can only do this if we get questions. Come in my office, send me an email, skype, whatever.