Ingrid is featured in theAt Guelph! I repeat, Ingrid is featured in the At Guelph! It is not her whole story, of course, but it does provide key aspects of her story.
I am teaching a field course in Algonquin this summer, and I “stress”, i.e. grade, two components of field work during this course: a group science project, and an individual natural history project. So the distinction (and similarities) between qualitative and quantitative are on the forefront of mind. This if, of course, compounded by Ingrid who will bring the qualitative approach into the hypothetico-deductive, quantitative, bastion that Integrative Biology is, after years of being exposed to Tom Nudds’s beating the bush ;-)
Sometimes I like it when Margaret Wente gets on her soap box. She has a couple of recurring themes, and our university education system is one she uses every couple of months.Here is her latest, and I will have to do some counting on the issues she brings up, and comparing them to my own, personal, experiences:
“ A large number of students learn little or nothing in university. More than a third show no improvement in their skills at all.
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.
Teaching a course is a lot of fun. The difficult part is to convert all these highbrow ideas to a group of 22-year old “kids” at 8:30 am in the morning. I really like the concept of serendipity (or is this just a justification for being glued to Google Reader and my new RSS feeds), but I stumbled across this blog post at the beginning of the semester: Are our kids ready for this?
As an undergraduate, I always dreaded group work. Being an introvert, I always preferred to do things on my own, especially when I didn’t know my group members. The first phase of group work is the worst (in my opinion)–getting to know each other and revealing our egos. Who are these people? Do you like them? Can you work with them? Do you connect, or exist on completely different planes?
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.
When we were preparing the grading rubric to assess critical thinking (which is more complicated than you might think), Marianne Staempfli found this very useful resource: The Critical Thinking Community. While the website itself is quaintly old-fashioned, it has a lot of useful information. For instance, a definition:
Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.
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.