Citizen science online is catching on these days. Not just for your screensaver anymore, these projects let you get your hands dirty, metaphorically speaking. You can classify galaxies or fold proteins.
I am really happy to share this project which is now in beta and building a community for astronomical research: CosmoQuest.
Categories: astronomy · education · outreach · science
Tagged: citizen science, cosmoquest
Hey! Just a quick note to plug a really cool organization called Astronomers Without Borders. They asked me to write a guest blog for them for Global Astronomy Month, and you can see that here.
I’ll be crossing some borders of my own as I head off to South Africa in late June! Dates are almost set, and it looks like I’ll be arriving in Cape Town around June 19th or 20th, then heading out to the Radio Astronomy Reserve in the Karoo for fieldwork with my colleagues on the Precision Array for Probing the Epoch of Reionization. After 2 or 3 weeks in the desert, I’ll be back with pictures and stories galore!
Travel tips welcome! If you are in and around Cape Town, say hello in the comments 
Categories: astronomy · education
Tagged: blog, karoo, paper, travel
I’ve had “The Art of Being a Scientist: A Guide for Graduate Students and their Mentors” sitting on my desk for some time now. It looks to be a fascinating and useful read, however, I was deathly afraid that I was “too late” to open the book and get anything from it. I mean, I’m no spring chicken in this department. I’m a 6th year grad student. What if it tells me that I’ve just been doing it wrong all along? That’s certainly not going to help my anxiety any…
Well, I opened up the book in a fit of courage and/or insanity, and I’m actually pretty pleased with it so far. I can easily skip over the chapters like “choosing a thesis project” and still learn quite a lot from the rest. In fact, I think scientists in any stage of their career can benefit.
After the introduction, Sneider and Larner get right into the heart of the matter. What IS science? You think you know when you get out of undergrad and have had a little bit of research experience. For most of us, I don’t think the full realization of what DOING science is like, day in and day out, is like until you tackle a PhD thesis. The chapter starts with some pretty obvious things, such as that science needs logic and repeatability and relies on observations of the natural world. Scientific theories have to be falsifiable and stand up to test after test. Science has predictive power that surpasses any so-called soothsayer in history.
A hypothesis emerging... Darwin's "tree of life"
However, the book is quick to point out that there is no “one right way” in which to do science. The authors compare deduction, which starts with a hypothesis that is tested by observations, and induction, where an observation leads to a hypothesis. The former is more logical and is reminiscent of the “scientific method” charts you see floating around. The latter come from a scientist looking at something and going, “Huh. That’s weird. That looks like a pattern or a correlation.” Further study then tests the new hypothesis. A great example would be the theory of evolution by natural selection, which grew in large part from Charles Darwin’s observations of the natural world and actually contradicted the working hypothesis with which he started.
Science also contains aspect of both reductionism and holism. Though critics of science often say that we scientists just break things down too far, a full understanding of the natural world requires understanding of both the parts and the whole. Quantum mechanics may describe almost everything in the particle world, and particles do make up everything, but that alone won’t get you very far in understanding how a particular disease can be treated.
The experimentalist and the theorist
Science, believe it or not, involves a certain amount of creativity. I didn’t quite believe it when my first research advisors warned me that the particular task I was undertaking had a certain “art” to it. However, there is a human element to interpretation and analysis that no computer can yet do for us. The mind of a scientist has to wander and create and explore and make leaps that seem to defy logic. Only then can the work be done and put through the rigorous tests that the scientific process brings. This is part of what makes science hard and also beautiful. I unabashedly think it is one of the most spectacular human endeavors. As Carl Sagan said, “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
For now, I highly recommend this book to young scientists at any stage, and I’ll keep updating with interesting tidbits as I work through it. I do wish I had this book when I was a first year grad student, but I got here eventually!
Categories: education · science
Tagged: book, grad school, personal, postaday2011
In honor of the UVa Astronomy grad students who took (and, I have no doubt, passed) their qualifying exams this weekend, a link forwarded around by one of our professors about how taking a test can actually enhance learning. Believe it or not, it’s not just a hoop to jump through! A flaming hoop. With tigers…
Rachael even graphed astronomy knowledge vs. time this morning!
Categories: education
Tagged: grad school, postaday2011
So, I’ve begun to make some forays into Astronomy Education Review, a journal about science education specifically as it relates to, of course, astronomy. It has been recommended to me by several people, and I’ve browsed it a bit as I begin to understand the wide-world of assessment.
As a kid, I thought tests were just something you had to get right to move on to the next level. It was a whole lot of rote memory, and much of high school was devoted to teaching to state tests. It is a system that many complain about but few know how to change. After all, as teacher, we really want to know the answer to the immortal question, “Is our children learning?” (Yes, yes, cheap shot.)
So, how do we make learning fun, student-centered, and still get an accurate assessment of learning?
Categories: astronomy · education · outreach
Tagged: assessment, dsbk, postaday2011
So before 2010 actually ends, I promised a recap of the Carl Sagan Day in Florida that I attended in November. Sad that you missed it? Well, all of the talks are still archived on video! Since I actually missed many of the talks due to my other duties, I’m glad for that.
If you didn’t already know, Carl Sagan was a huge influence on my life, through the movie “Contact” which I saw in theatres just as I was rekindling an interest in astronomy, pointing me towards where I am today, and Demon-Haunted World, a book that really got me thinking about skepticism, or how to apply science to everyday life. So you can imagine my ridiculous thrill when I was asked to participate!
Overall, it was a very fun and busy event at which I met a lot of fabulous people that I unfortunately haven’t had the time to keep up with since then. (Hello!) I was a bit sad, however, by the realization that I never did get to meet Sagan himself and thank him for the tremendous impact he had on my life. However, I got to live a little bit through James Randi’s talk, the last one of the evening, about his friendship with Carl Sagan. I nearly fell out of my seat with laughter when he recalled a time when Carl was tired of filming in that “cardboard spaceship” all the time.
It was really good to laugh and smile and celebrate the legacy that Sagan left behind. In the morning, I ran my first ever, brand-spanking-new teacher workshop, in the spirit of science education which Sagan upheld. Of course, I had to follow the excellent acts of Jeff Bennett, who has written some of my favorite astronomy textbooks and children’s books, and Jeff Wagg, who did freaking cards tricks! I think my ultraviolet-sensitive beads made for a good time as well, as I showed how they can demonstrate a blinded experiment in a fun (and sometimes messy) way.
The main event featured a series of speakers and was also live-streamed to all the fine folks on the interwebz. I had the honor of giving the first talk (ack!) which was a wandering history of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, a project in which Sagan was deeply involved. Talk about nervous! Not only was it a pretty full lecture hall AND chat room, but James Randi was in the front row with the lovely Chip and Grace Denman who I had met through SkepticampDC. Eep! Afterwards, I lugged my suitcase full of astronomy demo goodies outside to do astronomy activities with the kids in attendance! We made comets, played with soda and Mentos, had a scale model solar system, and had facepainting. (I had no hand in that last one, it was all the skillful work of Gabrielle Stern! Unfortunately, I never got one myself, with all the running around and getting soda in my hair.)
Meanwhile, the main speakers were touching on more aspects of Sagan’s legacy, from skepticism to space flight, and again to alien life. In addition to the aforementioned Jeffs, Russell Romanella and the hilarious and insightful Hal Bidlack took the main stage. As it got dark, I was able to attend the last two talks, the first by my fellow “damn kid” (according to Bidlack), John Boswell, who composes the excellent Symphony of Science. We were even treated to a preview of “A Wave of Reason”, which has since been released. I am a huge fan of this project because it melds art and science, and it pulls forth such emotion, at least from me, and from many others as well. Who said skeptics and scientists are only about cold logic?! If this project isn’t in the spirit of Sagan’s work to share the wonders of the universe, I don’t know what is.
The final talk by Randi was a real treat. I can’t do it justice, other than fond remembrance of the poor, cardboard spaceship, so do watch that one if you get a chance. And THEN I got to finally meet The Amazing Randi himself, which made me all giddy-fan-girl. Just a little. For all his ferocity with fighting charlatans, he is a sweet man, and I hope to see him at TAM9! Sadly, I did not get a chance to get over to the JREF, as my time there was short. However, that night I learned that nerds + dry ice + beer = hilarity.
There are more pictures of me and (mostly) Buzznaut, one of our Dark Skies, Bright Kids mascots, on Flickr. The best part was when I showed this picture to the kids upon my return, and asked who they thought this man looked like. Expecting to hear “Santa Claus,” I was delighted when one fourth grader shouted, “He looks like Galileo!” Ladies and gentlemen of DSBK, I think we are doing a good job.
Please, someone with photoshopping skills, I want to see Jame’s Randi’s face on an illustration of Galileo with his telescope. Please, please, please!
With that, I encourage you to check the work of Carl Sagan and some of the many projects inspired by skepticism, science, and the sheer amazement at how cool our universe really is.
But wait, there’s more! Be sure to read Jeff Wagg’s comments on the day, and check out the special edition ceramic necklaces made by Surly Amy.
Categories: education · science · skeptic
Tagged: events, Galileo, picture, Randi, Sagan, SETI, teaching, travel, videos
If you know me in person, you’ve probably heard me talk on and on about Dark Skies, Bright Kids, aka DSBK. This is an astronomy club for elementary school kids in Albemarle County, run by volunteers from the Astronomy Department at the University of Virginia. We visit a different school every semester, meeting with the same group of 3rd through 5th graders every week, showing them in a hands-on way just how fun science can be! We teach about rockets, …
… comets,…
… light,…
… the wonders of the night sky,…
… and so much more. We’ve been able to reach out to a fantastic group of kids and show them the wonders of science through astronomy. They live in a beautiful rural county with gorgeous dark skies, but don’t always have the resources with which to explore them.
Though our volunteer effort is only large enough to handle one group per semester now, we’re looking to extend our reach by publishing a children’s book about astronomy and distributing it to every 3rd grade public school classroom in Virginia. This takes money, and we’ve applied for a Pepsi Refresh Grant to make this happen. All YOU need to do is sign up at the site and vote for our project. You can vote for us once a day, every day, in the month of September!
Book excerpt. Click to embiggen!
I’ve been voting for a bit now for other projects, and haven’t noticed any new spam and no emails from this particular website. If you are really worried, use an email address that you don’t use for your real work or contacts. (But only vote ONCE! Please, don’t vote from multiple email addresses.) DO, however, vote everyday and pass this along to your friends, family, organization, or Facebook and Twitter contacts if you would like to help.
If you have an audience of your own (a blog, a radio show, a podcast, a website, etc.) we would be SUPER appreciative if you passed this on through those means as well! (BIG THANKS to those who have already done or agreed to do so!) Every vote, every day is going to count to get us closer to our goal, and help science education across Virginia.
Want to know more? Please check out our website where we have our mission statement, pictures, links, and free lesson plans of some of our activities that can be adapted for the classroom or home! Feel free to contact us using the email on the website, or me personally, if you have any questions or want to help. And if you are in Charlottesville or Albemarle and really love astronomy outreach, we could use boots-on-the-ground volunteers as well!
Thanks, and clear skies!
Thanks for the internet love from:
(More on the way. Please let me know if I’ve missed you!)
Categories: astronomy · education · outreach · science
Tagged: book, Charlottesville, dsbk, teaching
Hello!
Oh, wow. Hi. Back. Or something…
Um, yeah! So my month of teaching MADNESS is done. And weddings and seeing family and Tim’s family and all that good stuff is behind me. And I’m trying to get my head all back into research and such, and lots going on, plus my inbox is still full of unanswered messages and raging to-do’s… but I promised I’d say a few words about teaching. So here I go!
If you hadn’t heard before, I taught a summer course at the University of Virginia called “Life Beyond Earth.” This course was created by Prof. Bob Rood, and is usually taught by him. He is an astronomer who has done stellar evolution, radio astronomy, SETI searches AND is a cool guy who takes fantastic pictures and cooked fabulous meals for our outreach group. During the summers, however, our department opens up the courses for graduate students to teach, and I was delighted to get this position. Also, a bit terrified. I had tutored students in both of our 1000-level courses for a few semesters already, plus I had lots of great material from an interactive learning workshop put on by the Center for Astronomy Education at the last January American Astronomical Society meeting. LBE, however, was a 3000-level course (don’t ask why we went to a four-digit system, I don’t know) so I had no material prepared, though plenty of ideas of what I wanted to cover.
Lucky for me, I have a good support system here. I borrowed lecture notes from Rood and several other people, so I had a bank of lecture material to choose from. However, when opening up a presentation, I like to have an idea of the story, and use as few words as possible on the slides themselves. So all these pictures tell a story, but I don’t know someone else’s story all that well. I had to build my own. So I set about putting together my lectures on my own, but using the resources I had. In addition to lectures, I was using a textbook that I really liked, “Life in the Universe” by Jeffrey Bennett and Seth Shostak. I really like Jeffrey Bennett’s textbook style and ideas about science education, so I figured I’d be in good hands there. The book made sure to emphasize HOW we know what we know, and that’s crucial to understanding science. In addition, since I couldn’t use a lot of the ready made Astro-101 interactive learning tools out there, I tried to incorporate some of the review and rather insightful discussion questions from the book in lecture. To the extent which I did that is, well, probably not up to my own standard. But it all just happened so fast!
So, for a summer course, you have to squeeze a semester’s worth of material into a month. That means 2 hour and 15 minute lectures every weekday. Oy. I started preparing lectures a week before, even though it was unsure whether my class would run due to low enrollment. Naturally, I got caught up in producing top quality presentations with all creative commons or public domain and properly attributed and with notes and all… well, that takes too long. And my advisor even warned me about that, knowing me as he does! And yet, it was so hard to resist. Needless to say, I got sloppy with aspects of that in order to be able to crank them out with the proper speed, therefore, they are not published until I polish them up. Hopefully. Someday.
I decided to cover the scientific basics of Life in the Universe first, though in the future, I might not do it that way. It meant getting into the “sexy” topics a bit later, and maybe it would have helped to spread it around. In any case, we talked about the universe (in one lecture), star and planet formation and how those affect the chances for life elsewhere, and then biology on Earth. On that last bit, I was saved by the fact that none of my students (who were all interesting and bright and fun and excellent, by the way) were biologists. However, biology was always my second favorite science, and I could talk about the interesting intricacies of evolution all day, and I pretty much did.
Eventually we stepped off the sturdy platform of more basic science topics and into the nature of intelligence, sociology, the work of SETI, the Fermi Paradox, etc. Things that without a solid background I was less comfortable with. But, they were fun to talk about. I got a bit over excited for the UFO lecture, and I stayed up way too late preparing that. Since the book didn’t go into much detail on that, I assigned an excellent two-part article on UFOs in Junior Skeptic, and they seemed to enjoy it. We ended with a few lectures on human life beyond Earth, starting with manned spaceflight history, analyzing the present situation, and getting really fanciful with future spaceship design.
Despite the fact that I worked longer hours and slept less consistently than I had in a long while, I really had fun. I also see a lot of room for improvement. For one, well, being prepared with material the next time around will certainly be a help. I feel as though I built a skeleton of a class upon which I can build upon. For example, I can do better with the interactivity aspect. I actually had a teaching evaluation done by a member of the Teaching Resource Center (TRC), and that was incredibly helpful. We discussed some strategies for drawing out student questions, something that I was unprepared to do and didn’t do so well at. We did get some interesting discussions going, but I would have liked to have done more of them. I also tended to move between topics without a transition or a “take-home” point, and that probably would have been much more helpful for the students. The discussions also generated some wonderful ideas, but I was afraid that they never went anywhere. The evaluator suggested having them do a discussion journal, or following up with some other writing activity to cement the conclusions of each discussion. I could have also worked on having more demos (I had almost none, though plenty of Sagan video) and quantitative reasoning problems.
To be honest, I haven’t looked at the student evaluations yet. I know they are available, or at least I think they are. I’m afraid. Gah! What if they hated it??? I’m sure I’ll work up the courage soon. With my excellent timing, after taking the teaching position I found out that the TRC has a two-year program called “Tomorrow’s Professors Today.” Well, I applied and was accepted, so I’ll have plenty of opportunities to develop my ideas and skills over the next two years. I’ve also gotten some fantastic advice from the lovely Barbara Drescher on how to teach science as a process, not just a series of facts. I feel like I’m just at the beginning of a very long process!
Well, that was one of the more rambly posts I’ve written in a while… or ever. I guess I had a lot to get out that had been on my mind about the class and the whole process of teaching. I’m not going to bother polishing it up, so forgive me. There will be more to come as I continue this journey…
Categories: astronomy · education · general · science
Tagged: academia, teaching
This past weekend, I batted my eyelashes at Tim to go to the Hayden Planetarium with me once I discovered it was a few blocks away from a wedding we were attending. We took all of Saturday afternoon to catch the latest planetarium show and browse the rest of the American Museum of Natural History. He had never been there, and I gravitated towards my favorite parts of the museum. We wandered around the Rose Center (mostly the Space part) and I rambled on and on about subsections of the exhibits, pointing out where our friends’ research projects lie, and that nice blank part of the universe’s timeline where the epoch of reionization and dark ages research will help fill in. Then, we went straight for the dinosaurs on the fourth floor, because, who doesn’t love dinos?! We wandered around the fossils, dodging kiddies and their overzealous picture-taking parents. There’s only so much of the mass of information that one can hope to absorb in any one visit, and I’m just trying to keep my sauropods and theropods and ornithischians straight. However, I did notice a subtle theme in many of the exhibit commentary. Here’s an example (check out the yellow box in particular):
Maybe I’m just paranoid (especially since Tim didn’t pick up on this until I pointed it out) but there were a number of displays asserting that the science doesn’t tell us the truth, or we’ll never know the answers, because the fossil evidence in incomplete or because the animals are not here to study directly. Although it’s a fair point to say that science doesn’t prove any theory beyond a shadow of a doubt, and that extracting answers from the tiny bits of fossils we do find is excruciating, tedious, and not exact, it was an odd point to be hammering home in a science display. After all, I personally marvel at what knowledge we can glean from incomplete evidence and at the self-correcting nature of science. That’s the kind of message I would send, especially in this era of mistrust and misunderstanding of science by so many people.
So, after we got our fill of dino fossils and expensive but admittedly delicious museum food, we headed to one of my other favorite areas, the Hall of Human Origins. I love to wonder what life was like for early hominids, including for those of our own species who were physically identical, but living in a totally different world 150,000 years ago. I marvel at the tenacity of Homo erectus who populated the Earth for 1.5 million years, whereas we’ve been here for a fraction of that. Anyway, as I was browsing, I noticed that the displays read differently than in the fossil halls:
It asks a question, states that we don’t yet know, but that it is an area of active research. It puts forth a guess based on the best of our knowledge and leaves the reader wondering what we’ll find out next. This, I think, is far more exciting and educational and doesn’t do the whole process of science a disservice.
This was the first time that I looked beyond the information in an exhibit to the style of the presentation. It is important to know who your audience is and what message you want to send whenever doing science outreach or teaching. Students and museum patrons are probably not going to retain much specific information. Good teachers are aware of this and try to get across a general message about science and have to be cognizant of what that message is. It’s not easy to do this, but having a goal is a good start. You can tell that the designers of the different exhibits have different goals, or at least different opinions on what it is about science they want to convey. For what it’s worth, I think the latter example is going to be much more helpful in conveying the true nature of science to those who don’t live it everyday. And after all, isn’t that important? Isn’t that kind of transparency and understanding just what science needs?
… with a not-so-little Saturn V. Starring Pluto Little Dippy, last semester’s mascot for Dark Skies, Bright Kids.
We’re doing a kickoff party today for a new school, yay! If you don’t hear from me in a few days, it’s probably because I’ve been trampled by 80 over-enthusiastic kidlets. Wheeeee!
Categories: education · outreach
Tagged: ksc, moon, nasa, space, technology, videos
I’m a 7th (and final!) year graduate student in astronomy. My thesis has focused on radio astronomy instrumentation. That means, I get to build cool telescopes that will open up new frontiers in the universe. I also love to teach, both in a classroom setting and informally. I'm happy to talk about the universe with anyone who will listen, and I am skeptically curious about all things.