Today I spent an interesting & educational few hours at the University’s "Celebrating teaching excellence" day. This is when thestaff who’ve received Faculty, University, or national awards for their teaching share their ideas & techniques with their colleagues, and this is just wonderful as you’re guaranteed to learn something new 🙂
Continue readingYear: 2011
eye-catching blog post titles – I mean, ‘icky toilets’?
Via ResearchBlogging I found a post with the eye-catching title of Circumcision, preventing fraud, and icky toilets. What an odd juxtaposition, I thought. Darn good post, though!
Continue readingprior learning & university success in biology
One of the sessions at FYBEC – on the changes in NCEA Achievement Standards in order to align them with the 2007 Curriculum document – generated a lot of discussion. It was great to have this session, as a heads-up to the changes in prior learning that we’ll see in students coming in to uni-level […]
Continue readingchallenges in learning biology
I spent Monday & Tuesday of this week down in Wellington, attending the 2nd First-Year Biology Educators’ Colloquium. (Yes, that’s a mouthful! We usually just say FYBEC to those in the know.) It was really refreshing to spend time focusing on how we teach first-year biology at university, and on research into ways to enhance […]
Continue readingrhys morgan – another one to follow
Via Orac I found this excellent article by Rhys Morgan, a sceptical blogger who has recently been the focus of some attempts at bullying by someone claiming to be a legal representative of the Burzynski Clinic. Rhys has written an article for the UK newspaper The Guardian that highlights a number of issues related to […]
Continue readinga follow-up (from a new blog)
Over on ‘of trees and birds and other things’ Jarrod points out why it’s not a terribly good idea to base your view of a scientific issue on a single story in the popular press… (& hat-tip to David Winter on the atavism, who alerted me to this new evolutionary blog!) For the teachers & students […]
Continue readingwhat about archaeopteryx?
As a distraction (or should that be ‘procrastination’?) from what’s currently filling up my diary (ie processing student enrolments), I’ve decided to look at another of those ‘science’ statements from the school documents I linked to in my last post. "What about the archeopteryx?" they ask. Well, what about it? This, from their webpage: The […]
Continue readingwriting about environmental history
Over lunch today I had a really interesting conversation about environmental history and why it’s a Good Thing to know about. Much of the discussion was around the environmental history of Palmerston North, where I lived for about 22 years, first as a student at Massey University & subsequently as a teacher (first in various […]
Continue readingpicking & choosing what to believe in…
In my last post on a ‘creationist biology curriculum’ I asked the question: what, exactly, do they teach? Over on the Sciblogs site (where this blog is syndicated), a commenter answered by pointing me at another school’s curriculum. As I read through it, I could feel the area beneath my collar getting distinctly heated. This […]
Continue readingwhat, exactly, do they teach?
I was spurred to write this by a comment Grant made on my previous post on the various NZ political parties’ stances on science education. In that post I linked to the website of a ‘special character’ school: one with a religious underpinning & which states that they replace ‘evolution’ with ‘creation’ in the school’s science […]
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