On Wednesday we ran our first whanau tutorial with the first-year students – a class for those students who identify as Māori. The driver for this was the observation that a disproportionate number of the Māori students in my first-year class didn't do well in our first test, & as a result I asked Kevin, our Faculty's senior […]
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how do we assess teacher quality?
This is a post originally writing for Talking Teaching. It's a difficult question for universities, but an important one at a time when they are increasingly under scrutiny for the quality of their educational outcomes (read: student completion & retention). It's a difficult question for individuals too! Way back when I was a secondary teacher, […]
Continue readingtips for effective on-line science outreach
As you'll have gathered, I'm finding Facebook – and now Twitter – great sources of information, whether it's for teaching, sharing with my students (& others!), or blogging about. And today, this paper popped up on my Twitter feed: Ten Simple Rules for Effective On-line Outreach. Because it's published on a PLoS journal (in this […]
Continue readingsustainability and on-line learning…
… and serendipity! I've just participated in a great AdobeConnect session, run by the university's Centre for e-Learning, on the interfaces between academic publications and social media. It was fun, educational, & thought-provoking & has provided something of a spur to my own thinking about the value** of social media in this particular sphere. (For […]
Continue readingmusic to learn by
This was first posted over on Talking Teaching. I’m always looking for interesting ideas that might spark student engagement. A couple of days ago this rap video popped up on the ScienceAlert FB page: As you can see, it’s a fun post with a serious message & – I think – an excellent piece of science […]
Continue readingthe 10 commandments of rational debate
Critical thinking is a necessary tool for understanding the world we live in. And I don’t believe we teach it particularly well. I know that students in high school science classes learn how to assess the validity/reliability of a source, for example, and that’s great, but on top of that we need to get students […]
Continue readingwhat would the world be like if we all just… disappeared
I do enjoy asapSCIENCE – their videos are quirky, entertaining, & informative, and can provide some great talking points for science classes. But for this one, add poignant to the adjectives.
Continue readingncea & university entrance – numbers & interpretations
January has again been a very busy month those of us involved in the student enrolment process. This year we noticed that a reasonably large number of students hadn't achieved university entrance, and while there are very definitely options available for that cohort, it was still a concern & we've been waiting to see what […]
Continue readingshould food containing dna be labelled?
Apparently 80% of people in the USA think so, according to a Washington Post article that's been all over Facebook in the last few days. That is, 80% of those polled in the regular Food Demand Survey (by Oklahoma State University's Department of Agricultural Economics) agreed with the proposition that all food containing DNA should be […]
Continue readingcows and physics and urban myths
In which we encounter – cow-tipping! This is apparently the focus of both myth & mirth in the US: the idea that cows, asleep on their feet, are regularly tipped over by tipsy youths. Now, apart from the inconvenient little fact that cows tend to sleep lying down & thus are supremely untippable at that […]
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