AW #21 Is Up

At Magma Cum Laude: earth science outreach. Nice work, Jess!

Deadline Approaching for AW #21: Geologic Outreach

Tuff Cookie has extended the deadline for AW #21 until this Friday, October 30.  The topic is geologic outreach; the original announcement and description is here.  Leave a comment at either post with a link to your submission, or alternatively, she has an email address in both posts that you can use to send her the link.

And, as always, we’re looking for new hosts and topics.  Leave a comment here if you’d like to host.

Call for the Next AW

Tuff Cookie has posted the call for submissions for the next Wedge:

What kind of Earth Science outreach have you participated in? Have you hosted a geology day at your department, given a field trip, gone to your child’s/niece’s/nephew’s/cousin’s school to do a demonstration, or sponsored an event for Earth Science Week?

Deadline is Sunday October 25.

AW #20 is Up

Dave Bressan at Cryology and Co. has posted the next Wedge, unanswered questions in geology.   Tuff Cookie is hosting next month’s AW, geological outreach, but we’re still in the market for later hosts…

AW #19: Out of the Box Teaching Ideas

Posted August 29, 2009, by Jazinator (visit the original post to view or leave comments)

The Accretionary Wedge #19 – Out of the Box Teaching Ideas

Teaching is a tricky thing. You want the students to learn, but you want them to learn in such a way that they can remember the information and reiterate it if necessary. The problem with many classes now-a-days is that teaching to most teachers involves standing in front of a lecture hall, reading off notes, based on a textbook, that the students have neither any desire to read and if they do happen to read, obtain little useful knowledge out of it. Granted this may be a bleak view of education but this is sometimes how it seems.

So this months Accretionary Wedge is based on this:

“What out of the box ideas do you use to teach people about geology or geological concepts?” No need to limit yourself on ideas you have actively used. If you have used it and you think it is good, great. Is it an idea you have worked up on and gotten ready but haven’t had the chance to use it yet, also great (this is pretty much my scenario). What if it is just a theory that you think would be something different and cool, even better. Anything works, as long as it is “Outside the Box” (i.e. not your typical lecture and textbook approach).

And boy did we get a wide variety of ideas. Actually the ideas were spread out enough that made me think that different people use the different senses to try and teach. Anything from touch to taste was sampled and tried, and here are the results of our experiments (some experiments fall into multiple categories so I am only going to list it under the one that seems the most appropriate or fun).

Look

Out of the five senses this is the easiest for people to take advantage of in teaching. We live in a visual world and geology is in part a visual science. With that in mind, several of my own teaching ideas have taken advantage of this including using geological movies as a teaching tool, (You can check out Part 1 of Dante’s Peak) or using classic works of literature to introduce different geological concepts (like creating topo maps in Thoreau’s Walden).

Kim over at All My Faults are Stress Related has gone in a different direction. Instead of blocking her student’s use of the internet, she encourages it. She uses the internet and Google Earth to teach about volcanoes across the globe. She directs the students to pick one of several volcanoes and using Google Earth, they have to determine if there are recent eruptions and evidence of lava, ash fall, or mudflows. After that they can use the Global Volcanism Program to get other information available on the volcanoes including recent eruptions and the type of lava erupted.

Listen

Using hearing as a teaching tool is not a novel idea. Typically this is the principle learning technique used in lectures but there are novel ways that this can be used. Dr. Tony Ekdale had come up with a unique way to use sonification in paleontology. “In paleontology, it is possible to render various aspects of fossil shapes, such as cephalopod suture patterns or brachiopod commissure lines, as a series of musical tones that can be recognized easily by the human ear… Evocative sounds can generate vivid images in our mind’s eye. For several centuries, natural sounds have been incorporated into art.” He used the natural variances in suture patterns and other paleontological patterns to create differing audible patterns. Definitely a unique take on paleontology.

Touch

Out of most of the sciences out there, geology is one of the few where touch is the principle method of learning. You need to touch and look at the rocks, minerals, maps and so on to really get a grasp at what you are dealing with. With that in mind Lockwood over at Outside the Interzone has come up with several different methods where students can use their hands to create different Earth systems. Some of his highlighted activities includes creating a 13 meter (that’s right, 13 meter!) 1:1,000,000 scale cross section of the earth to demonstrate convection. Another is using iron filings and a magnet to show “how magnetic inclination can be used to determine paleolatitude.” He also links to the massive manual From Mountains to Monsoons that he helped work on with step by step instructions on how to complete these and several other activities.

Taste

Food seems to be a big motivation factor in alternative teaching. Christie over at Christie at the cape currently uses cake (that’s right, mmmmm cake) to teach about deformation. “As it turns out, cake deforms elastically at low stress and non-recoverably (let’s call it viscous) at higher stress. The students cut as many sample cores from the cake as they can. This leads to a bit of waste, invariably eaten, thereby increasing the general level of (blood sugar) excitement in the room. Load is applied by placing other food items (of labeled mass, e.g. small cans and jars) on top of the cake cores. The students measure the surface area of contact and calculate applied stress.”

A bit fattening maybe, but an awesome use of baked goods. Another healthier example is brought to us by Ian over at Hypo-theses who wants to use “a banana as an analogue for rock deformation in general, and fault propagation folding in particular. Grasp an end in each hand leaving at least the central third free. Slowly move your hands towards each other. Initially the banana will deform ductilely, and actually thicken. After the initial thickening, the banana will start to fold.” He accompanies these instructions with step by step pictures of a slowly deforming banana as well as a real life comparison to his mutated fruit. And when your done, you can counter act that sheet of cake you ate previously.

Smell

Smell is one weird teaching technique that is a bit hard to quantify so I determined that Callan’s method from the NOVA Geoblog about using sweat stains as an analogy for ore bodies is the best “smell learning technique”. It shows how “certain types of ore bodies are thought to be ‘sweated out’ from magma chambers as they intrude to shallow enough levels in the crust… These hydrothermal disseminated deposits end up in the pore spaces of surrounding rocks, or filling in cracks. This is kind of like how your body sweats out a solution of dissolved salts in water.” Ewww, but definitely a fitting analogy, if not a smelly one. He also goes on to describe how peanut butter between bread can be used to show how igneous sills work and how a Mack truck can be used to show how exotic terrains can be accumulated by a drifting continent.

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So although there is a preponderance of typical teaching methods in the geological education community, there definitely is no shortage of people with fantastic and a little wacky out of the box teaching ideas. And who knows, perhaps someday some of these examples will become the norm in teaching.

Make sure you check out next month’s Accretionary Wedge being hosted by Dave over at cryology and co.

Deadline Reminder

The deadline for the next Accretionary Wedge, what remains to be discovered in geology, is next Saturday Sunday, September 20.  Dave Bressan at Cryology and Co. is hosting.  Here’s the original call for submissions- leave a comment with that post when you get yours put together, or email Dave.  He has a link to his address in the post.  (I’m having a hard time choosing from many good possibilities)

Call for AW #20: Unanswered Questions

Dave Bressan has posted a call for submissions for the next Accretionary Wedge:

What remains to be discovered for future earth scientists what we (still) don’t know about earth? What are the geological riddles that still lack answer – all questions are allowed – it could be a local anomaly, or a global phenomena, or something strange…(Naturally you can also include a possible answer to your problem).

Submissions are due by September 20; leave a comment with a link to your posts either on his blog at the above link. He also provides an e-mail link if you don’t deal well with commenting.

I’ll also reiterate his mention that we’re looking for hosts and themes for October and beyond.

AW #19 Is Up

Out-of-the-box Teaching Ideas is up over at Dino Jim’s Musings.  I love the structure of this one; the ideas are organized by the way in which they are perceived by the five senses.

AW 18: Inspiration!

It’s time for the Accretionary Wedge! If you recall, this month’s topic is your inspiration to study geoscience.

It was really fun to read these. A lot of you guys started out loving science and even geology in particular as kids, and you just stuck with it. I admire that! Lots of others just fell into it, like I did.

Lockwood tells about his lifelong fascination with science, starting with a great book as a kid and continuing through school, with some encouragement by great teachers. He ended up in geology by process of elimination after some lousy biology and chemistry classes, and stayed there because of a great and engaging teacher. Bob Jamieson talks about his experiences with exposure to geoscience over the years — by seeing great local geology growing up, by taking science classes in high school, and by just little bits and pieces that added up to an interest in the subject.

Ian Stimson can’t sing, so he had the opportunity to sample some geology instead of singing in the choir. His coursework steered him into taking geology, which at first he thought was all right. And later realized was completely awesome, of course. John at Karmasotra says he just knew he wanted a job outside. He decided to add geology to his coursework after reading a book that made it sound cool, and took a class from a teacher who was a little out of date and still teaching continental drift! crazy!

Michael Welland at Through the Sandglass says he had an early interest in geology, found through family trips and great books. And he acknowledges that after being discouraged for a while, connections with the right people helped him get inspired again. Geology Happens reports that “in high school… I found that the landscapes I had been walking, climbing. biking and canoeing through had stories that could be teased out of the rock. It seemed that by following a few simple rules anyone could piece together this tale. I was hooked. What other field allowed me to be outside all the time and to do real science?”

Silver Fox at Looking for Detachment has a geologist for a father, which exposed her to the topic, but it wasn’t until that awesome intro class that she decided to give up on the history major and try out geology herself. Apparently Silver Fox and I are twins (except for the geologist father part).

Short Geologist planned to study archaeology, but decided after that terrific intro class that geology was an exciting alternative that actually might lead to a job. And Jim Lehane followed that childhood dream of digging up dinosaurs all the way through grad school! That’s almost up there with planning to be an astronaut and actually doing it. A Life-Long Scholar didn’t want to work, but enjoyed school, so she took classes at multiple universities without ever declaring a major. Once she learned that grad students get paid to continue in school, though, she found some direction, and wound up in geology because there wasn’t a single required class she didn’t want to take. “Six years of being a full-time University student, and I’d finally found the course I wished to study! Very little time elapsed from that moment until I’d applied and transferred to another University, in another state, and became a Geology Major.”

Anne Jefferson says in her guest post at Highly Allochthonous that she was first inspired to study geology for her high school science fair project because it was not related to the science her parents studied, and she was a little rebellious! Her project was about fracturing in a Wisconsin sandstone. Tuff Cookie always wanted to be a geologist, and the more she learned, the more she was sure about that. And playing with lava at Kilauea cemented her resolve to be a volcanologist.

Jim Repka realized he wanted his professor’s job on a great intro field trip, after years of trying to study geology without a lot of luck. It took a long time to get through school, but with luck and determination and good teachers along the way, he’s gotten to where he wants to be. Garry Hayes had interests in geologic things but little exposure to academic earth science before going to college. As he says, “It worked something like natural selection: I had the interest (crystals and fossils), and I had some of the basic skills (maps and compasses), I just hadn’t found the field in which the skills and interests would be useful. Once I entered the correct situation, those pre-adaptations allowed me to survive!”

Thanks for all of your submissions! Check in at the Accretionary Wedge for next month’s topic!

Just a Reminder

The deadline for the August AW is next Friday, the 21st.  The topic is Out of the Box Teaching Ideas.  When and if you get a submission together, leave a comment and link at the announcement post. And we are still eager for more hosts and topics… if  I and/or others brainstormed up a bunch of topic ideas, are there people willing to host?