Guys!!! The wait is over. We present the new and improved (hopefully) AbGradCon for 2008!
The web page is up and can be accessed here: http://people.ku.edu/~dimitra/agc08/agc08.html
We have a facebook group too! : http://ku.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5986153617
Registration page will be added soon. Feel free to pass it on to your colleagues.
-AbGradCon08 Team
So I’m the unofficial PSARC and VPL rep to the NASA Astrobiology Institute’s Internet Technology Working Group. (So I’m the VPL and PSARC rep to the NAI’s ITWG… alphabet soup, anyone?) Today, we had a meeting about social networking, and a few ideas were discussed. Many of them were similar to the things we discussed at the AbGradCon workshop, in particular social networking sites, blogs, and wikis. The hardest part of the discussion was that it had to be limited to an hour, when there really is a lot to discuss here. The positives and negatives about all these were discussed. Like any new technology, transferring to using these new tools will require effort. However, they should make data more accessible and dynamic, ultimately resulting in more efficient use of time and more accurate, widely disseminated information.
There were also some specific ideas bandied about at the meeting or that started bouncing around my head afterwards:
One other specific thing that was proposed – and will be acted on in the near future – is to have one of the upcoming FAR seminars focus on these networking ideas. I’d like to continue the discussion from today here, and start ramping up for the FAR discussion. So what networking tools do people think are worthwhile? Which ones do you use? Do you have specific ideas for new tools we can use to communicate? Do you think the ideas above are worthwhile or silly?
In the interest of having more regular content on this blog, i’m going to try to post info about electronic tools useful to the astrobiology community. If anyone else out there has a cool tool they’d like to share with everyone else, go ahead and post it here…
To start, i thought i’d share a fun recent discovery with everyone – the new “sky” features in Google Earth. In short, the new version of Google Earth lets you explore the night sky using the same interface you can use to explore the Earth. If you haven’t used Google Earth before, you should check it out. The interface is very intuitive and the visuals are stunning. You can use Google Earth to zoom in on your home, place of work, field site, or favorite getaway. My fellow geologists have been using Google Earth to help them make pretty pictures for talks or to check out aerial views of their field sites before departing to collect samples/data. Additionally, Google Earth is a solid educational tool that one can use to make virtual tours of anything from a city to the ecology of a region to the history of a nation. From my understanding of things, you can pretty much make a tour of whatever you want – if you wanted, you could make a tour of all the places you’ve lived before and send it off to family for a trip down memory lane. One should be able to do all this in Google Sky as well. Someone should plot up the stars for which extrasolar planets have been discovered. That would make for a really great virtual tour for classrooms, public outreach, and anyone stands in awe of the explosion of data coming from the extrasolar planet hunters. Does anyone out there have the know-how to tackle something like this?
There’s another tool out there that’s just as cool – or maybe even cooler – NASA’s World Wind. Its Windows-only for now, but they’re currently working on a Java version that will run on Linux or Mac OS. There are LOTS of great things about WorldWind, from the ability to plot “near real-time data” on things like the weather to the ability to use it to explore other planets such as Mars, Venus, Mercury, the Moon, and Jupiter. The 3-d engine is fantastic. There’s even an astrobiology field tour that will take you to places like Akilia Island and the Rio Tinto Basin! Want to see what a sunset is like on Mars? You can do that too, as the interface includes lighting effects from the sun. Overall, its a wonderful piece of software that is very easy to use. The Kasting group was discussing some data on Mars gullies, and we wanted to know if there was a correlation between their appearance the terrain in which they formed. It was extremely easy to plug my laptop into a projector, download WorldWind, fire it up and take a look at the places the gullies were found. It was my first time using the software, and the interface was very easy to use.
I’d recommend both pieces of software to anyone. Google Earth gets a LOT more exposure and is something we should consider using for public outreach purposes, and WorldWind is much more customizable and seems to be better for plotting your own data.
Again, if you have other tools, feel free to post about them. I’m going to put up another “tools” post in the future to see what professional networking sites people are interested in using for the Astrobiology community, so check out Research Pages, Nature Network, and Facebook. In the end, we’ll probably all be using some combination of these… So check them out!
An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education discusses the reluctance with which university professors in the sciences incorporate proven science instruction methods into their classroom. This short report focuses upon professors at research universities and discusses the reasons why professors at research universities are called upon to change their instructional methods as well as why there is resistance to change in this science community. Important quote from the article by Jeffrey Brainard:
“About 30 percent of entering freshmen plan to earn bachelor’s degrees in science, mathematics, or engineering, but only about 15 percent of all baccalaureate degrees are awarded in those fields. The percentages are even lower among black and Hispanic students, who make up a growing share of the undergraduate population. While many science instructors have prided themselves on using introductory courses to “wash out” students who are lazy or lack aptitude, in reality many student who drop their science majors are academically well-prepared and motivated. “
There are many programs and efforts sponsored by the National Science Foundation to help change the landscape of instructional techniques used in undergraduate science courses. For example, a program at the University of Wisconsin at Madison works with graduate students to incorporate inquiry-based activities and real-life examples into their teaching practice. During the evaluation of the program, however, it was obvious that graduate students enjoyed the program but still felt pressure to ‘conceal’ their work from their professors, who viewed it as distracting from their research.
The conclusion of the article is that if young researchers try delaying implementation of the new teaching methods until their careers are established, they may put off the attempt for good. At nearly all universities, the tenure system rewards good research over good teaching, and since faculty members have the final say over their own courses and are often resistant to change the status quo rules. Even those professors who are up for new things are often unaware of the new research-backed methods, partially because there has been limited funding for ‘getting the word out’.
The point is in order to keep students engaged and pursuing science careers, professors need to branch out from the traditional lecture format – which has been shown to be inefficient compared with newer methods of teaching. Laboratory sections that accompany the class cannot make up for the lack of engagement in lecture sections.
As I like to remind everyone, just because you had to sit through the boring lectures as an undergraduate and graduate student doesn’t mean you should make the next generation do the same. 
The article, titled “The Tough Road to Better Science Teaching” is in the Chronicle of Higher Education Vol 53, Issue 48.
Let’s start posting!! Don’t be shy. Again, email the admin if you are an author and you can’t log in/post!
Shawn Domagal-Goldman here (username: shawndgoldman). This is my first time running a blog, although I’ve also frequented quite a few blogs on Chicago sports teams in the past. I just finished my PhD in Geosciences and Astrobiology at Penn State, and will continue to work as a postdoc for the next year with my thesis advisors, James Kubicki and James Kasting. My research has mostly been on modeling stable isotope fractionations for systems relevant to the rise of atmospheric O2 in the Arcehan – specifically Fe and S isotopes. More on that later…
For now, i’d like to get everyone else’s feedback on the site. There is a new sidebar with some new tools to use – check those out. Do you like the look/feel of things? Can you read everything clearly? What types of posts do you want to read/write here? What types of tools/widgets do you want us to provide? If there is something on another blog you think is cool – send us a link to it! Let us know what you want (or don’t want!) out of this blog. Like any community, blogs are only as strong as the individuals that comprise it… so let us know what you want! Less exclamation points? OK…
Hey,
I’m H. Langley DeWitt, currently a 4th (almost 5th!) year graduate student at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
I work with Margaret Tolbert in the Chemistry Department, synthesizing organic hazes that could have been present on the early Earth/believed to be present in the atmospheres of the outer planets.
I’ve agreed to help design/maintain/moderate this blog, so any comments and questions you send to the blog will be directed to me!
My fellow moderator is Shawn Domagal-Goldman, and he should be introducing himself shortly!
http://cires.colorado.edu/science/groups/tolbert/people/dewitt/
Since I haven’t figured out the ins and outs of adding people to be contributors to this blog, I’m going to ask that, if you are a graduate student/post doc in Astrobiology, and interested in contributing, to please comment to this post.
I’ll then send you an invite to wordpress, and sign you up!
This is the space for the new Astrobioblog. The idea of this blog is to summarize important new articles in the Astrobiology field. Since it is a very multidisciplinary field, hopefully we’ll have graduate students and postdocs in different fields keep us informed of the exciting findings in their particular area of study!
Within the next few weeks, volunteers willing to summarize new articles every few months will post introductions about themselves, their schools, and their specific research. Then, we’ll get to keeping up with the upcoming research in the world of Astrobiology!
