Category: science
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1:1 in a High School Science Classroom
These are my notes and some links from Susan Perkins’s presentation “1:1 in a High School Science Classroom” at ACTEM 09. (I got to this session really late, unfortunately, but I had a good excuse! I met Angus King!) This was a GREAT session. Susan is doing EXACTLY what we hope teacher will do when…
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In Praise of Outdoor School, Ed Holzberger, Classen SAS and Oklahoma City Public Schools
This past Wednesday, my 11 year old son and I were on a three mile hike in the Arbuckle Mountains of south-central Oklahoma, heading to “three falls” about a mile from from Camp Classen. I turned to him and said, “Wow, isn’t this amazing? Just think, you could be sitting in school today, and here…
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Thinking About Learning & Learning About Thinking: Implications for Creative Human Activity by Dennis Cheek
These are my notes from the first half of the second session session, “Thinking About Learning & Learning About Thinking: Implications for Creative Human Activity by ” by Dennis Cheek at the THE NEW RENAISSANCE: A Revolution of Creativity and Learning conference. The mobile website for this conference (which is optimized for the iPhone /…
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Standalone WiFi Skype Phones and Rocket Scientists
Steve Jurvetson, in his ForaTV video presentation, “The User-Generated, Real-Time Web,” says (among other things) that we’re going to see Skype spin off from eBay in the next few months (his speech was in June) and create standalone, wifi-based phones which have been a part of the founding vision of Skype since the beginning but…
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Thinking about dark matter, the origins and size of the universe
Yesterday’s 28 hours of air travel and airport waiting afforded me some time to watch a few TEDTalks I had not seen previously, and the following two were standouts focusing on topics including dark matter, the origins and size of the universe, the structure of galaxies in the universe, galactic distances, and parallel / multiple…
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Using brain waves to control robotic arms, value of diverse podcast subscriptions
My son, Alexander, and I are commuting now in the mornings down to Oklahoma City so he can attend Classen SAS. The drive is about 20-30 minutes, depending on traffic, and last week we discussed that we should listen to a book on tape or some podcasts on our commutes. This morning we listened to…
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Full Solar Eclipse Images
Full solar eclipses don’t happen very often. One just did on July 22nd. The Flickr images are coming in. From Shenzhen, China: From Hanoi, Vietnam (I think): Some of my favorites are not embeddable from Flickr, like this one from Hong Kong, this one from Guam, and this one from Manila in The Philippines. Hat…
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Space tourism coming in 2010
Thinking space tourism is a pipe dream for the distant future? Think again. Virgin Galactic is gearing up to deliver this service for $200,000 per ride starting in 2010. This may sound like an urban legend, but the groundbreaking of New Mexico’s spaceport last week in Upham was real. XCOR Aerospace and Armadillo Aerospace are…
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Incredible tornado footage
Thanks to both Eric Langhorst and Beth Still for tweeting the link to this amazing footage from Vortex2 of the tornado this past week in Wyoming. The most remarkable part of this video for me was this section which showed a “tornado within a tornado.” I remember many years ago talking about tornados with my…
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The Last Extinction and Science learning with NOVA
My son and I really enjoy watching NOVA specials on our home DVR. We haven’t done this in awhile, but last week we made some time to watch the episode titled, “The Last Extinction.” For some reason our DVR cut the episode off early, so we were delighted to find that the entire program is…