Mason Posner teaches anatomy and physiology, marine and vertebrate biology at Ashland University in Ohio. He does research on the evolution and function of the vertebrate eye lens and has interests in undergraduate research and teaching technology. He leads a science communication capstone courses that teaches Biology majors how to develop science blogs
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Facebook at your own risk

I pulled my head out of a grant proposal writing daze long enough this past week to notice a fellow professor having some trouble with their Facebook privacy settings.  Seems that a religion professor at Dartmouth thought it would be funny to point out the verbosity of some of her colleagues.  Even better, she worried [...]

Blogging in the college classroom.

I’ve been reading a number of reports from the recent ScienceOnline 09 science blogging conference in Raleigh, NC.  The Southern Fried Scientist and Anne-Marie from pondering pikaia have some nice write-ups from the sessions they attended.  What caught my attention most was a session titled Teaching College Science: Blogs and Beyond.  I am teaching [...]

Great student science videos

The Southern Fried Scientist is having his Marine Invertebrate Zoology students produce 2 minute videos on scientific journal articles. They are really fantastic, especially one on the effects of reduced predation risk on mollusk evolution.  What a great way to engage students in the literature and get them thinking about how to [...]

DIY coursecasting

With many of us going back to teaching in the next week or so I wanted to post about an application I have been using for the past three years to podcast some of my courses.  Coursecasting, as this type of podcasting is called, is a great way to provide lecture material to students [...]

Behind the scenes at the Cleveland Zoo

 

My Vertebrate Biology students venture to Cleveland again, this time to take a behind the scenes tour at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo from Alan Sironen, the Curator of Carnivores and Large Animals (maybe the best job title ever).  Alan showed us the stables, containing zebras (above) and two species of gazelle, including the endangered slender [...]

An evening with Neil Shubin

 

Students in my vertebrate biology class made the trek up to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History to see Dr. Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago talk about his 2006 discovery of Tiktaalik, an important transitional fossil in tetrapod evolution.  After reading some of his papers, chapters from his new book and seeing his [...]