A Fish Eye View » teaching tech

Using a blog and wiki in my Marine Biology course

Mason Posner — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 02:18:13 +0000

Over the past couple of years I have played around with using blogs and wiki pages in my courses. This past semester I incorporated both into my Marine Biology course and feel good about the results. My reasons for using each type of web technology differed, so I will hit them separately:

The course blog

I have been assigning readings from science blogs over the past few years to reinforce material covered in class and engage students with outside, related content. This past semester I used a blog in my Anatomy and Physiology course to answer student questions that stumped me in class, or that I needed to research more fully. After class I would post an answer to the course blog with links to additional reading. But in my Marine Biology course almost all of the content was student generated. After adding a few of my own posts as examples, I told my students to add a post of their own once every other week. With ten students in the course this meant almost a post each day (although they often came in droves). The only guideline I gave them was that the information had to have some connection to marine science. You can read the results yourself, but I was impressed with the range of information that students added, and happy to see students commenting on each other’s posts. A Zoomerang survey given at the end of the semester showed that 8 of 10 students agreed or strongly agreed that the blog was a helpful part of the course (the other 2 were neutral). The one thing I would change next time is to urge students to use more diverse sources for their posts. Almost every post was a summary of a news story from Science Daily.

The course wiki

A few years back our University started running MediaWiki software on our internal servers so that we could host our own wiki pages. When I taught Marine Biology two years ago I had my students write information guides for species they saw during our end-of-semester field trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I then used this content to write wiki pages on each species. This year I assigned each of my ten students to write guides for two species each, and to add these to the wiki themselves. Their entries needed to include some personal comment about their interaction with the species. After some editing for style and format we now have the start of an online guide to Outer Banks coastal species that I plan to add to each year I teach the course. And many of the students used their own pictures of the species they encountered, adding some new online content for others to use.

Both the blog and wiki seemed to engage students in material beyond the official meeting times of the class. Students accepted both techniques quickly, and 80% found the blog valuable. I will be curious to see how these tools work in two years when I teach the course again, as students will be building on an already rich set of content.

Young science bloggers need community

Mason Posner — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 14:09:00 +0000

Bora at A Blog Around the Clock initiated a great discussion on young science bloggers and why they do not always stick with their blogs. Bora was kind enough to talk about my senior capstone course at Ashland University in which my students start team science blogs to hone their science communication skills. Only one of my former students has kept with their blog once the class was over. So why is that?

One former student has commented that they felt uncomfortable blogging on controversial subjects and having their public writing come back to hurt them. And a science journalist friend of mine noted that “the kids stop blogging because, you know, blogging is what old people do”. It’s true that some of my former students share science thoughts on Facebook, but another avoids talking science on FB for fear of being ostracized as a science geek by her non-science friends.

The most common comment I read was that without a critical mass of people reading your stuff, there just wasn’t the motivation/guilt to get a blogger over the inertia of writing that next post. I definitely felt this when I started this blog, and I remember the excitement of actually getting some comments. Maybe we “minor” science bloggers, either young or old(er) just need to band together. We can be our own community, encouraging each other to write, guaranteeing that there are at least some people waiting for that next post.

So I would encourage you to check out the two blogs below from my former students (and this one too!):

Amy writes about disease and public health at Plague-erism
Savannah and Neeley are true science geeks starting their careers in science, and blogging at Science Haggis

And while you are at it, check out some great student (or recently student) blogs and let them know you are reading:

Homologous Legs
Life of Pi
BaslerCast – a high school science blog from Wisconsin
Extreme Biology – the high school science blog for Stacy Baker and her students
Potspoon

Blogging in the college classroom.

Mason Posner — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 04:15:44 +0000

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 my department’s senior capstone biology seminar this semester for the first time, and am focusing on science writing as a central theme. I started this blog, my first, back in September and have become totally absorbed with the science blogging community. I also have a strong interest in playing with different teaching technologies. So for this capstone course I decided to merge the two. My students are starting their own science blogs in groups of three or four to develop skills in communicating science. I hope that this will also facilitate discussion of what a well-trained biologists should know – another central them of the course.

You can follow along with this experiment at our central course blog. My students will have their blogs up later this week, so check back to see our progress.

Great student science videos

Mason Posner — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 03:55:41 +0000

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 communicate science. Enjoy:

DIY coursecasting

Mason Posner — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 04:03:35 +0000

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 for review or for students who miss a class. You can also use this technique to record and share any talk or critique your own presentation skills. There is extensive online information on coursecasting, but in my own experience I have found that overall students like the ability to review course material on their own time. And I have not found that attendance drops when podcasts are made available – although I teach at a small University where attendance usually is not a problem. Your results may differ.

The key to sticking with coursecasting is making it simple. Your techie urges may keep you going for a while, but to continue semester after semester you want it to be easy. Quick setup and no post presentation editing. You may be fortunate to work at a school with IT support for coursecasting, but I don’t. The apps and services I’ll describe below require no help from your IT department.

OK – you’re excited. But what do you need?

The only thing you will have to buy is an application called Profcast. This is Mac only software at the moment, although the developers promise a Windows version soon (yet another reason to switch). The current cost is $60 ($30 academic pricing). If you are using Windows there are other software solutions. Either way, get your department to pay for it.
Presentation software – ProfCast supports either PowerPoint or Keynote.
A microphone that provides audio input to the computer playing your presentation- I use the internal mic on my Mac laptop and the sound is fine. The downside is that when you walk away from the laptop your voice level drops, but the laptop mic does pick up student voices when they comment or ask questions. You can use a wireless lapel mic, but then you cannot record students in the class.

With this simple setup you can record a podcast in any room that has a digital projector. Your studio moves with you. To record your lecture or talk you simply open profcast and drag your presentation into this window:

ProfCast will open your presentation and when you are ready to start you click the record button. The software will record your voice in synch with each slide. When have finished your talk, you click the share button and ProfCast turns the recording into a .m4a or .m4b enhanced podcast file – this means that chapter headings are inserted so that students can easily advance to any slide in your talk and listen to that specific part of the lecture/talk. Your talk will look like this when viewed in iTunes:

: Podcast viewed in iTunes showing chapter selection – click to enlarge

Recording the presentation is that easy! The trickiest part is actually distributing your recordings to students. You can link each one to a webpage or distribute them using classroom support software like Blackboard or Angel. If your University has an iTunes U setup you can use that. I have played with a few solutions but am now using the following:

Upload your podcast episodes (the individual lectures) to an internet server. This can be on your University servers or using your own personal web host. I started using Bluehost (which also hosts this blog) because I could not access my University servers from off campus. ProfCast makes this process easy by providing a built in podcast publisher. This part of the software will add each new episode to your podcast and then upload them to your server space. ProfCast will also write the RSS file (the most technical part of this process). The RSS file tells podcatching applications, like iTunes, when you have published a new episode (lecture) so that it will be downloaded automatically. This brings us to the last part of the process. How do students subscribe to or download your podcast:
Set up a Feedburner feed for your course. You bloggers reading this may already know what that means. For the rest of you, Feedburner is a free service that makes it easy for others to subscribe to your podcast using programs like iTunes. This is the application that my students almost always use to get my podcasts. Once you sign up for a free Feedburner account and tell the website where your RSS file and podcast episodes live, you just need to give your students the feedburner URL for your podcast. For example, my anatomy and physiology course is found at http://feeds.feedburner.com/anatomy. When students go to that address they see:

The beauty of using Feedburner is that you do not need to maintain a website for your podcast, Feedburner does that for you. Students can then either subscribe to your podcast so that iTunes will download the episodes for them when they are posted, or they can download each individually. Feedburner will also keep stats on how many people subscribe or access your podcast.

On last bit of advice – start slow. I found that it took several weeks to get this system working smoothly. Pick one course and consider it an experiment. Let students know that you are trying this out for the first time and ask for feedback along the way. This way if things do not work students will not be relying too heavily on the podcast and will not get upset when they do not appear. I still have the occasional technical glitch that kills an episode (usually once a semester I forget to hit the record button at the beginning).

I receive very positive feedback from students about my podcasts during course evaluations and when talking to them about the course. I would highly recommend that you give this a try.

If you are already podcasting your courses please let me know in the comments section what software/techniques you use. I’d also like to know about any interesting teaching uses you have found for podcasting. I plan to post about that in the future.

Lizards walk on water too

Mason Posner — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 03:30:35 +0000

Dr. Tonia Hsieh from the University of Florida made a video appearance in my vertebrate biology course to discuss her 2004 paper on the biomechanics of running on water. Dr. Hsieh’s research attempts to understand how animals move by integrating engineering and physics with biology. She also considers the evolutionary history of her organisms to better understand how different types of locomotion have evolved. She spoke with us about a particularly cool example of movement – lizards running on water. Those are of course basilisks, or jesus lizards. My students had the chance to discuss the paper with Dr. Hsieh and hear some added background about how the research was done.

Dr. Hsieh and her collaborator George Lauder discovered that these lizards use a unique motion of their legs – they move them laterally through the water to keep their bodies from falling to the side, and then move them medially to keep them from toppling towards their opposite leg. At the same time they are producing forces that propel them forward.

We spoke together using Skype video - a great inexpensive (free) way to video conference.