Not keeping up with the times?
January 14, 2008
By now you must have heard the story about a teacher preventing her students from using Wikipedia and Google for assignments. I remember the days when we were not allowed calculators in class (in fact I never used one till my Masters, since all we were allowed to use were log tables). However, I have come full circle on this subject. Instead of saying that Google makes us lazy, how about re-thinking how we approach education? How about changing the expectations? The fact remains that we have resources available to us today, which allow us to expand our knowledge, to find all kinds of information, too much information actually. Wouldn’t it be useful if today’s students were taught how to distill that large volume of information down to its core points?
As Neil Saunders comments in his Facebook note on this story
Is this “shooting the messenger”? It’s dumb, whatever it is.
Further reading:
A Rogue’s World
Technorati Tags: Education, Google, Wikipedia
Changing minds
January 1, 2008
I am a regular reader of Edge, much as I think the website needs a design update and there is a feeling of self importance that can rub you the wrong way. This years big question from Edge is a simple one and very hard one at the same time; What have you changed your mind about?
Going down the list and reading some answers, I was struck by how little I related to them. Some of them are scientific paradigms that have changed as our knowledge grows. Some are cynical, others almost naive, and some didn’t exactly sound like an issue where minds have been changed. That said, there are a lot of interesting thoughts there. Recommended reading.
I decided to ask myself this question. What have I changed my mind on over the past year. It doesn’t include something like next-generation sequencing, which has become mainstream (or almost mainstream) faster than I thought, since that is based just on ground reality. It was a strong, somewhat rigid belief in the role of science in society.
It is very easy for us to believe, as scientists, that science is the be all and end all, and anything that diverges from hard science is not to be taken seriously. However, over the past few years, I have come to realize that such an approach only results in alienation and a barrier between science and society. My mind on the importance of science in society and for our future has not changed one bit. What has changed is how it fits into the fabric of our future.
In a world full of inequality and agendas, our conversation with the world, as scientists and scientific thinkers, should focus on making science more accessible. Does that mean we compromise on the quality of our science? Absolutely not, but we should not be naive enough, or perhaps arrogant enough to think that just because we have fact on our side, everyone is going to subscribe to our point of view. This comes in two flavors. Education will always be the best way to making science a part of our daily lives. Whether it is formal education, or using virtual worlds, or books like Howtoons, a good, fun education is essential for science to return to society. Web x.y is a term I use generically for the modern, read/write web. Today, we have the opportunity to communicate at different levels and using multiple media. Unfortunately, we use this medium primarily for two purposes (scientifically speaking), hardcore advanced science, or science as politics. There are a few who use their pulpit to communicate the beauty of science (Sandra Porter instantly comes to mind), but by and large, our scientific web is still not quite interesting. One of my hopes for the year is to see material that makes science more accessible, and makes people wonder, the way we used to as kids when we saw Cosmos, etc. I have strong hopes for video. There is something about video, screencasts, animation and virtual worlds, that really appeals to me. Some of it captures just the geeks, but that is a start. One thing I’d like to think about this year, or try and find and highlight are efforts that make science fun and accessible.
I’ve mentioned Sandra, but I’d like to point to a couple of other sources
Sassy Science podcast mixes music and general science. Topics covered include the following
Science of Heroes – NBC’s television show Heroes is a science-fiction series based on the premise that there are genetic mutants with extraordinary powers out to save the world. This Human Genome Project plays a big part in the show’s theory, but where does the science end in this show’s science-fiction continuum? I interview a geneticist to find out.
WiredScience. Shows on PBS (in HD too) and online. Typical Wired content and the webpage rocks. Just watch Dr. Schrempp’s Chem Lab
Further reading
Paul Kedrosky
Attila
Technorati Tags: Science, Society, Communication, Education, Video, Wired Science, Sassy Science
Searching for lectures on the web
November 17, 2007
At Bioscreencast, we believe in using alternative media forms to communicate science, since we think that the web offers opportunities to communicate and collaborate that were not available in the past. So it should come as no surprise that a search engine for classroom video recordings excites us. At this point the search engine, called Lecture Browser, only works for MIT courseware, but the plan is to make it available to other universities.
The coolest bit; you can go to exact points in a lecture relevant to your query term. I wonder if, at some point, voice-based search, or taking a snapshot of audio and using that as the query term will ever become reality? The developers intend to add collaboration features in the future. IMO that is a necessary feature. People should be allowed to have discussions and Q&A around a particular lecture or series.
I’ve actually not been able to use the search engine, but hopefully it’s a temporary issue that prevents the page from loading
Thanks to Hrafn Thorisson for the link
Technorati Tags: MIT, CSAIL, Video, Lectures, Search
MyCIB - Integrative Biology in Nottingham
November 14, 2007
I found the MyCIB website via Duncan Hull’s flickr page. The image used the describe the site tells all you might want to know
MyCIB, the Multi-disciplinary Centre for Integrative Biology has a three-fold remit
- develop multidisciplinary projects across the life sciences
- provide a versatile computing infrastructure and data analysis support for post-genomic and integrative systems biology researchers
- deliver post-graduate training in the above areas
It’s good to see more and more integrative biology centers coming up. I’d hope that in the long run that a significant dose of chemistry and some physics/biophysics is part of these curricula. If we want to understand druginteractions and metabolic pathways, we need to do so. From the diagram, that certainly seems to be the case with MyCIB. And the description of the Integrative Biology Concept brought a smile to my lips (emphasis mine)
Integrative biology advances our understanding of biological phenomena through the close collaborative efforts of laboratory and theoretical scientists, who develop mechanistic mathematical models that identify gaps in biological knowledge and propose hypotheses for laboratory testing. The laboratory results lead iteratively to refined models that have predictive value, such as the interactions between diet and health, or improving drug efficacy while minimizing adverse reactions. The modelling integrates phenomena at different physical scales or incorporates different branches of physics (e.g. biochemical thermo-dynamics, with fluid dynamics and materials science). The approach is analogous to that between experimental and theoretical physicists.
Another concept that the figure illustrates very well, and described above, are the inter-relationships and the iterative process of modeling and simulation. It was something I learnt during graduate school because that’s how we approached matters, and it was a lesson that still serves me well.
Image courtesy of Duncan Hull via a Creative Commons Attribution license
Technorati Tags: Modeling, Simulation, Bioinformatics, Systems Biology, MyCIB
Yahoo joins the distributed computing educators league
November 12, 2007
Google can’t get all the press, and after all Yahoo is the company really pushing Hadoop. The result, Yahoo’s own distributed computing academic program.
But seriously, it’s good to see HPC, especially the distributed web system type, getting this kind of an academic push. What I did not know; Facebook is a Hadoop user.
Don’t you wish sometime that when it came to things like education and standards, all these rivals would just pool in their resources and stop trying to compete.
Technorati Tags: Yahoo, CMU, Hadoop, High Performance Computing, Distributed Computing, Education
