January 18, 2006

Around the blogosphere

  • The latest Tangled Bank carnival on science blogging. Not forgetting our very own Carnival of the inforsciences, of course.
  • Confessions of a Teenage Science Illiterate from the SciAm blog is pretty interesting. I like this quote: "Perhaps if more people understood just some of such basic principles of science, we would be ready to make informed decisions about the medical potential of stem cells, global warming and other vast science-based conundrums facing ... the world today. At the very least, we should educate our children to understand them, since they will have to deal with the consequences of the decisions that are made today in an apparent fog of ignorance." Amen.
  • Blogging about teaching: The miniseries by Jane. The first episode is up, and it's about The Intro Courses. Jane has some great ideas about teaching intro programming courses. As I recall my own first programming (Fortran, natch) course back around 1982, it's what really got me interested in CS. It was great fun, I even did the bonus assignment on matrix multiplication. I'm pretty sure there weren't any blowhards in the class. It was such early days for teaching programming to anybody, that I think we were all pretty much at the same level.
  • The Wrong Side of History, via InsideHigherEd, is an interesting commentary on women in science and how many male faculty members are still in denial.
  • Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 'cause, you know, you just can't make the point enough. And because it demonstrates the strenghts of the Wikipedia.
  • Generation Disengaged from ACRLog. Are students less intellectually engaged in their educations today than in the past. We always seem to assume "Kids Today" are somehow fundamentally inferior in commitment that we were back in the good old days. Personally, I think we're all just remembering our own undergrad education with rose-coloured glasses. That, and people who become profs or librarians might also have been a little keener than average.
  • Via E3, a new blog Physics Information Fluency by Pat Viele.

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