Articles have been piling up in my Bloglines feeds as I keep saying “Oh, that’ll make a good blog post…” and then not getting around to actually writing anything. In an effort to clean things up a bit (in much the same way that I clean my desk off every September, whether it needs it or not), I’m just going to throw a bunch of them out here with mininal comments. This post is a collection of links from academic bloggers.
The Dean Dad has absolutely been on fire for the last month. He’s got good posts up on institutional inertia, strategic planning, measuring outcomes, and academic conferences (which he likes much less than I do), among other things. Just read the whole blog, already.
Over at Galactic Interactions, Rob Knop has some excellent ideas about introductory astronomy. This is a topic I really keep meaning to get to, as it connects with my thoughts on Physics for Poets, and also because I’m teaching a new-to-me version of our introductory course this term. Rob also has a class demo I’m going to steal.
Finally, Eugene Wallingford has some thoughts on hierarchical majors, which include responses to some things I wrote a while back.
There you go. Go read.
I used to daydream that a Physics for Poets course or a set of “Science Bag” public lectures could be built around equations, not avoiding them. “The equations you need to know” say
F = MA mechanics
V = IR electricity
PV = NRT thermo
or ?
maybe 2 more on energy
skip all derivation but but just take one at a time and show a bunch of applications and all the clutter around them. That and a table of cross referenced units. I’ve only gotten my niece who is totally anti-math to be interested when I calculated something using these simple equations like showing how 100 million people putting in a compact flourescent really did mean about the same energy per year as 1.3 Million cars, which was a story we had seen.