An Appetite For Wonder. Richard Dawkins. Ecco Press. 2013. $25 Had I been the publisher, I might have suggested the title, “A Career in Science was a Foregone Conclusion.” Or, perhaps, “How My Genes Forced Me Into Evolutionary Biology.” Either would have been a more appropriate title and truer to the author’s own admissions. “I’m…
I’ve been teaching online for a decade, maybe more if I include the hybrid courses, the course which have a traditional recitation (lecture) component and an online component. I always struggle to figure out how to best duplicate the in-class experience in my online effort. I make videos, use web sites, and provide my own…
Needless to say, the weather this weekend proved beyond any shadow of doubt to be dangerous, destructive, and deadly. On Saturday, I spent some time and put together an animated GIF to demonstrate how we could see the potential for bad weather developing. The animation is a collection of ten gifs I downloaded from weather.unisys.com.…
I’m probably wrong, but bear with me as out outline all of my errors for you. Over the last two decades I’ve seen student performance noticeably decline. Students fear math. Not calculus, but merely simple multiplication and division. Ask any student to calculate a percentage, i.e. “The population of the United States is 310,000,000 people.…
The Story of Earth, by Robert M. Hazen. Viking Press. Hardback. $28 I’m writing this review early. I think it is important I do so. I learned something almost immediately, within the Introduction, in fact. Not even did I reach the first chapter before I realized how ignorant I have allowed myself to become. And,…
This last week one of my faculty asked me to help her re-direct her tablet display to the dual-data projector system in one of our larger auditorium classrooms. At the end of the last academic year, our department had a little money left over. I recommended to one of our faculty she might invest in…
MOOC. To some, the acronym is a dirty word, like “larvae,” or “spider,” or “A-Rod.” People spit the word out like they are trying to remove a stray hair from their mouth. I can understand their distaste for MOOCs. Change is hard. Massively open online courses are a natural evolutionary stage in the use of…
I’m sharing my recent ‘Student Evaluation of Instruction” with the world. My intent is to highlight a couple of examples of the problems associated with using ‘student evaluations’ in course evaluation. I have copied these comments verbatim from the form I received in the mail last week. The evaluation document also includes a color-coded chart indicating…
The greater portion of the following collection of musings came on the very first day of the Education Conference. My current position covers a diverse number of disciplines, roles, and responsibilities. My office is on the top floor of a 5-story building, on the perimeter of our office space. And I am a Team of…
The award ceremony validated over three decades of dedicated effort to serve and train students in the geospatial sciences. My institution was awarded one of the most, if not the most prestigious and coveted, awards in our discipline. The ESRI Special Achievement in GIS (SAG) award is presented to less than 1/10th of 1% of…
Constant Geography 
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