January 2012
1 post
To lecture, or not to lecture?
From time to time, a story hits the media that decries that bastion of undergraduate education, the lecture. It’s too passive, the criticism goes; it encourages rote memorisation rather than promoting conceptual understanding. Cue interesting discussion on Twitter, because some geologists aren’t willing to give up on the lecture quite yet…Physicists Seek To Lose The Lecture As...
October 2011
5 posts
Teaching through blogs and tweeting: possible, or...
geotweeps, help! trying to write about using social media in undergrad teaching research - ideas?Meagen PollockOctober 28, 2011 2:00:29 PM EDTReplyRetweetAnd the answers rolled in. Unsurprisingly, undergraduates’ hierarchy of social media usage is different from ours, most notably in their much more heavy use of Facebook.@meagenpollock My students use FB instead of e-mail to...
To blog your research, or not to blog your...
Our starting point is an opinion piece in the Guardian by Sarah Kendrew (@sarahkendrew) which took on some negative opinions expressed about blogging in a Q+A by physicists Brian Cox (TVs current stand-in-exotic-place-staring-moodily-into-space icon) and Jeff Forshaw.Brian Cox is wrong: blogging your research is not a recipe for disasterA few days ago, the Guardian ran a Q&A session with Brian...
What's being erupted at El Hierro
The eruption at El Hierro in the Canary Islands is taking place under the sea, but pictures from the scene are starting to show products of the eruption floating to the surface. But what are they? Read on for a crash cause in volcanic rocks that can float. The undersea eruption has manifested at the surface in the form of a plume of dirty brown water. wired.com
Of particular interest to watching...
A Tweet's eye view of GSA
The use of Twitter at scientific conferences is still limited to a small fraction of those in attendence, but there are enough nowadays for someone who is following the official hashtag (because there will be one) to get a flavour of what is going on. Find out for yourself thanks to Dr. Laura Guertin, who has archived some of the more memorable tweets from the just-finished Geological Society of...
GSA Jumps the Kraken?
The kooky conference abstract that no-one takes seriously inevitably becomes the star of the show. Our story begins a couple of weeks ago, when a geotweep looking through the abstracts for the upcoming Geological Society of America conference comes across a rather…. fanciful…submission.“ Behold the Triassic Kraken....
June 2011
8 posts
Fear the quake, ignore the volcanoes?
Another day, another example of California quake fear-mongering, in the form of a piece ‘reporting’ on a paper just published in Nature Geoscience.“ Weather Channel has a “monster quake to come” article about San Andreas. You /know/ some people will take that as imminent prediction. Nooo.seismogenicJune 27, 2011Scientists Say California Mega-Quake Imminent - weather.comby...
Quake Prediction is impossible - and...
You can’t predict earthquakes in the ‘be somewhere else next Tuesday sense’. Geologists would love it if we could. We don’t love it so much when people claim that they can predict earthquakes, needlessly scaring thousands of people in the process. Perrykid asks a question which many probably ask when they see junk like this:“ Strong earthquake (possibly major) likely in...
3 tags
Nabro eruption from space
Ask the Geotweeps, and ye shall receive... more...
Field experience? What field experience?
The most westerly point in the US
Geologists are so misunderstood!
Craving mountains