Geological Photography Field Trip

Today I'm at the Geological Society of America annual meeting, and attended the short course/field trip on Geophotography.  It was led by +Ellen Bishop , +Marli Miller , and +Stephen Weaver , all of whom are talented photographers specializing in geological work.  Look them up, their work is really fantastic.

I first got interested in photographing geologic subjects when I began teaching a decade ago and found it was really difficult to find good quality photographs of the various features I was trying to teach my students.  Most upper-level geoscience textbooks only provide black & white images, and of course they don't provide multiple images of all the various features one might want to view.  Finding good photos of all the geology things is really, really challenging, and students need to see lots of examples.  Lots!  Fortunately there are websites like the Earth Science World Image Bank, the Earth Science Picture of the Day, and the EGU Imageo site, but there are still lots of holes to fill for good quality photos of geologic subjects.  So my passion for geoscience education has led me to try to contribute.

I've put out a number of Geology Field Photos on my Google+ page (search Carrigan #geopic) in the past couple of years.  It's been rewarding to share these with my followers.  I've also blogged about that effort in the past, so no need to say more here.  I will continue to primarily share my geophotos in that manner.  Don't get me wrong - I don't have some overinflated ego about the quality of my photographs.  I enjoy doing it, but I've got a lot to learn and a lot of room for improvement.  

Geological Photography essentially blends aspects of the art of photography with the science of geology - how do we make visually appealing, high-quality photographs of geological features.  Although I've been interested in this for a few years now, it's only been in the past year that I've wanted to push my photography skills beyond shooting with automatic settings and little to no editing.  The fact is that with a good camera and a decent eye, you can take a lot of decent shots that will be beneficial for student learning.  That will only get you so far, so this past year I've been learning how to take photographs manually, to control all the various settings - aperture, shutter speed, ISO, white balance, etc.  OK, I take that back - I still let my camera control the focus.  My few attempts at manual focus have been disastrous.

I'll tell you one truth: when you go from fully automatic to fully manual, the quality of your photos will decline at first!  My wife can attest to this, as the pictures of our kids from this past year were sometimes, well, not so good.  It takes time and practice to learn new skills, and I'm definitely still on that journey.  I've taken a lot of shots over the past year where the exposure was just all wrong.  Sure, you can adjust some of those things in software afterward, but the best thing is to get it right when you first take the shot.  Today I was in full manual mode; no more training wheels.  We left in the morning and headed out to Roxborough State Park, the geology of which is a lot like other areas of the CO Front Range - upended Pennsylvanian Red Sandstone Fountain Fm., followed by various other units until you get to the Dakota hogback.  Lots of good scenery to photograph, and I purposefully did a lot of experimenting with various settings.  Definitely some real buggers, like the times when I adjusted the aperture but not the shutter speed - oops.  I still need to look through the bunch and pick out the good ones and do some editing, but it feels obligatory to include some photos in a blog post about geophotography, so here are a couple of shots from today that aren't too bad:  

Tomorrow we head to the convention center with laptops and our RAW files and are learning about post-processing of digital photos.  Here's an area where I know next to nothing, so I'm really excited about this.  Hopefully I'll have more & better photos to share in the future.

Anyone out there care to share their experience photographing geologic subjects?

Radioactive Decay of Candium

Last week, I posted on G+ a brief preview about an in-class learning activity that I do in my geochemistry course, which I refer to as the "Radioactive Decay of Candium".  The idea is to use a student-centered activity in class that is enjoyable & interesting in order to learn about how radioactive decay works.  I didn't originate the idea, rather I've taken the main idea from an activity on the SERC geoscience education website & modified it a bit.

The activity begins with a very short discussion about how radioactive decay works, but really I want to get them going quickly, so we talk about the fact that each m&m has a 50/50 chance of landing m-side up or m-side down, a lot like flipping a coin.  So I give them each a couple hundred pieces, a bag, and a couple of pieces of clean, white paper, and a handout.  Their job is to count the pieces, place them in the bag, shake them up, pour them out, remove those showing m-side up, and count the ones that remain.

Fig 1. Science in progress!

Those that remain are placed back in the bag & the process is repeated.  Each time, they record their results on the board.  After they reach zero m&ms, I give them a second handful of pieces, they count those & then add them to their first pile and do it all over again with a larger sample.  At this point, they might have ~300 pieces.  This time, however, those that "decay" each turn might get eaten.  After all of the groups (I usually have them do this in pairs) have finished, everyone records all of the data.  We then walk through the graphs they have to create with the numbers, now working on their own.  So here's a graph of all the trial runs, including the "class total", which is just a sum of all pieces on each step.

Fig. 2.  Decay curves of Candium for all experimental runs.  

This obviously shows the number of pieces that remain on each turn after they shake them out & separate out the "decayed atoms".  Then I have them calculate the percent of the total number of "atoms" that have remained on each turn, which looks like the figure below.

Fig. 3.  Percentage of total atoms that remain on each turn for all experimental runs.

I like the comparison of the two graphs, in that it shows that no matter how many atoms you start with, the decay in each case is the same percentage.  It's a fun activity that helps students really connect to the idea of radioactive decay, and a tasty one too!

New EarthCache Developed: Hill City Fold, Black Hills, SD

I've mentioned a couple of times previously that I spent the month of June out in the Black Hills of South Dakota, teaching field camp for Wheaton College at their Science Station.  It was a great experience and hopefully I'll get to give it a go again in the future.  I've also written recently about EarthCaches, a program between the Geological Society of America and Geocaching.com.  While in the Black Hills, I logged a number of EarthCaches and also recorded information about a couple of places in order to place some new ones.

The first one I've set up is a roadcut on Highway 16/385 near Hill City, SD, within the Black Hills.  The roadcut exposes a fantastic example of a fold.  EarthCaches must have an educational component, and for this one I ask the geocacher to identify whether the fold is a syncline, anticline, inclined, or recumbent, so the geocacher has to learn something about the axial plane of a fold and be able to recognize it in the rocks.  So, forgive me if I don't post a picture of it!  The cache description contains enough information for geocachers to know what these terms mean, so by observing the fold in the field this ought to be easy to answer this question.

I also ask the cacher to measure the horizontal length of the fold as exposed in the roadcut.  One of the easiest ways to measure distance over land is with a GPS, which every cacher ought to have with them in the field.  In order to navigate toward a point of interest, geocachers often enter the coordinates of a location into their GPS to set a waypoint, tell the GPS to "GoTo" the point, and the GPS will then tell them how far away the point is.  This obviously makes it easy to see your distance to the point decreasing as you get closer.  I have cachers use this technology in reverse - establish a waypoint (POI) at one end of the roadcut, tell the GPS to "GoTo" that point, and then they themselves physically walk away from it to the other end of the roadcut.  When they reach the other end of the roadcut, the GPS will tell them how far they've gone.  This exercise hopefully helps cachers to learn to use GPS technology in a way they might not have thought of before.  After all, why would I tell the GPS to "GoTo" a point, but then I myself "GoAway" from it?  It isn't an intuitive use of a GPS but works really well.

The new EarthCache was just approved, so we'll see how long it takes someone to visit the site and log it.

Geology with First Graders

Last week, based on an invite from the teacher, I paid a visit to my oldest daughter's first grade class to talk about geology.  I knew they had been learning about sand, so my job was to take it up to 11.  I also knew, based on what my daughter brings home, that they had previously talked about solids, liquids, & gases, but otherwise they don't get a whole lot of science in first grade.

I brought with me some samples; the ONU Geology program has lots of samples of rocks & sands (obviously), so I took some especially relevant ones to show the kids.

The main point I tried to get across to them is this: different kinds of sand come from different kinds of rocks.  I figured for first graders that wasn't a bad place to start.  The idea is to have them connect in their minds that rocks, when eroded, will form sand, and that there is a direct connection between these two kinds of materials. This is, really, their first introduction to the rock cycle.

I took with me 4 samples of sand.  The first one is a typical quartz sand in a jar that had a couple of nice shells in it.  That one I passed around first and had each student rotate the jar of sand until they found the secret prize inside.  Lots of wide eyes and careful looking at this point!









After I had their interest, I then showed them three other sands and three related rocks.  The white sand here is loaded with calcareous material, and the white "rocks" are pieces of some kind of coral from the same beach.

The green sand is olivine rich, with black chunks of basalt and white pieces of crushed coral.   The green rock is dunite.

The black sand is eroded basalt cinder for the most part, and the black rocks is a basalt with obvious pahoehoe texture on the top surface.












I talked about the three different rocks as representing the three major rock types: the dunite as a metamorphic rock, the basalt as igneous, & the corals as sedimentary.  They didn't quite pick up on the differences or the words well (and I didn't expect them to), but they were at least exposed to the terms.  They liked the basalt the best - it is a pahoehoe sample from Hawaii, so we talked about lava & how it is a hot, liquid rock that cooled to form this solid material.  They were really impressed with that!

Granted the olivine rich sand didn't come from the erosion of dunite, but the samples allowed them to see that there are connections between rocks and sediments.

After we looked at those, we ended with this question: what might happen if you took a sand, and squeezed it really really really hard?  You can't do this with your hands, but the Earth is able to squeeze sands hard enough that they turn back into rocks!  At this point I pulled out a couple of sandstones that are easily seen as grains of sand that are all stuck together.  Minds blown!  That was another moment where their eye-brows were all raised.  Again, here they were exposed to another idea from the bigger concept of the rock cycle.

It was a really fun experience.  These students are considerably younger than the ones I'm used to teaching!  And, if I'm totally honest, they are in general a lot more enthusiastic about learning than some college students!  :-)

Teaching Climate Change II - What effect?

So I've yet to return to this topic after my first opening post, but eventually I'll get back there.  This evening, I came across an article on the USA today website that basically says that politicians drive what Americans think about climate change.  The article is based on a sociological study that looked at various public opinion polls over the last decade on climate science, and then tried to test to see what kinds of things might have caused any shifts in the polls.  The disturbing conclusion of the study is that science journals, science bloggers, science educators, or anything else science related, has little impact on what the U.S. public thinks about climate science.  Instead, the things that drives U.S. public opinion about climate science are the words of politicians.

Sorry I made you shudder there.

It really has me wondering if I should even bother continuing this series of blog postings.  Seriously.  Not that I ever expected to have any sort of national sway with what I write here, but it does seem to minimize the importance of science education on all sorts of levels.  Yikes.  I'll of course keep pressing on & keep believing that being a science educator is a pretty important and good cause to dedicate one's life work to, because I think its the right thing to do, but I guess it makes one wonder how much effect one's work is really going to accomplish.

I'm not so sure what to think about this study (is it valid? biased? carefully done?), but unfortunately my gut is telling me that the conclusion is probably true.  I think a lot of folks have their political associations, and let those societal associations drive a lot of their thinking.  Maybe I should change "their" to "our" and include myself.... Our culture, our surroundings, the messages we get every day, from all the inputs, all the signals, all the noise, it's all in many ways telling us what's right & wrong, what's good & bad, what should be or should not be, what's normal, what's acceptable, and even what's reasonable.  And I tend to think that we humans are pretty highly influenced by those surroundings.

One has to wonder if the same is also true for other issues - how often do we let our opinions on a subject be essentially determined by political affiliation?  Instead of saying you're a Democrat because you're pro-choice, for example, maybe it's the other way around - maybe you're pro-choice because you're a Democrat.  or vice-versa, maybe you're pro-life because you're a Republican, and not the other way around.  I can't imagine anyone would be likely to agree with that, but my social-psychology friends have blown my mind a few times in the past with things I'd have never thought were true.  That is to say, that maybe we take on the values of the group we self-identify with, without even realizing that's what we're doing.  That's a pretty scary thought.  I do doubt it applies really strongly to people who've learned the art of critical thinking, but if you're an educator you know that a whole lot of folks don't do that whole critical thinking thing terribly well.  I bet this is more important in our society that people might initially assume.  And here I am blabbing on about psychology, as if I know something... sheesh...

Glad to be a moderate independent voter.  That means something here, right?  I can only hope.

Teaching About Climate Change, Part 1: Framing the Discussion

Every year, I teach a geoscience course on natural resources & the environment.  It is a general education course that any student can take so long as they've already taken a college science course.  Students come in from a wide variety of backgrounds & interests.  I've had students who are majoring in elementary education, engineering, business, math, geology, chemistry, geography, sociology, exercise science, and many others.  I love teaching this course.

One of the biggest challenges, however, is teaching the subject of climate change.  This subject is so big, broad, integrated, and so complex that it is probably the most difficult subject to teach in the geosciences in my opinion.  Further, the subject isn't just about science, because the issue has become such a hot topic in our society.  Another challenge here in my case is that I'm not a climate scientist in terms of area of specialization.  As a geochemist I can easily relate to a lot of the chemical data in climate science, but my expertise lies in other fields.  These challenges mean that a careful, thoughtful approach to teaching the subject is all the more necessary.

So I'd like to talk about how I teach this subject in the hopes of hearing from others who also teach it.  I plan to share a couple of posts on the topic.  In this first one, I'd like to talk about how I frame the discussion.  I think there is nothing more important than this when teaching a controversial subject.  I pose this in my course as "Asking the right questions about climate change", with four questions:

1) Is the Earth's mean annual surface temperature rising?
2) If so, what is the cause?
3) If so, what effects will it have?
4) What should be done about it?

The first three questions are science questions; they can be answered by data.  The first three questions also gradually increase in uncertainty.  The first question brings with it the least amount of uncertainty because it is the least complex.  It simply involves measuring the same thing, over and over again, in different ways and over long periods of time, and then seeing what the trends are in the data.  The answer to the first question is obviously "yes", since the rest would be moot otherwise.  The second question brings more uncertainty, since it is looking for a cause.  Causation is, as any scientist knows, often difficult to prove.  Often we look for correlations that have strong theoretical reasons to indicate causation, but there is always uncertainty in this.  The third question brings even more uncertainty, because it brings an added dimension of prediction of the future.  Creating models that will correctly predict the future is hard work!  Especially in this field, where the models have so many variables and feedback loops.  But there is good, rational uncertainty, and then there are the smear campaigns that attempt to insert uncertainty into places where it really doesn't exist.

The fourth question is not a question that can be answered by science alone.  Science can and should inform decisions here, and it does so by clearly answering the first three questions.  But this last question is broader than the natural sciences.  That tricky word "should" in question four brings the trouble.  How we answer this last question depends also on perspectives from economics, cost/benefit analysis, morals/values, public policy, political theory, social science, behavioral science, and other fields.  The question cannot be answered by natural science alone, and I think it intellectually prudent to be upfront about this.

I think this framework allows students to begin to separate the science from the politics in their minds, and they need to do that in order to understand the issues.  In our culture, complex issues often get boiled down to bite-sized bumper sticker position statements, and people are generally divided into two general camps - the pros and the cons.  That is, the science and the politics get conflated, and before students can begin to think clearly about the issue and come to an informed opinion, the science and politics need to be distinguished as separate entities in our minds.  I think the absolute wrong question is "are you for or against global warming?"  That's just too vague & too convoluted to be useful in education.

So that's how I approach it.  How do others who teach this subject frame it?

Accretionary Wedge #38: Back to School: What Teaching Has Taught Me About Learning.

In the Call for Posts to this latest edition of the Accretionary Wedge, Anne asked:
"What should you and I and other geosciences profs be doing better?" 

In graduate school, I took some really sweet courses - like Igneous Petrogenesis from Calvin Miller (at Vanderbilt), and later Tectonics from Rob Van der Voo and Metamorphic Petrology from Eric Essene (both at Michigan).  These courses were fun and memorable, challenging yet enjoyable, and above all, made me think critically about the topics at hand.  There were a number of others too.

And then there were the OK ones, the so-so ones, and the awful ones, and I won't name names.  I knew I wanted to be a professor when I got out, and I knew, as everyone does, that there are professors who are good teachers, and there are those who are in-between, and there are those who need to be encouraged to find another profession.  And I would be one of the good ones, right?

I'm in my 8th year as a professor now since leaving UM.  The one thing I've learned clearer than anything, is that graduate school does not prepare one to be a good instructor.  At all.  I realize now how very little I knew about how people learn.  Spiraling? Student Learning Outcomes? Scaffolding? Pedagogy?  Bloom's Taxonomy? Cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains?  Assessment?  Goals and objectives?  I hadn't really heard of any of those terms.  I was in training to become a professor, a job that at least in part involves teaching, but I hadn't even heard words of the language spoken by those who understand the literature on how to teach well.  Graduate school does not prepare faculty to be good teachers, at least not intentionally.

In my early years as a professor, I absolutely couldn't understand why some of my students struggled so much to learn.  Because I did some things really well.  A lecture, now that I can deliver, with schnazzy, well organized  powerpoint slides, numerous examples, interesting sidenotes, a couple of breaks for questions & discussion, and even a joke or two that drew actual smiles.

But here's what every professor needs to know: of that fantastic 50 minute lecture you just gave, the one you spent 2 full days preparing, organizing, scanning your old field photographs for examples, sifting through textbooks to find the right figures, and all of that - of that 50 minutes where you deliver a great lecture, students might retain about 10 minutes.

10 minutes?!!?  Are you kidding me?!??!  Unfortunately, no.  Now, most of us professor go "now wait a minute, I got a whole lot more out of lectures than that!"  Yes, you did... and that's why, today, you're the professor.  But unfortunately the research shows that most people do not learn well from lectures.  That's something I never learned as a student.  But in my role as a teacher, this point has become crystal clear - for most students, lecture is largely a waste of time, even the good ones!

One concept that has revolutionized my teaching for the better is the realization that if students don't actively use the information being communicated to them, they won't really assimilate it or retain it.  I've seen it many times now in the past 7+ years - I'll give a good lecture, students will comment that they learned the material, and we both feel good about what went on in that time we spent learning new concepts - but then I give them some problems to solve, or an activity to do, and they suddenly have tons of questions!  They may have thought they understood a concept, but now having to apply it they realize they don't get it like they thought. Questions they didn't know to ask, now start coming out.  These are the moments when they are really learning!  All of us learn through our experiences, experiences that require us to overcome something, solve something, find a new way around something, etc.  No one learns to ride a bike by sitting and listening to someone talk about how to ride a bike.  You learn to ride a bike by getting up on that bike and trying to ride it - and you fail the first few times, maybe the first hundred times, but eventually, the neurons start to fire together in the right way, the skills are honed, and off you go!

So professors out there, if your students are struggling, even though you've given them what they need to know in a great lecture, and they've got some good books to help them out, and you went over that concept in class 5-6 times, and they asked questions, and it seemed to go really well, realize this - lecture is largely a waste of time.  Man, I hate to say it!  Partly because I've listened to some really great lectures at times, and really gotten a lot out of them.  Instead, or rather in addition, think about what activities you could have them do, what problems you can give them to try and solve, and whatever else you can do to stop being the sage on the stage and start being the guide on the side.  Because the good thing is, the students still need you.  Student-centered learning doesn't mean that the teacher isn't important, far from it!  Figured out a great way to talk about a tough concept?  Got a great slide to summarize some complicated processes?  Great!  Deliver it well!  Good lectures are still better than bad ones!  But after that, what problems will you give them that will require them to use the information you just presented?  What activities will you assign to them, where they apply the lessons learned?

When I first started teaching, this was really hard.  What am I going to have them do?  Do I have the materials I need?  What questions will I ask?  A really well developed activity takes a lot of work.  To think about the learning goals of the activity, how to immerse the student in the subject, to assemble the right materials and equipment, and to write up a nice looking assignment sheet isn't an easy job.  Fortunately, there is the Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College.  For many years now, professors from all over have been contributing activities, labs, and other information to the site.  I find that for me, the best way to use the site is to follow the Teach the Earth link, and then head to the "Upper Level Geoscience Courses" link, find the course I'm teaching, and start searching from there.  There is a wealth of information there, but it isn't always easy to find what you need or what you're looking for even if you know it exists there.  But a lot of the stuff submitted is pretty good, and with enough patience I can generally find something that at least sparks an idea in my head.  Now that I've done it a few times, it has become much, much easier,  to think about, create, and implement good activities, and student learning is increasing.

Teaching has taught me that even the best lecture is largely a waste of time, but working through activities, solving problems, and recreating experiments is time very well spent.