Time for active reading in my class

Last week, Apple made a major announcement about their entry into the textbook market. The best criticism of Apple's plans was given by Audrey Watters.  I'm not going to recap what she said. You must read it for yourself.

And, if you are a believer that all textbooks are crap, you probably won't have much use for what I have to say here, either.  I'm often surprised by the number of teachers (college and high school) who have no use for the textbook. And, sorry Frank, building ramps doesn't count:

(Although, Frank does have some good ideas of what a physics ibook could look like.)

I do believe that it is my responsibility to (as much as possible) choose relevant and well-written texts for use in my classes. I also believe that there is no perfect textbook.

I have introduced to my calculus-based class what I am calling active reading.  The class has already been assigned readings from the text to complete before coming to class.  They complete short reading reviews online before the class starts that I look at before class starts.

But this is not enough.  Active reading requires:

1. Note taking while reading. Both in the margins and in their notebooks. Underlining and judicious highlighting are also encouraged.
2. Access to other reference materials, such as dictionaries or the web for looking things up.
3. Repeated reading. My class knows that their first time reading through the material I don't expect them to become experts.  I do expect mastery of the concepts we cover in class before the next quiz or exam.

I don't think we do enough in the sciences to teach our students how to be active readers. I don't know how we can correct this deficit, but I think it's something that is long overdue.

Puzzling pair of wire loops

This is my stab at resolving the puzzle of the mutual inductance of the pair of wire loops posed last night by Andy Rundquist.

1-Subject Notebook 1 p. 71
brought to you by Livescribe


I hope Prof. Rundquist doesn't mind one more screencast to watch.

A not-so-dumb idea...

Two days ago Rhett Allain tweeted this video:   

and said it would make for a good blog post.  I thought it would make for interesting class discussion.

So I showed the video in class.  I didn't say anything other than: "Here's an interesting video I thought we could watch."  After the video I asked the groups to talk about what they had observed and whiteboard everything they could think of to describe the physics displayed in the video.  Here are what 3 groups came up with.

The group that came up with "the tangential force caused angular acceleration" was pretty proud of that statement.  We talked about how using the concept of torque was probably better.  And, of course the best whiteboard was not photographed because I didn't get my phone before it was erased. That group not only identified the torque and angular acceleration, but the change in moment of inertia when the guy's leg came out of the seat and the change in center of mass which caused him to tip the chair over.  I was really impressed.

Thanks, Rhett!

Another reminder to myself

Tonight I had another one of those deja vu moments where I realize (after too long stumbling around) that I've been down this particular road before.  I'm leaving this note here for myself to remind me in the future how to do this trick.

I wanted to post the daily image from the Astronomy Picture of the Day webpage to the class webpage in the college's CMS so that it updates everyday.  If I had access to the server, I'm sure I could write a perl/php/wget/python/bash script to automatically do this. I don't have access to the server, obviously. And, of course, I don't really know enough javascript to be dangerous enough to write a page to embed in the CMS course page.

After much googling, I found Feed2JS, an RSS feed to JavaScript converter. I put in the APOD feed and tweaked a few of the settings, then generated my javascript code, which I was able to embed in the course page.  Since I only want to show one image, I set the number of items to display to 1.

After getting it to work I decided that I wanted the full sized image for the course page.  A bit more googling, and I was able to find a better RSS feed which I plopped into the Feed2JS code generator.

Now I'm a bit scared to search through my blog archives because I'm wondering if this is something I tried leaving myself a note about in the past.

Too many links to FEA projects

Here is where I'm dumping some links to Finite Element Analysis (FEA) software that I was looking into a few weeks ago.

• SfePy - FEA libraries in Python for those who want to roll their own solutions.
• CalculiX - "A Free Software Three-Dimensional Structural Finite Element Program"
• Z88 - Z88 Aurora (Advanced User inteRface fOr Reliable feA) - only available for 64-bit linux
• SLFFEA - San Le's Free Finite Element Analysis
• CAE Linux - Computer Aided Engineering linux distribution
• Code_Aster - Mature code base, but lack of documentation in English
• List of FEA software

The original Veritasium?

I have four videos I want to remember for potential future use. I've been reading about and discovering the wonders of the work of Julius Sumner Miller. I discovered him when I was rummaging through our department's kit of "Physics of Toys". I had asked our lab coordinator if we had the manual for the kit, and he pulled out the book Physics Fun and Demonstrations which is essentially the manual for the kit. It seems like Professor Miller was the Paul Hewitt of his day.

Or maybe he was the Derek Muller of his day:



Notice that with the exception of rushing a bit at the start of that clip through the question of what the other person will predict, he starts by eliciting the misconception of the concept he is about to demonstrate. Also, he asks the other person (and therefore, the audience) to make a prediction before the demo is done.  Channeling Eric Mazur or Interactive Lecture Demos?

Not all the Miller videos are so pedagogically sound.  Here's a video that Miller did of his toys series, which he rushes through all the demos and skips over some of the explanations.   I picked one of the series to show here, but there are several other in the series to watch.  They are good for experts in physics, but not so much for novices.



I had no idea that Miller became a commercial spokesman for a candy company in Australia toward the end of his life.  Can you imagine a company hiring a physicist today and blending physics concepts with ad copy?  (I'm not sure the ads do anything to get people learning or thinking about physics, but it's interesting to think "what if" nonetheless.)




Finally, someone remixed a few clips of Prof Miller to come up with a re-imagined video (explicit lyrics warning!) of a classic Cypress Hill jam:

What is good about the Khan Academy?

I've already hinted at what I think is bad about the Khan Academy (KA), but in my upcoming talk at the Illinois Science Education Conference, I promised to talk about what is good about the KA.

I have identified four specific things which I think represent the good parts of the KA.

1. Breadth of topics - Having what is closing in on 3000 videos in the KA, there is no doubt that the breadth of topics that is covered is incredibly wide. If you are a student in grades 4-12 and/or college, chance are good that the KA has a video which is related to something that is being discussed in one of your classes. That alone doesn't make KA a good resource, but if a video can serve as a launching point for discussion in class that would be a good thing. The more videos they have, the greater the chance that topics in more classes could have discussions related to something students watched on KA.
   
2. Resource for "flipping" - Much has been said about the potential for using KA to "flip" the classroom model. I don't want to make this discussion all about whether or not trying using "flipping" in a physics classroom is a good thing or not. I can see the value in the idea doing something to encourage engagement with the course material is a good thing.  Full disclosure: I made videos for 2 terms that students were encouraged to watch to guide their reading of the assigned material. I believe that critical reading is a skill we overlook in the college curriculum, and that I should be doing more to help my students be better readers. With respect to the KA, I think that if you have decided to use a "flipping" technique in your classroom then you owe to yourself to at least look at KA and decide if it could be a resource for you.
   
3. Connection to Peer Instruction - One of the basic principles of Eric Mazur's "Peer Instruction" technique of teaching is that the students learn by talking to each other more effectively that by hearing a lecture because the students in class who just learned the concept can explain the concept in a way that makes sense to others in the class. That's the "peer" in Peer Instruction, right?  Students learn from other students better since the professor has forgotten what it was like to not understand the concept and can't connect with a struggling student as well as another student.
   
4. Virtual Tutor - I do believe that one of my jobs as a teacher is to have alternate ways of explaining a concept to students. Not everyone is going to understand every concept the first time we cover it, and there may be students who don't understand something the second, third or tenth time I explain it. If a KA video provides an alternate explanation for something that didn't click for a student in class, then I'm all for that. It is sort of like having a virtual tutor, except you can't really ask questions of the tutor.

So there you have it.  Four things I think are good about the Khan Academy.

 

Khan Academy is the free online "for dummies" resource for learning

Would you recommend any of these books to someone taking a physics class?

If someone was taking a physics class and told you they were using one of those books as a supplement, would you tell them not to?

I don't think there is a right or wrong answer to either one of those questions, but I do have my own opinions. :-)

I think, in general, the condensed review-guide style or "for dummies" type books are not particularly great resources for students in my classes to turn to. I would not recommend them, if asked by a student, but if a student said they had picked one up and was trying to use it to help study, I wouldn't necessarily discourage that, either. I would encourage that student (and ALL my students) to focus on the material and concepts we are engaged with in class, but if another books helps facilitate that, maybe that is okay.

The warning that I would give my students is that I cannot possibly review all the material out there to know the quality of that particular book.  I wouldn't know if it has any errors or misconceptions presented in it. I also have a bit of trouble knowing whether or not to trust the author without reading the book and evaluating it myself. From the four books shown above, I've only ever heard of one of the co-authors: Eugene Hecht, who has written an optics textbook that I have used in teaching.  Finding and verifying the credentials of the other authors is difficult or impossible in many cases.

I go to bookstores frequently, and I have no doubt that any of these books are going away anytime soon. A few new ones trickle out every year or so and eventually old ones go out of print.

If someone was to decide to write a new physics study guide, that wouldn't be a big deal. But what if that person decided to give it away for free on the internet.  Would that be a big deal?  Would you point your students to that resource?  (Maybe you would.  Maybe you wouldn't.  Again, there is no wrong answer to that question.)

Of course, you can find study guides or collections of notes all over the web. Some are great, some are not so great.

It should be no big deal if someone posts a new resource online. Yet, there is no denying that the Khan Academy has got the attention of teachers, administrators, school boards, foundations and policy makers who are all concerned with the future of education.

My question is WHY are so many people excited about the Khan Academy when the quality of the product is no better than the "for dummies" series of books, and in some cases, isn't even as good as those?