Browsing all posts in Teaching.

There be Dragons (& Voorwerps)

It’s 2 weeks to Dragon*Con and I’m going a bit insane. As I mentioned in my last post, a group of us are getting ready to launch a comic book at Dragon*Con. As I’ve twittered, there is a fundraiser for cancer research the night before Dragon*Con. What I haven’t mentioned is after a summer hiatus, [...]

A scientific mind is a terrible thing to waste

I haven’t been doing a lot of writing lately. I generally just make the excuses, “I’ve been busy” or say “I don’t make money on my blog and need to focus on paid jobs.” These are just excuses though. I can always find time to write. The truth is, I just can’t find it in [...]

Emerging Fields: Astronomy Communications and Education

When I started graduate school, I was given the impression that astronomy consisted of two broad formats (observational and theoretical) and addressed a set of specific subtopics (planets, stars, intersteller media, galaxies/cosmology). In this paradigm, people who studied how people learn astronomy were off to the side somewhere. In broad brush strokes, this is a [...]

An academic life punctuated by bullets, part 2

There are some titles that should never be reused. This is part 2 of this post I wrote in 2007. This older post is better than this one. Please read the older post here.
Earlier this evening I got an IM from a friend alerting me that this afternoon there had been a shooting at the [...]

Galileoscope: A dream of 1 Telescope Per Child

I know a set of men who had a dream. They wanted to see every child in the world have access to a high-quality low-cost telescope. They wanted something that would show the rings of Saturn, survive a tumble down the stairs, and just keep revealing the sky night after night after night. This is [...]

You must have Power to Stop Discrimination

This is a piece on gender inequity and sexual discrimination (not sexual harassment, which is a different and emotionally more devastating thing). I’m writing this at this time not because of any one thing that’s happened, but because of a culmination of things. Sometimes it just seems like a topic is in the air, building [...]

Digital Divide and Novel Technologies

I’m in hardware Mecca. Their are massive monitors, coffee table touch displays that my coffee cup won’t destroy, universal wireless, and outlets in abundance. I’m at MS Faculty Summit – a program put on by MS Research’s Academic program. I am surrounded by other faculty from around the world and the top creative minds from [...]

Complete: 1 Semester

The semester is over.
My grades are posted.
My students have received their grades.
I am 3 forms (paperwork will kill me) from starting my summer.
And I plan to play a bit, write a lot, travel too much, and try and remember how to jump horses over itty bitty fences designed to restrain dachunds.
w00t

Classifying Planets

This year’s Masursky Lecture is being given by Alan Stern. Stern seriously earned my respect last year in the face of a disgruntled room of geophysicists who didn’t have the nuclear engines they needed, who’d been told that Mars was not a funding priority, and who had been saddled with manned moon plans. He handled [...]

Catching up

It’s been a while since I last blogged. I have to admit that I’ve missed it, but the past few months have been a bit busy. Things are finally starting to reach the point where I can begin to reveal some of what’s going on.
About a year ago I went to the UK for the [...]