The following TED talk demonstrates some of the scientifically accurate visualizations created by biomedical animator Drew Berry. The link under the video will take you to the Walter+Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research site where a number of the 3D animations are housed and viewable by the public.
Possibilities: Adding kinesthetic activities to online course offerings
The following Forbes Video demonstrates a technology that may allow us to incorporate kinesthetic activities into online course offerings.
Physicists Seek To Lose The Lecture As Teaching Tool
The NPR “All Thing Considered” show conducted a very interesting interview with Joe Redish, a physics professor at the University of Maryland on classroom lecturing and the need to consider other methods of information delivery to students.
Importance of Applied Math in Education…
Source: The Chronicle
Selected Professional Development Resources
- There’s CodeYear and Codecademy. Codecademy provides simple, self-guided lessons on programming. Currently there are a number of lessons on Javascript, and there are more lessons in more languages on the way. CodeYear is a layer on top of Codecademy where you can sign up to receive Codecademy lessons by email. ProfHacker did a writeup on Codecademy back in September that gives another overview. I’ve worked through the “Getting Started with Programming” lesson from Week 1 and it was a lot of fun.
- You can also sign up for Stanford University’s massively-open online Introduction to Computer Science course that starts up In February. This course sounds much more like a traditional university course, with online video lectures, assignments,and quizzes. The course will focus on Python It’s not for credit, but there will be a discussion forum for students (“users”?) of the course that should add a nice human touch. I’ve signed up for this course as well as another Stanford MOOC on cryptography. If I had the time, I’d also do their courses on algorithms and information theory… and a few others besides. Sigh.
- Don’t forget MIT’s OpenCourseWare class on Introduction to Computer Science and Programming, which was one of the main inspirations for my inverted MATLAB class and was a great help in preparing me to teach that class. It’s expertly taught, and the assignments and course materials are top-notch.
- And for the math people, Project Euler provides a great set of mathematical computer programming problems that will sharpen your skills in both math and programming. These range from fairly straightforward (“Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000?) to forbiddingly complex and are not posed in any particular language, so you can choose your favorite platform and go to it — or try to solve problems in multiple languages. I’ve set a goal to solve at least three of these problems in Python by spring break.