School Spirit

As I was searching for things to make “delicious”, I came across this nugget:

I know it’s like a school spirit thing to name virtually every service associated with Baylor something involving “bears” or our school colors (green and gold, in case you been under a rock in another state since school has started).

This is really odd though. At first glance, I totally thought that Baylor went outside of the typical and was referring to the Asian animal. Then, I read the subtext and was a tad disappointed. Oh well!

Surprise Field Trip 9.24

I loved the show Magic School Bus when I was younger. One of the most frustrating things about my elementary school experience was getting home, even my mom came to pick me up on time, at the tail end of the daily showings on PBS. Luckily there were plenty of reruns and VHSs, so I didn’t have to go without the greatness of the Fritz and her motley crue of curious students.

Much in the same sense, Dr. C gave us ninety seconds to pick up our things and venture down to Moody Library. (a random side note: I love going to Moody and contemplating my ignorance. I mean there’s so much knowledge and information in that place that I know I’ll never have time to delve into.) There we found something that was truly remarkable, (and I’m not just referring to the free food).

That Thursday afternoon, there was an Educause conference that involved assorted Baylor faculty and staff along with professors from all over the world. Instead of using a obnoxiously yellow bus to explore our curriculum, we used the Internet via a Twitter tag (#elifs09), a powerpoint presentation, a virtual parking lot, the seemingly phantom voice of the presenter, and many inquiring minds.

Though the content covered wasn’t a direct derivative of Ted Nelson’s “Computer Lib/Dream Machines”, the connections could definitely be made. Nelson argues very coherently that education shouldn’t be nearly, if at all, as static it is, if we, as a generation of knowledgeable and tech-savvy people, want to truly enlighten our students. The Educause presentation was namely about how to improve the learning environment by intregrating computers (and the internet) more actively into the classroom. During the presentation, we interacted and bounced ideas off of each via the aforementioned twitter tag, and the group covered a whole spectrum of topics from ‘video conversion’ to ‘smartboards’ (my ap bio teacher has one and it’s the coolest thing) to ‘the task-artifact cycle’. It was all extremely intriguing.

The best part of it (besides the free food of course) was that fact I made  a simple suggestion of integrating the integration discussion into our New Media Studies class. Next class we’re going to have two projectors instead of just one (and we’re still working on where the second projector will go) to see how the dynamics of our learning environment will change and if we will indeed learn better. I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited to be a lab rat! I guess that’s the nature of New Media Studies.

Hans Rosling and Statistics

I would lying if i said that i didn’t like numbers, but in the classroom, i find numbers totally and completely irritating. This is probably because I’m constantly bombarded with integrals in calculus, molecular ratios in chemistry, and experimental data in psychology.

Nonetheless, I can tolerate numbers. After all, how would I call or text people without them? haha

But that’s the beside that point. In class, we watched a ‘tedtalk’ video about statistics and demographics about the all in the countries.

Hans Rosling discussed general global census data collected from the 1960s/1970s up until 2003. Though the information he used to create the animated and interactive visuals is readily available for anyone to view and use, it is what he did with the info that was astounding.

Even in the video, he said that statisticians wouldn’t approve of his methods because they present the facts in a completely different manner. His graphics are meant for hypotheses to be drawn from. Rosling’s hypotheses are fairly groundbreaking; not only are they groundbreaking, but they are mostly common sense. Alas, common sense isn’t so common anymore.

This is just my long-winded way of saying I really like the way Rosling’s presentation.

Do/n’t Break the Shackles

i very recently was finally able to regain access to my twitter and wordpress after a slew of confirmation emails! sometimes i feel as if i’m actually being oppressed by the luxury technology, esp. the internet offers.