Hello everyone,
We will be using this discussion format throughout the workshop to ask and answer questions on various topics. We encourage everyone to participate freely.

For starters, please jump in to say hi, to introduce yourself and/or just to make a test post and see how it works.

I will go ahead and introduce myself...
I am Karin, the sender of lots of emails! I work for SERC and spend most of my time involved with the Cutting Edge series of workshops. This is my first 'virtual' workshop, however I teach online and I participate in the occasional online forum, so this format is a comfortable one for me.

I teach an introductory course in environmental geology and I use a data-based assignment about hurricane frequency in the North Atlantic. I like the data-driven approach but I am looking for more ideas to strengthen this assignment. I have also noticed that some students go way overboard with the relationship between hurricanes and climate change. Some of them like to blame every recent hurricane and disaster (including earthquakes!) on climate change. So I am looking forward to hearing more about the recent science so that I can get a clearer picture of the relationship.

OK, enough about me. Now it's your turn - click the 'add to the discussion' link below to share your own introduction and thoughts.

thanks!
-Karin

Hi,

I am Brian and I will be participating in the workshop. I am really hoping to develop or adopt hands-on exercises or activities to use in the classroom, especially those exercises that do not require technology to conduct.

I am a medical geographer, with a background in natural hazards and climate change, now transitioning into climate change and public health issues.

Hi, I'm Ingrid. I'm an assistant professor who teaches mostly large undergraduate classes (well it feels that way at the moment). I'm interested in the causal relationships between climate change and climate phenomena in general. I would like to use hurricanes as one aspect of the earths heat redistribution, and get my students to think about prediction (as a guess at what might happen, but they will get the caveats of what we don't know in the end) using knowledge they have gained in intro oceanography.

Hi, I'm Sean. I'm the Technical Director here at SERC (and a physicist by training). I develop the tools that run the SERC websites and will be trying to keep the technology running smoothly for this workshop.

I've just added a screencast to the technical information page with an introduction to creating your account, editing your profile and working with activities. Check it out:
http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/hurricanes08/tech.html

Hi Sean. Is your desk top view in Yugma supposed to be black right now?

Hi all! I'm Mel. I teach physical geology, environmental science, and general physical science at a small 2 yr college. All 3 classes have a climate change component to them. I'm always looking for new ways to engage my students with hands on activities/assignments. I have participated in several of these online workshops, and I learn something valuable every time. I look forward to getting to know all of you. Mel

Hi, I'm Lisa. This is my first e-forum and second cutting edge workshop. I'm a paleoclimatologist working on high resolution climate events. Eventually, I hope to detect individual NAO winters and Sudden Warming events in my lake sediment records. I teach at a primarily undergraduate institution teaching climate change to applied meteorology majors, and weather and environmental science to non-science majors. I'd like to learn how to use Hurricane data to demonstrate climate relationships to the met students. I also hope to learn data handling exercises for non-science majors, using a cool subject like hurricanes to intrigue them.

Hi, folks. I'm Ben. I teach physical geology, environmental geology, and global climate change courses at SUNY Geneseo. About half of my students are from down-state New York, and are anxious to learn more about extreme weather events. I'm most interested in learning the current thinking on the link between historical climate change and hurricanes, and to share with you and learn from you various teaching activities for this topic.

Hi, I'm Dave. By training I'm a meteorologist, though with no particular research expertise in hurricanes or climate change. Last year I ran across a highly readable book called "Storm World" by Chris Mooney, on the scientific (and political) debate swirling around hurricanes and climate. I realized that the topic fit wonderfully into an upper-division course on the science of climate change that I was co-teaching at San Francisco State University with rotating geology or oceanography colleagues, so we introduced the topic, it went well, and we want to develop it further. I might also soon be teaching an upper-division, non-majors course on violent weather, and the topic could be terrific for that audience, too. I look forward to hearing your ideas!

Greetings! I'm Rob. I teach Earth Science and Environmental Geology to non-science majors at a suburban community college outside Phila. I've been doing some climate change work with my students in both courses for a long time; and the data and understanding keep getting richer, and I feel at times I'm getting left in the dust. So any chance I can get to learn from others and develop some better instructional approaches at the same time, I'm there. This is my second SERC workshop; I was in the first online 'class' for Course Design in the summer of 2005 -- an absolutely terrific workshop.

Hi - I'm Cindy - I'm a paleoclimate modeler and teach a wide range of courses, from Intro Meteorology to advanced Mesoscale meteorology, Climatology, and Global Change at the Univ of Northern CO. The topic of hurricanes and/or climate comes up in *every* class I teach. I'm looking for new ways to present this to students at all levels. In my advanced courses - Climatology and Global Change(for grads), we read and discuss journal articles on the connection between hurricanes in climate. I'm looking for ways to make this activity more effective - and some ideas on how to bring this topic into my intro and non-majors courses.

On another note, this workshop also interests me because of the online format. I have recently begun some teaching online - and feel like I am fumbling around a bit. Part of the problem is that I have never taken a class online. What types of activities/discussions/assignments will make my courses effective? I'm hoping to get some ideas from this workshop, and get something of the 'student' perspective.

Hello all. This is Chris. I am an environmental geologist at a small, liberal arts college. I primarily teach GIS and remote sensing, but I also teach a few other courses that discuss climate change. For the first time, I will be teaching an honors seminar on global climate change, and am looking for some good ideas for activities to incorporate into an interdisciplinary class focusing on climate change. Hopefully, I can apply some of those ideas into my other courses as well.
I look forward to working with you in the morning.

Hi there! My name is Serena and I am a marine micropaleontologist studying past ocean circulation changes and their relation to climate. I teach a variety of Earth Science courses at a mainly undergraduate institution, both on campus and online. In particular, every semester I am in charge of a 200-level class on weather and climate change, where every time we discuss severe weather students have several questions on if and how global warming will affect hurricanes. Therefore, I would like to develop an online lab activity for my students where they will use available data to inquiry about possible relations between global warming and the number and intensity of hurricanes. This lab will be for college students, but since a large number of our majors are in the teaching track, I would like to have also a simplified version at the high school level that my students can use when they start teaching.

Good morning everyone. I'm Todd, a first year faculty member at SUNY Oneonta in the Earth Sciences department. I teach Intro Meteorology (2 sections) as well as Remote Sensing, Oceanography, Computers in Meteorology, and Atmospheric Radiation. I am also currently developing a course dedicated to the study of climate change and its impacts. My passion is developing new ways to visualize data and to allow students (K-16) to experience hands-on science. To that end, I am enrolled in this program to discuss how we might make some interesting activities for all levels. I will be giving a talk tomorrow on some general approaches I have used successfully in the past in my outreach activities - but I mostly am looking forward to participating in this program when I'm not running back and forth between my 4 classes.

I plan to post a few links on here to some data I've had success with using for my hurricane talks in the past. The specific linkages to climate change are something I'm hoping to develop this week.

Hello,
I'm Ned Gardiner, currently with NOAA's Climate Program Office producing visualizations. My background is in remote sensing, GIS, and ecology. Rather than pursue a faculty or research position after graduate school, I worked at New York's American Museum of Natural History building visualizations aimed at the public (read: middle school level of science knowledge) in HDTV. Low resolution versions of many of these are available at sciencebulletins.amnh.org
My production model is to work directly with primary researchers to convey authentic science messages and to that end, I am working with today's lecturer, Tom Knutson, on a project describing tropical cyclone science. Our product will be distibuted on the Science on a Sphere platform (sos.noaa.gov).

I helped organize this workshop because visualization is best used to aid other forms of communication and teaching. Working with this group is one of the most effective ways I can imagine of ensuring the highest possible impact of visualizations that I help produce because you each directly work with a presumably attentive audience of people who will enter all walks of life. I look forward to learning from each of you about the teaching process and perhaps being able to lend some resources for your own efforts.