Mordecai-Mark Mac Low

Associate Curator and Chair

Astrophysics

Department of Astrophysics

American Museum of Natural History

79th Street at Central Park West
New York, NY 10024-5192

Phone:

212-496-3443

FAX:

212-769-5007

http://research.amnh.org/users/mordecai

What are, to you, the key issues in creating learning resources that support your teaching style and your student's learning styles?

Balancing comprehensibility against completeness, and content against process. That is, there's always the temptation to push as much material as possible in, to the neglect of making clear to students where it came from, and what it means.

What is your vision for the "textbook" of the future and what impediments do you see to realizing that vision?

Wikipedia demonstrates what a distributed group with a common goal can accomplish using modern tools. The question is how to motivate academics to participate in such an effort, as well as how to validate the resulting product.

Describe briefly any research you have undertaken on teaching or learning.

I haven't published anything in the refereed literature. I am helping advise an EdD student studying the educational use of astrophysical visualizations currently. We use the results of prospective and retrospective studies in the design of Space Shows, and in creating teacher training programs at the Museum.

Have you created publicly accessible learning resources?

I've participated heavily in the production of the Hayden Planetarium Space Shows, "Search for Life: Are we Alone?" and "Cosmic Collisions", which are now distributed both nationally and internationally. These are 20 minute productions bringing modern astrophysics to the planetarium audience using high-end visualization techniques on supercomputer models and observations, with roughly a million viewers per year.

How would you like to contribute to the workshop?

I bring a somewhat orthogonal perspective as an active research scientist at an institution that engages heavily in both teacher training (hundreds of teachers per year at different levels) and informal education of K12 students (with 500,000 student visits per year). I may well end up representing the K12 teaching community in some indirect way -- certainly the issues of textbooks are even more vital there than at the undergraduate level.

What would you like to take away from the workshop?

A clear direction to proceed in designing and implementing tools for teaching.