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Want Earth and Mind to Come to You?

Posted: Apr 26 2010

Want to be sure not to miss the latest posts and discussions on the Earth and Mind blog? There are a number of ways you can get automatically notified when the site is updated.

Get Email Notifications of New Articles

This technique for getting email notifications about new articles takes advantage of the site RSS feeds (learn more about this below) and a 3rd party service. But you don't need to know anything about RSS feeds (not even what those words mean) to get the email messages.
 

1. Go to http://blogtrottr.com/.
2. Paste in the url of this site: http://serc.carleton.edu/earthandmind and your email address
3. Hit Submit.

That's it. You'll now get automatic emails whenever new articles are posted. 
 

Get RSS Notifications of New Articles

This site provides a built in RSS feed that's always updated with the latest article information. If you already have a preferred way of reading RSS feeds just point your reader at the site, or the RSS link at the bottom of the front page and you're set. If you're new to RSS here's an introduction to using RSS.
 

Get Email Notifications When People Post to a Particular Discussion

Each Earth and Mind article is followed by a space for public discussion. If you've interested in the discussion for a particular article you can use the small "notify me of new posts" link that appears immediately above each discussion. That will take you to a page where you can indicate how often you'd like to receive updates. If you haven't yet created yourself an account (or aren't logged in) you'll be prompted to do that before the notification is set up. If you'd like to change your notification settings later on you can always visit the notification page for your account to make changes or unsubscribe.
 

Get Email Notifications for All Discussions on the Site

It's also possible to sign up to be notified by email when someone posts to a discussion anywhere on the Earth and Mind site. Just follow this link.

Related Blogs

Posted: Apr 26 2010

Earth & Environment

• Speaking of Geoscience: The Geological Society of America's guest blog. "....scientists sharing ideas and information, asking questions, and dissecting issues across a range of earth-science topics..."
• Real Climate: "Climate Science from Climate Scientists." The scientists who blog at this site are especially good at: (a) explaining the science behind climate-related news, (b) providing context for important, newly-published scientific publications.
• Highly Allochthonous: focus on tectonics and continental deformation. This site posted an excellent and early account of the tectonic setting of the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
• Hypocentre: The blogger, Ian Stimpson, is a seismologist/structural geologist at Keele University, and the posts tend towards earthquakes and UK topics. In addition to the usual chronological archive, there is also a clickable map of his blogged-about localities.
• "Earth science observations, news, photos, teaching, & commentary,"by Callan Bentley, of Northern Virginia Community College. Strong on photography of geologically interesting sites.

Interactions between Humans and Earth/Environment

• The Oil Drum: "Discussions about energy and our future." Strong on "Peak Oil" and challenges of running a society/economy with diminishing energy supplies. Deeply engaged commenter community.
• The Archdruid Report: "... perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society."Goes deeper into philosophy and has a more literary writing style than most of the other blogs listed here.
• Climate Progress: "...climate science, politics, and solutions." Overlaps somewhat with Real Climate but slants more towards societal implications, and the voice is more journalistic.
• Question Everything: "...How does the world work?"Topics covered include: biophysical economics, education, evolution, sapience, and systems science. The blogger, George Mobus, has a background in zoology, decision science, and computer science.

Communicating about the Earth & Environment

• The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media: "...forum to foster dialogue on climate change among scientists, journalists, policymakers, and the public."Their take on "media" is broad, including museums, the arts, and music, as well as traditional news media and digital new media.
• Columbia Journalism Review: The Observatory: "...online critique of science and environmental journalism."Covers a wider range of science topics and a narrower range of media types than the Yale Forum.
• Skeptical Science: "Getting skeptical about global warming skepticism..." "Explaining climate change science & rebutting global warming misinformation"

Teaching about the Earth & Environment

• Earth Learning Ideas: "Innovative, Earth-related Teaching Ideas." This site posts a new hands-on teaching teaching idea every two weeks; most are low-cost, hands-on student activities suitable for middle school or high school.

Thinking (Cognition)

• Cognitive Daily: "A New Cognitive Psychology Article Nearly Every Day." Readable summaries of recent research articles, leavened with humor. Covers a wide range of topics, especially strong on perception.
• The Frontal Cortex: Well-written musings about the intersection between neurosciences and everyday life. The name comes from the part of the brain that is thought to control complex cognitive behaviors, personality expression, and decision making, among other things.

Visualizations and Representations

• Information is Beautiful: "Ideas, knowledge, issues, data--visualized." Original, creative visualization of all sorts of intriguing data and information. The blogger, David McCandless, describes himself as a visual and data journalist. Unfortunately not much data from nature, and little metacognitive reflection on how the visualizations are invented and why they work.
• Visualizing Sustainability page from the blog "Computing for Sustainability." 282 diagrams or visualizations depicting the concept of "sustainability." Many variations of flowcharts and Venn diagrams, but also cartoons, tables, and much else.
• High level architecture of earth system models page from the blog "Serendipity:" "... what has software engineering got to do with climate change?"

Using Logic Diagrams to Organize Knowledge and Pinpoint Ignorance

Posted: Apr 18 2010 by

Kim Kastens

(adapted from essay and talk prepared for the Cutting Edge Workshop on "Developing Student Understanding of Complex Systems in the Geosciences," Carleton College, April 18-20, 2010.)

Introduction

One of the hardest aspects of learning about complex Earth Systems is organizing fragments of knowledge into some kind of coherent framework. I teach students who want to be science journalists or environmental journalists. These students are looking towards a career in which they will frequently have to jump right into the deep end and come quickly up to speed on complicated new ideas. I am always on the lookout for techniques that will help them construct understandings quickly and accurately, techniques that will continue to work for them when they no longer have me and their other professors to scaffold their learning, techniques that will help them to become effective self-directed learners.

One of the most powerful techniques that I have come up with is a type of concept map I call a logic diagram. More

Reflections from the Front Lines of Interdisciplinarity

Posted: Mar 26 2010 by

Kim Kastens

I recently spoke on a panel about "Interdisciplinary Research" at a conference of education researchers. I was recruited to provide an eye-witness account from the point of view of someone who does interdisciplinary research, to be followed by three speakers who research interdisciplinarity. I found this to be an interesting assignment, requiring new thinking on my part. Here's what I came up with:

More

Comments (2)

Challenges Inherent in Teaching Geosciences

Posted: Mar 12 2010 by Kim Kastens

Several inherent attributes of ocean, atmosphere and solid earth sciences contribute to making these disciplines challenging to teach and learn at the K-14 level. These include the large spatial scale of important processes, the consequent reliance on models and representations rather than actual target phenomena in hands-on activities, the centrality of systems thinking and emergent phenomena, and the importance of non-experimental modes of inquiry. None of these difficulties is unique to geosciences, and none is insurmountable, but they do require purposeful attention from educators, curriculum and program designers, and evaluators. More