Grace Learning and Education Notes

Return to Conference Schedule

Learning and Education Official Notes

Marie Studer: lead. Beginning with questions:

How many people intersect with educators or students? More than half attending.

How many have been educators or students? Again, more than half.

Shows that everyone has experience in realm and opinions on discussions here.

4 panelists:

Doug Wilkin
Devin Reese
Ken Walker
Natalia Zamora

Here to explore relevance of biodiversity literature to lifelong learners. Looking to figure out how we can give access to more and better information, make it exciting for them, and allow them to provide relevant information and contributions back. Figure out what they can contribute to us.

Questions for discussion:

Why do BHL and others even want to engage with educational audiences?
What does it take to engage with them effectively?
What is the right timeline for planning to engage, and to what degrees?
Where are the students and teachers and what media platforms do they use? Is that how we engage with them?
How can we influence educational practices? How can we make it compelling?
How do we take advantage of those rich stories/soap operas in controversies in biodiversity?

Devin Reese:

Consultant to national sciences research center; Science curriculum consultant.

Focusing on secondary school. Good place to start the discussion. That might eventually feed model for primary school classroom.

What do we know about how secondary school students learn science?

• By grade 4 they're loosing interest in science
• As students learn power of science, they also become interested in science, so we need to help them learn the power of science.
• Students don't use evidence very well; rely on personal views
• experience in using evidence in the classroom can improve their ability to use evidence
• students are not very good at controlling variables. students often design experiments with lots of uncontrolled variables.

What can BHL offer to instruction?

• Can get students exciting about range of phenomena science can explain
• become comfortable using science as evidence
• become familiar with real practice of science

How can BHL offer this?

• Show how good science is rooted in long historical context of what is known to date
• model how scientific process unfolds, including how to study particular research article
• reveal messy aspects of science
• demonstrate ways to organize information to make it more interpretable

Strengths of BHL for students?

• search on species name/keyword
• access from EOL pages; EOL pages quite accessible
• literature in multiple languages
• great links in BHL including Flickr and Facebook

How can BHL better reach students?

• Bring new types of content into the collection
  • What kind of literature might we want in BHL that's not primary literature? Much of this is much more accessible for students.
• engage specific user groups to provide specific input
  • Majority of high school students today not using primary literature. We could focus on science magnet secondary schools for user groups for input.
  • Inquiry-based curriculum development programs that participate in state adoption process
• offer other database tools for young audiences
  • Language and tools for BHL tools are too complicated
  • Should be able to search for common names
  • Search tool that filters content for more recent literature
  • more salient access from BHL to EOL
• communications technologies high priority for students
  • Leafsnap - app to take picture of app and ID it; similar idea might be good for BHL

Dream scenario:

• Students on BHL blog/facebook. It's inspired them to go to primary literature. student experiments have improved after exploring good experiments in BHL.

Doug Wilkin:

CK-12 foundation:
Mission: to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the k-12 market, both in US and worldwide
Open source/content format
books termed as "FlexBook"

FlexBooks:

• All content created by CK-12 intended to provide a foundation for the creation of FlexBOOk - customized books that can be updated on a daily basis, at a moment's notice.
• Can be customized to meet needs of students, creativity and style of teachers, and goals of states
• Offer complete set of material for middle school and high school student, including all teacher's editions.
• All of this is free.
• Use a share-alike license
• Material available online and in variety of formats.

Vision:

Create collaborative environment; collaboration between high school students and college academics

CK-12 EOL collaboration:

How can two groups work together to benefit science education? Want to make biodiversity tools accessible to high school student. Biodiversity is underemphasized, underrepresented, and under-taught in typical American high school class. It's too important not to be discussed.Schools and teachers evaluated on test scores with curriculum dominated by cellular and molecular biology and genetics, how do we make them care about biodiversity.

We need to offer them something that is exciting; a unique opportunity.

New CK-12 Book: Understanding Biodiversity - collaboration between CK-12 and EOL.

• Specifically aimed at high school student.
• It will be written by high school students for high school students.
• Will be maintained by and accessed through CK-12.
• All students know about biology is pre-med and pre-vet; we need to expand their horizons
• we need to include links from other websites to this book to make it accessible to everyone and make it visible
• Should generate collaborations between high school students and biodiversity research centers.
• Students will be specifically credited.
• This is planned to be given to students to work on on their own
• Students given specific species to research and give specific categories for them to research

What do secondary students need from BHL?

• If I know little about biodiversity, where do I start?
• needs to be:
  • Easy to use; explains what biodiversity is, brings them in and keeps them exploring
  • explains why biodiversity is important
  • appropriate links on BHL homepage
  • suggestions for species for secondary students to research

Q&A

• will researchers work with students to develop these books
  • Most won't have the time unless they also get something out of it. Need to build a framework that will also help them get something out of it.
    • Science education is at an epidemic low level. It's our responsibility to raise the quality of scientific education in America.

Natalia Zamora

Costa Rica by end of 80s has adopted national conservation strategy. We need to know, use, and save biodiversity.

INBio:

• created in 1989
• mission to increase awareness of biodiversity
• try to put in different formats and media
• try to work with politicians and decision makers
• have biological collections and products like publications, guides, species pages, educational materials, virtual learning communities, biodiversity theme park

Cyberhives:

• stimulate creative and innovative use of scientific technology in:
  • classroom
  • field
  • cyberspace
• build collective knowledge with other students in country and experts on specific taxonomic group
• schools include high schools with Internet Access from grades 3, 5, 7, 10, and 11
• 3 teachers per school
• ministry of the environment and energy also participate
• they train teachers (specific teachers that are really interested) - 9 month program
• train students - get them in field trip and then students choose topic they want to work on for rest of year
• students develop own projects supported by community and parataxonomists.
• at end of year students go to symposium to communicate research results
• want to scale to whole country; address other fields; go international (south america); explore mobile technology applications

Question asked to colleagues: who knows what BHL is and who uses it?

• some have used very little; some didn't know it existed; some think it's of great value
• educators think it's a great start but too scientific for students and teachers
• Additional questions:
  • How well is bHL known around the world?
  • who are users?
  • which info should be digitized first?
• What do audiences want from digitized literature?
  • Packaged information thematic and organized, with images links to articles; short dynamic and interesting;
• How can we make digital resources accessible?
  • strategic partners; link BHL to country's biodiversity databases;
• What are tools that provide added value to BHL?
  • different levels of depth; tool wiki style where users can build knowledge based on BHL content; do personalized collection; my own report;
• Can we leverage audiences for crowd-sourcing?
  • Yes, but differentiate between science and popular knowledge; need different tools for urban and rural audiences; need applications for mobile technology

Principles of Interpretation:

• interpretation is art; chief aim of interpretation is not instruction but provocation

BHL-Europe virtual exhibition is the kind of packaging we need for students

We need to prioritize the audiences we want to work with, and if it's students, some interpretation of the content needs to be done.

Ken Walker

Current focus is to transition digital medium to use museum-based science to information-based science

Dream Scenario? Instead giving cornerstones of his approach:

Computers are bicycles for our mind:

• science is the practice of reduction - breaking things down to simple ideas to explain the complex
  • humans are hard-wired for reductionism.
• the practitioners of science are forever trying to undress nature while our artistic impulse is to be wrapped in it.
  • the inform related strands of thinking in ways that promote energy and vision. this energy pushes us ahead.
• learn to discover or discover to learn
  • most went through learn to discover with school;
  • users wants more than just access to data.
  • fact sheets do not engage the users
  • traditional method is learn before you are allowed to discover
• New knowledge is not science until it is made social
  • introduce art into learning; get kids to make models and explain why things are certain things
  • the internet has provided myriad of ways to make science social
• New Einsteins will be scientists who share
  • many major incursions found in australia were discovered by public, not scientists
  • citizen science can discover and document a wide range of new science

Q&A:

Q: When we talk of education, we talk of going directly to student. should it be the authors of text books and publishing houses that we should be focusing on?
A: If we want an impact, we have to make publishers start to think of ways to link to our resources because that will get these resources into millions of classrooms.

Comment: In 1980s evidence and experiment was introduced in science curriculum in US. In 1990s it was taken out because of budget cuts. Now it's being addressed again. We tend to think of science as something that must be memorized, and we can't do science until we know a certain number of facts. Citizen scientists can make this happen. Think of students as citizen scientists instead of students. We tend to teach students that with science it's either right or wrong, but it's not true.