From software to flowware

We talk about Web 2.0, a construct of the web accessing itself and people using the power of the Internet to have digital work done for them. I believe a number of our students are already flowing seamlessly between the non-digital word and the digital world and that our next challenge as teachers is to do the same in our instruction. While it is not one of the NETS or ISB standards, having this quick and appropriate accessing of digital information, applications, and conveniences is a goal I am increasingly seeking in my classes. I want to highlight the quick and appropriate.

There are many teachable moments that used to be left to a separate "let's-get-to-that-later-if-time-permits" list off to the right of our white boards. When students ask those questions and the answer is not ever given, the curiousity we seek to tap, the 'digging for deeper understanding' we claim we support, and the contributions shy people give to the class discussion can easily be stifled. With affordable, anywhere, anytime, abundant digital age we live in now, the class can easily donate seconds or a minute to taking advantage of these teachable moments.

Today my lesson was on the history of our understanding of inheritance. I wanted students to learn about racism, prejudism against women in the field of science, and the science behind our present understanding of the structure of DNA. Three times, students asked questions that helped students and me alike know more about this topic. (and I am looking up another question now before I continue....see Chargaff below)

Reference: http://kentsimmons.uwinnipeg.ca/cm1504/Image265.gif

1) A woman named Rosalind Franklin had a "beautiful" x-ray crystalograph of DNA. It looks like a smudged 'X' on paper. "How did she see something about the structure in this picture?" Looking up 'Franklin Crystalography DNA', I found a clear explanation that the 'X' showed there were two helices and the widths of the lines of the 'X' being uniform showed that the two lines were uniform in length.

Reference: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikibooks/en/5/5d/Biochemcamille2.jpg

2) "Franklin didn't get the nobel prize, but she got an award later..." She not only did not get any award, her real contribution was not recognized until 1968, 15 years after the discovery of DNA's structure and five years after she died of ovarian cancer.

Reference for image on left:
http://media.photobucket.com/image/Watson%20and%20Crick/Primate_bucket/WatsonJames-CrickFrancis.jpg

3) I wanted a copy of the posed picture taken of Watson and Crick, which was readily available on google.images . See the above picture on the left.
I also found it on Flickr, thanks to mmullen31. See the image on the right. I am not sure it should be in public domain because it comes from the text Unraveling the History of DNA. Notice the Flickr image does not have the quality of Google.images yet.

4) I remember hearing something about another scientist in the race to discover DNA's structure, Edwin Chargaff. He did not get the Nobel price, either, with Watson and Crick. I knew he had called Watson and Crick something like "intellectual pygmies", so I searched 'Chargaff intellectual pygmies' and got:

He [Chargaff] said later on that, "They impressed me by their extreme ignorance ... I never met two men who knew so little—and aspired to so much." Later on after the structure of DNA had been published Chargaff said, "That in our day such pygmies throw such giant shadows only shows how late in the day it has become." Larry Moran, "Sandwalk: Strolling with a Skeptical Biochemist." 23 July 2007.

In the 50s, the racial and stature slurs were equally insulting.

I guess I did not address the issue of flowware well in this discussion. I do not yet consider myself one who flows seemlessly between technological developments. It is my goal to do so to be a more connected and more appropriate teacher for students of our time.

[The comments added to this site after my posting it shed light onto why the woman Franklin did not get the Nobel prize. She was off base about the helical structure of a complementary A form of DNA. (same source)]

Use of cell phones in class

Cell phones come with increasing capacities for doing useful information gathering in science classes. For the present unit, I taught students the skills of planning an investigation in which they measure the change of some populations across some sort of gradient. I gave them a recipe lab to meaure how the density and species of plants changes as one gets further from the trunk of a tree. The students then individually found a gradient on campus that they chose to investigate and developed a lab to sample this.

I thought this would be an ideal opportunity to investigate the variety of ways cell phones could be used in the lab. The plots the students were studying varied from the berm by the parking lot in front of the school, to the weeded area by the Suriwan Gate, to the slopes and drainage ditches on the cross country path around the soccer and baseball fields. I would not be able to be in constant contact with all of the students, so I gave them my cell phone noumber and asked them to call me when they had questions or concerns. I also suggested they use the cell phone to take pictures of the individual species of plants they were sampling and the calculator to do their averaging. I suggested students could use the angle function on some phones to measure the slopes of their plots. Now that I look back on it, those with GPS functions should have included the locations of their plots and used the compass on their phones to lay out the transects of their investigations.

Within five minutes, while I was working with one student, another student 150 metres away had a question that required my going to her plots. I was able to help her move to another, more suitable location early in the class period, reducing frustration and lost class time.

Students also used LoggerPro interfacing during this lab to measure the temperature and light intensities at various locations in their plots. This was done to either ensure these variables were maintained as relatively constant throughout their plots, or showed the values of the independent variable they were studying. (A student might check how the shade of trees affects the plant life. By measuring the light intensities at different locations under a tree and away from a tree, students plot the change in plant species' populations against light intensities.)

To use the light and temperature probes outside, students needed to put batteries in their LoggerPros, open the software on the computer and run the program for the appropriate probes, and use and care for the computers outside. It was a joy to watch students using a computer like they normally would use a clipboard and notebook to gather data and make observations.