derekbruff's blog

As I mentioned here a few days ago, Richard Cyr (Biology, Penn State) visited Vanderbilt on Tuesday.  He gave two talks, one on faculty careers in the sciences, and one teaching large science classes.  I shared some highlights from the two talks on the new Vanderbilt Center for Teaching Twitter account as he was presenting.  You can see all of these tweets in one place right here.  We were glad to have Richard join us for the day!

Richard Cyr of Penn State University is visiting Vanderbilt University today.  The Vanderbilt Center for Teaching will be "live-tweeting" his sessions today, one on academic careers in the sciences, the other on teaching large science courses.  Follow our "tweets" on Twitter.

The latest episode of the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching podcast features a panel discussion with Kathy Friedman,assistant professor in the Biological Sciences Department and AnnKindfield, senior lecturer in the Department of Teaching and Learningat Peabody College.Kathy Friedman talks about studentmisconceptions she has encountered when teaching biological sciencesand what she does to address them. Ann Kindfield follows up by sharingwith the group her research around inscriptional practices in scienceand science education.

There's an interesting debate about the proper role of active learning in the college physics classroom going on here in response to a blog post by Diana Senechal about classroom response systems ("clickers") and the MIT TEAL classroom.

And by "interesting" I mean largely one-sided.  I thought that CIRTL folks might want to weigh in on the debate with a comment or two to provide additional perspectives.

A couple of weeks ago, Stephanie Chasteen of the University of Colorado-Boulder shared a series of blog posts on teaching with classroom response systems ("clickers") in upper-division physics courses: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3  Read More »

The "computational knowledge engine" Wolfram|Alpha provides much of the functionality of a computer algebra system (CAS) for free to the general public. This makes some sense since the service is provided by Wolfram Research, the makers of the CAS Mathematica.

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The latest episode of the CFT podcast features an audio interview with Guil Gualda, assistant professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences at Vanderbilt University, in which he discusses his fall 2008 course, "Geology of National Parks." The course featured a field trip over fall break to the Grand Canyon and a class project that recreated that trip in Google Earth. Guil has some great thoughts on how aspects of this project motivated his students to do great work.