Social media can do a lot of cool things, like launch wee babies from post-college obscurity into weblebrity stardom, but we won’t likely be seeing the Twitterversity of YouFace issuing a Bachelors of Micro-Marketing anytime soon.

Last week’s Social Media Week panel on “The Future of Social Media in Higher Education,” was a lot like watching an awkward blind date.  Sure, social media and higher ed might have a lot of common interests like “iPhones” and “Facebook”, but they probably shouldn’t be planning on having internet babies anytime soon:

Mashable’s Adam Ostrow envisioned a future where college professors might amass tens of thousands of followers on Twitter and use social media to “build their personal brand”, while Fordham University’s Dr. Kathleen King saw a future where the classroom might become increasingly accessible through virtual courses using technologies like Skype or Facebook.  Jatched.com co-founder and NYU undergrad Mary Casey predicted a future where augmented reality might enable students to point their iPhones at objects and gain instant visual access to layers of information.

College professors as web celebrities?  Virtual courses?  Augmented reality apps and iPhones as required texts?

Each of these innovations comes with its own unique set of baggage, not least of which is the fact that institutions of higher education do not operate like savvy corporations.  By the end of the hour long panel, serious issues like educational access and the economic barriers that might prohibit widespread adoption of new technologies never had a chance to be fully addressed.

As higher education faces crippling budget cuts during this “Great Recession,” perhaps the question we should be asking is not how social media will change the way students learn in the classroom, but how social media might be harnessed to rescue higher education from the brink of disaster.  Kickstarter for Universities, anyone?

Watch the full panel on social media and higher education here.

(image via Switched)

Canadian researchers have found that, despite educator worries that comics are “unsuitable reading material… associated with poor quality, cheapness and disposability,” young boys who read comics are more likely to read literature in general, and more likely to enjoy reading.

This should come as news to all the middle school teachers I had who wouldn’t let me count Maus or Tintin books on my reading list.

According to the Canadian Council on Learning, which mostly focused on whether comics can be used to bridge the reading gap between boys and girls (hence the male-centric focus):

Boys who read comic books regularly also tend to read more text-based material and report higher levels of overall reading enjoyment, compared to boys who do not read comic books. In fact, some evidence supports the idea that comic books provide a “gateway” to other literary genres. For example, some researchers have argued that the language of comic books can help young people make the transition from informal everyday language to formal written language.

Another popular myth is that the visual element of comic books makes them more suited to immature readers. In fact, comics can help readers develop a number of useful language and literacy skills. The extensive use of images in a comic book requires readers to develop two kinds of literacy: visual literacy and comics literacy.

The full report was unavailable online at the time of this article, but hopefully can be found here.  More quotes can be found at Bleeding Cool‘s article on the report.

Armenia is a country mad for chess, having won a number of world chess competitions in recent years. Now, the country will impart a love of chess to the next generation, committing $1.43 million to an educational program that will see chess taught as a school curriculum subject for children six and above, who will study chess in classrooms for two hours per week.

While the country is framing the program in terms of Armenia’s world competitiveness in chess, it’s fair to expect that there will be broader educational benefits: Education ministry official Arman Aivazian said that chess lessons would “foster schoolchildren’s intellectual development” and teach students to “think flexibly and wisely.”

(news.com.au via Neatorama. pic via Shutterstock.)

These kids today. Back when I was in school, simply having a cellphone in the school could be enough to land you in hot water. Now, the New York Times is reporting that a growing number of teachers are using Twitter and other digital communication systems as a “back channel” through which students can ask questions and engage in discussions.

Educators who have embraced the new approach say that it brings more people into class discussions. From the NYTimes:

Nicholas Provenzano, an English teacher at Grosse Pointe South High School, outside Detroit, said that in a class of 30, only about 12 usually carried the conversation, but that eight more might pipe up on a backchannel. “Another eight kids entering a discussion is huge,” he noted.

Some students seem to echo this belief. One 17 year old interviewed by the Times said that he never felt the need to speak up during discussions. He adds that when typing, however, he feel like he can better express himself.

Beyond boosting participation, some educators say that modern children respond better to more modern teaching methods. Again, from the Times:

In Exira, Iowa, Kate Weber uses the technology for short periods almost daily with her fourth graders. “You’d think there’s a lot of distraction, but it’s actually the opposite,” she said. “Kids are much quicker at stuff than we are. They can really multitask. They have hypertext minds.”

Bold changes to traditional teaching like this are bound to beg the question: do they work?The discussion about how to incorporate technology into the classroom has been a longstanding one. Years ago, it meant using videos as part of class demonstrations, and teaching Internet research skills. A key difference now is that the technology in question is already used by the students, and in the case of Twitter may already be in their hands. This is markedly different from more top-down technology strategies, which required schools to provide their own technology for use in the classroom.

While it’s easy to virulently dismiss such practices as a hackneed attempt to be “modern,” or the result of so-called “lazy teachers,” it seems unnecessary to dismiss these new methods out of hand. Most of the criticism seems to spring from the use of these tools in the classroom, but consider their utility out of the classroom. If teachers are available by Twitter, a student with a question could simply fire off a tweet while reading an assignment. The whole class could share in the answer right away, or perhaps the next day in class.

And the issue of empowerment is an importnat one. Most adults will probably recall that, yes, a select few active students dominated class discussions. Why, then, would it be bad teaching to try and give a voice to those people who, for whatever reason, are sidelined through traditional classroom techniques? Moreover, the practice of raising one’s hand to ask a question is designed to maintain order in a class. Providing an electronic means could maintain that order, while also answering just as many questions as before. Perhaps even more, considering that many may speak online while only one can be called on by the teacher.

These techniques are new, and they are worth discussing. For the first time, digital communications are robust and familiar enough to allow fast and useful discussion among large groups of people. They will, eventually, invade nearly every facet of our lives for better or for worse. But no teacher worth his or her salt would embrace the potential distraction of computers in their classroom if it didn’t help students. Traditional teaching methods surely aren’t going anywhere — schools still have libraries, after all — and finding smart ways to utilize modern tools could help our struggling public education system.

Questions? Tweet me.

(NYTimes via Gizmodo, image via Antonio Viva)

The South Korean Ministry of Education is investing a hefty $2.4 billion into making the country’s school system completely digital. The plan is to abolish textbooks and replaced them with digital learning materials stored in a centralized database, which students would access with tablet PCs.

Of course, there is still much to do before this plan can get off the ground. Digital textbooks still need to be developed, the centralized digital storage system for schools currently does not exist, and many of the schools will need to have WiFi networks installed. There is currently no word on how the tablets will interact with the system, but South Korean reports say that tablets will be provided to low-income school children.

Though some digital education pilot programs have been attempted in the U.S. and other countries, few can rival the scope of the South Korean plan. While it will certainly be interesting to watch unfold, an entirely paperless school system will surely stand as a useful test case for other countries to emulate. Perhaps the digital learning revolution will have its start in Seoul.

(image and story from The Chosunilbo via Engadget)

When we think of students using social media, it’s hard not to imagine the college freshman holed up in the library spending hours on Facebook when they should be studying for exams, but maybe there is a little more value in social media for students than you would think. An interesting infographic by Masters in Education suggests that being involved in social media is actually good for students’ grades. However, the graphic doesn’t really get into the nuts and bolts of how they established a correlation.

Still, some of the claims seem pretty believable, like students using social media to organize themselves into a study group when one wasn’t organized by a professor. Even if the social media addict is unlikely to be at the top of the class, it is still good to note that there are positive ways to use social media for educational purposes. It doesn’t have to be a brain sucking vortex of wasted time, in fact, it could provide some great new ways for students to learn.

(via Bit Rebels)

A childhood filled with Reader Rabbit and other educational doodads appears to be the key to improved cognitive development later in life. Everything else, including whether your parents were loving or not, has no discernible effect. At least, that’s what Martha Farah, Director of the Center for Neuroscience & Society at the University of Pennsylvania, and her colleagues have concluded after a twenty-year study.

Over the course of the study, the group recorded details like how many children’s books the participants had, whether they had toys that taught about colors or numbers, and if they played with toy or real musical instruments. In addition to these educational elements, they gave the participants a score based on how much support and care they received from their parents. They also performed brain scans on all those being studied. Their results, presented at the Society for Neuroscience‘s annual meeting, were somewhat surprising.

Specifically, cognitive stimulation at the age of four had the most profound effect on the development of each subject’s cortex. Those with educational toys and the like showed a more-developed, and thus thinner, cortex at the conclusion of the study. The group says that all other factors — including the child’s parental score — had no effect on this development.

It’s worth noting that this study included a mere 64 participants from what the abstract for the study calls “a low socioeconomic status background.” Not only is that a relatively small sample size, but including only a certain background means that the conclusions could be skewed by not controlling for other environmental factors common to that background.

(The Guardian via reddit, image via Reigh LeBlanc)

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Fly larvae — fine, maggots — that are raised on food spiked with alcohol grow up into flies who can’t learn normally without the aid of a little booze juice, marking yet another way in which maggots are pretty much just like college students. A study demonstrating the difficulties maggots experienced while trying to take in new information without the aid of a morning beer to take the edge off things appears this week in the journal Current Biology, which reminds us that keg stands are not always recreational choices — sometimes they are educational tools.

Fly larvae who had been fed rations spiked with alcohol need a quick liquor fix to get their minds in order and prepare to process and retain new information. Larvae learning was initially obstructed by the fly equivalent of a couple of stiff drinks, as common sense would suggest. In the wake of a six-day ethanol bender, though, the larvae could learn just as well as their sober counterparts after they’d had a few — but seemed learning impaired when they were cruelly denied a glass of grain alcohol with dinner. The study also suggests that alcoholism — long thought of as a human disease — may have closer than suspected analogs in even the simplest creatures.

Past studies have suggested that alcohol can actually kickstart some parts of the brain involved in learning. Neither of those studies will come as any surprise to legions of university kids who are, right at this very moment, terribly hungover in a survey of post-colonial literature, or sipping off of flasks in a geology lab. You know who you are, and according to science, your lifestyle is not without merit. Personally, your intrepid reporter always found a mid-day tipple to be a mighty effective tool for keeping the old shakes at bay that also made learning fun. That said, it was just an English degree at a state school, so it’s not like I was breaking my back anyway. Consider your source and all that.

(via Eurekalert)

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Sometimes it seems that no matter how well an idea is accepted by the scientific community, there’s someone out there not willing to believe it. That’s why Jonathan Osborne, professor of education at Stanford University, says we should be teaching students how to argue based on evidence, not just cram facts into their head. The challenge, Osborne says, isn’t in getting students to argue — it’s getting teachers on board with teaching “argumentation.” Why not just argue with them until they agree?

Osborne isn’t alone in the idea that students need to learn to argue based on evidence. It’s considered a key practice by the National Research Council’s A Framework for K-12 Science Education, released last year. Specifically, that report calls for students to begin, “engaging in argument from evidence.”

The idea that a scientific idea has to be fought for is as old as science itself. We all know and accept the idea that the Earth goes around the Sun now, but Galileo had to defend that idea in court, and it nearly got him excommunicated from the Catholic Church as a heretic.

Not that Osborne wants to see children defend their scientific beliefs in court, he’d just like them to be able to if required. “In science, people argue for their ideas, in terms of the evidence that they have,” he said. “There should be more opportunities to look at why some ideas are wrong, as well as what the right ideas are.”

Osborne also calls the fact that peer review, though crucial to the scientific community for ideas to be validated, is not taught in K-12 education “a bit worrying.”

To test his theories on the importance of argumentation, Osborne set up pilot programs in 2007 at four schools in the United Kingdom that would teach students to argue based on evidence. The study lasted for two years, after which time the team analyzed the data, and were surprised by the results. There was no significant improvement in the student’s skills and understanding.

That could be because two years is not enough time to see major improvements, or the way the students were assessed was not good enough. It might also be because argumentation does not actually help students understand science any better, but Osborne doesn’t believe that’s the reason, and it’s a belief he’s willing to defend by getting more evidence to back him up.

(via Phys.Org, image via Mill View)

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It’s that time of year again when kids are starting summer vacation and teachers just couldn’t give a damn. Yesterday, we brought you the story of a fourth-grade teacher from Wisconsin who got falling down hammered while chaperoning a class field trip. Today, Europe is getting in on the action as a sixth-grade teacher in France has been suspended for putting on a viewing of Saw for a roomful of 11-year-olds. If he really wanted to watch a Cary Elwes movie that badly, it occurs to us that The Princess Bride might have saved him a lot of trouble. Also, it’s a good film, unlike Saw.

I for one can attest to the power of viewing horror movies at too young an age to really process them. My Dad sat me and my kid brother down for a viewing of Evil Dead when I was about nine — my brother was all of six — and it pretty thoroughly scarred us both for life. Also, I’m reasonably certain my Mom is still pissed at him for it. But even that is better than the situation Clement has put himself in. I mean, at least it was my Dad. Parents are supposed to scar you for life — it’s what they do. Teachers are supposed to do everything in their power not to scar a kid for life, even if they often will anyway. That’s why they get paid and parents don’t.

Maybe the most unforgivable part of this whole sordid story, though, is that Clement, clearly aware that this would be the first horror movie most of these kids had viewed, chose Saw as an introduction to the genre. To which we can only say a resounding “Really, dude? Really? Saw?” If you are going to introduce kinds to a whole variety of movies, there are plenty of great flicks out there to get them started on! Modern chillers like The Innkeepers or classics like The Exorcist. There are franchises that should be required watching, like the Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween films. Hell, there are even age appropriate scares for 11-year-olds like the scarier-than-you-remember Little Monsters and the not-as-scary-as-you-remember Poltergeist.

All these movies and more at your fingertips, and you go with Saw as a way to introduce a new generation to horror cinema? Suspension nothing — that fact alone should be grounds for termination. And maybe a stint in some sort of basic cinema re-education camp.

(via Guardian)

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A study was done that used MRI scans of the brains of 27 adults to determine that humans learn new words better by hearing them than they do by learning them visually. One of the authors of  the study then told the Daily Mail that it means children who use iPads will learn fewer words than previous generations. Nope. It does not.

Marco Catani of the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College in London, and co-author of the paper, “Word Learning is Mediated by the Left Arcuate Fasciculus,” said in the Daily Mail:

We have less time to talk to each other and our children are taught through devices. They have access to the internet, iPhones, mobile phones and tablet computers. These are visual rather than auditory, so it is likely that they will end up with a lower average number of words than previous generations.

Except that’s not a claim supported by anything in the paper, the stated goal of which is, “to seek direct evidence of the role of the [arcuate fasciculus] in auditory-motor integration and word learning.”

I’m now seeing the story being picked up a few other places all focusing in on the issue of tablets and smartphones limiting vocabulary, and that bothers me. Besides the obvious fact that tablets, computers, and smartphones are also audio devices, using this study to justify the claim that they should impact vocabulary at all is unfounded. It’s also incredibly old.

Socrates made a similar argument about the alphabet, claiming that using symbols to commit ideas to writing would make humans shallow thinkers and rob us of wisdom. You know how we know Socrates said that? Because Plato wrote it down. Socrates was wrong. Writing things down is awesome.

I’m not arguing against what the study actually shows — that humans learn new words better when hearing them than seeing them. I’ve only ever seen the words arcuate fasciculus on my computer screen. As I write this now, I’ve never heard them out loud. Will I remember them as well as if Marco Catani himself spoke them to me? Maybe not, but I’m sure I’d learn them just as well if he told them to me over Skype on my laptop than if he told them to me in person.

As far as Catani’s claim goes, people not having enough time to talk to their kids sounds like it could lead to a smaller vocabulary, but don’t blame technology for not making time for your children.

(via Daily Mail and Eureka Alert, image via Brad Flickinger)

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Natalie Portman and Marvel have teamed up to offer girls a chance to get involved in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) with the Ultimate Mentor Adventure. Portman is more than just a face on the campaign, she has a legitimate science background and was the coauthor on two papers. We tracked them down. Take a look.

The Ultimate Mentor Adventure works to help pair high school girls with mentors in STEM fields near their homes. They can upload videos of the work they do with their mentors, and winners will be selected to fly to Los Angeles for an epic science adventure including a trip to a Thor: The Dark World screening preceded by a documentary about their work. It’s something Portman is passionate about, and has a background in.

Besides her on-screen credits, Portman is a Harvard graduate with a degree in Psychology, and it seems that her education is more important to her than her career in film. In 2008 she told Fox News, “I’d rather be smart than a movie star.”

Thankfully, she can be both.

While still a high school student at Syosset High School on Long Island, Portman (Then, Natalie Hershlag) coauthored a paper titled, “A Simple Method to Demonstrate the Enzymatic Production of Hydrogen from Sugar.” The abstract for that paper reads:

There is current interest in and concern for the development of environmentally friendly bioprocesses whereby biomass and the biodegradable content of municipal wastes can be converted to useful forms of energy. For example, cellulose, a glucose polymer that is the principal component of biomass and paper waste, can be enzymatically degraded to glucose, which can subsequently be converted by fermentation or further enzymatic reaction to fuels such as ethanol or hydrogen. These products represent alternative energy sources to fossil fuels such as oil. Demonstration of the relevant reactions in high-school and undergraduate college laboratories would have value not only in illustrating environmentally friendly biotechnology for the utilization of renewable energy sources, such as cellulosic wastes, but could also be used to teach the principles of enzyme-catalyzed reactions. In the experimental protocol described here, it has been demonstrated that the common sugar glucose can be used to produce hydrogen using two enzymes, glucose dehydrogenase and hydrogenase. No sophisticated or expensive hydrogen detection equipment is required-only a redox dye, benzyl viologen, which turns purple when it is reduced. The color can be detected by a simple colorimeter. Furthermore, it is shown that the renewable resource cellulose, in its soluble derivative from carboxymethylcellulose, as well as aspen-wood waste, is also a source of hydrogen if the enzyme cellulase is included in the reaction mixture.

You can read the full paper and learn all about the enzymatic production of hydrogen from sugar at the Journal of Chemical Education, but it will cost you $35. Arguably worth it depending on how much you need to know about enzymatic production.

The other paper on which Portman is listed as the coauthor (again as Natalie Hershlag) was from 2001, and is titled, “Frontal Lobe Activation during Object Permanence: Data from Near-Infrared Spectroscopy.” It’s abstract says:

The ability to create and hold a mental schema of an object is one of the milestones in cognitive development. Developmental scientists have named the behavioral manifestation of this competence object permanence. Convergent evidence indicates that front lobe maturation plays a critical role in the display of object permanence, but methodological and ethical constrains have made it difficult to collect neurophysiological evidence from awake, behaving infants. Near-infrared spectroscopy provides a noninvasive assessment of changes in oxy and deoxyhemoglobin and total hemoglobin concentration within a prescribed region. The evidence described in this report reveals that the emergence of object permanence is related to an increase in hemoglobin concentration in frontal cortex.

For the full text you can head to the Harvard site where it is available for free in it’s entirety. It’s a truly fascinating read if you’re currently a geeky parent raising a geeky child and trying to observe when object permanence actually sets in. Just saying.

We applaud Portman and Disney for their effort to get more people involved in STEM fields. The more scientists and engineers there are in the world, the more interesting things we have to write about. Keep it up.

(via Disney/Marvel, Journal of Chemical Education, and Harvard, image via Disney)

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Pretty much everyone needs to have at least a basic understanding of computer concepts to function in the modern world. Play-i wants to help your little geek-in-training learn the basics of computer coding by playing with their toy robots Bo and Yana.

Play-i’s goal is a simple one. They think young children around the age of five should be exposed to programming concepts, but kids that age probably aren’t ready to sit at a keyboard and type some code. Instead, they can learn the basic concepts of programming through Play-i’s visual interface.

The robots are controlled remotely by commands a child can organize using an iOS device and use storytelling to guide children through programming the robots’ instructions. The app allows access to the raw code, so that children can progress to writing the instructions directly whenever they’re ready.

Get jealous of how kids will learn in the future by watching the video.

Right now, you can reserve your robots at a discounted price by supporting the crowdfunding effort through the Play-i website, and they’ll be shipping in the summer 0f 2014. You can also donate some extra money to fund robots for schools and organizations for underprivileged children.

(via Engadget, image via Play-i)

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The DIY Gamer Kit tasks you with building your own portable game machine and programming its games. Looking for a fun project that you can get creative with? Have a little geek-in-training who won’t stop bugging you for a new console for the holidays? This kit may be the solution you’re looking for.

When the kit is fully assembled and soldered together, it sports a familiar, GameBoy-esque design, but the DIY machine is much simpler. It sports an eight by eight LED display and a buzzer for rudimentary sound. Of course, the real draw here is seeing how creative you can get with the included coding tools and the limits of the device.

As with most educational coding toys, the kit comes with some simple, pre-made software libraries that users can play around with and learn from, so that it’s easy to pick up with relatively low coding knowledge. As the coder’s skills grow, they can get more creative and see what they’re capable of. The kit also comes with custom versions of Snake and Breakout preinstalled, so you can take a little break after assembling it and get some ideas on what to code.

If you think kids these days are spoiled and take technology for granted, this may just make the perfect gift.

(via The Verge, image via DIY Gamer Kit)

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For a kid (or teacher) in school there is nothing better than a snow day, but educators have been concerned with how an unexpected day off might impact a student’s education. A new study examined the impact of snow days on how students learn, and the results are promising for kids who want a day off.

Harvard Kennedy School assistant professor Joshua Goodman, himself a former school teacher, was asked by the Massachusetts Department of Education to study the impact of snow days on a student’s education. He looked at data from grades three through 10 between 2003 and 2010, and says that not only does closing school for a snow day not negatively impact a student’s education, but keeping the school open while its snowing can be worse.

While schools factor snow closures into their annual schedules and can make up the days later, if a school stays open during a storm, some students may still miss school. Goodman says:

[Schools] need to consider the downside when deciding not to declare a snow day during a storm—the fact that many kids will miss school regardless, either because of transportation issues or parental discretion. And because those absences typically aren’t made up in the school calendar, those kids can fall behind.

Keep that in mind next time it snows and you’re not sure if they’ll be closing schools. Maybe they should.

(via Phys Org, image via Thunderchild7)

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Educational ads usually say, “stay in school or else you’ll be unemployed and sad all the time,” though that’s also applicable to most university grads I know. In Australia, though, they’re not satisfied with vague threats about your career and your future; oh no, they want you to know that if you drop out of school, you will die a horrible death.

In this commercial for Australia’s Learn for Life Foundation, obvious horror-fan filmmakers Henry Inglis and Aaron McCann demonstrate the most intense of consequences for slacking off and skipping class. It’s a pretty cute video – until it gets real. Stay in school, kids!

(via FEARnet, image via YouTube)

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Less than a month before its release, Marvel has released its variant cover for Ultimate Comics Spider-Man #1, drawn by Sara Pichelli and featuring the new man behind the mask, Miles Morales! After the jump, a look inside Miles’ origin story, including speculation about a possible anti-union agenda (that is probably nothing to worry about).

Now that we’ve been officially introduced to Miles Morales, Bleeding Cool has seen the first few pages of #1 and is wondering if there is an anti-union agenda featured in his story aimed towards the educational system. Apparently, writer Brian Michael Bendis was inspired by the documentary Waiting for Superman, which centered around at-risk kids and their journeys through public and private education. A big part of that was the lottery process to get into charter schools. I direct your eyes towards this panel, showing a young Miles with his parents at one of these lotteries:

Which is followed by this one:

Comic Book Resources — which provided these panels — has an interview with Joe Quesada, who says that he was “really intrigued” by the work of Geoffrey Canada (president and CEO of Harlem Children’s Zone, which works to increase the graduation rate of students in Harlem), and had recommended that Bendis watch the documentary featuring Canada, Waiting for Superman. That documentary was well-received by critics, but was seen by some as an attack on teachers and teacher unions because of how badly the public school system was portrayed. Parents in the film were shown turning to charter schools, which were being promoted as the solution to an unsatisfactory public school system. (Many of the film’s statistics have been disputed, and even more questionable statistics concerning charter schools were left out altogether.)

Since Miles is being brought up in the same city (albeit a different borough of New York City), could this just have made for a good background story for our hero, showing that Miles’ parents were concerned for his future and went to great lengths to ensure it went well for him? Totally. But a blatant anti-union agenda attacking the public school system? In a Spider-Man comic? Unlikely. It’s a comic book. While everyone may have an opinion about education (to which they are all entitled), this would be the most boring storyline ever for a Spider-Man comic. Something tells me that Miles Morales will have bigger fish to fry than the educational system.

(The Daily Blam, Comic Book Resources, Bleeding Cool)

I’ve been worried about science. I don’t mean in the usual zombie plague or Skynet sort of way. I’ve been worried about science in the real world, which is honestly much scarier. The current US political climate doesn’t do much to make me feel confident about the future of research and exploration. I also read the same articles that you probably do, about how girls still need encouragement that they can do math and science at all, or how women scientists are ever-struggling for the recognition they deserve. It makes me nervous. I may not work in a lab, but I’m a huge science junkie, and I hope to raise a few little geeks of my own one day. I found myself in need of some reassurance that the next generation might yet turn out to be as science-loving as the rest of us.

I could have been a good writer and done some “research,” but instead I took the easy way out and defaulted to nepotism. I called my mom.

To be fair, my mom’s got some cred. Her name is Nicoline Chambers, and she’s the head of the science department at West High School in Torrance, California. Five years ago, she developed an astrobiology course for high school juniors and seniors. In her words, astrobiology “seeks to answer four questions: where did we come from, how did we get here, where are we going, and are we alone?” She’s given talks at a hefty selection of science and education conferences, including the Astrobiology Institute for Instructors at the University of Hawaii, and the Lunar and Planetary Institute’s Astrobiology Science Conference in Houston. She’s an Education and Public Outreach Consultant at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and she has been invited to speak at the National Association of Biology Teachers Convention on behalf of the NASA Astrobiology Institute. Last week, along with fifteen others, she was named Los Angeles County Teacher of the Year.

She also makes amazing pies, but that really only benefits me.

I chatted with my mom about science education and her views on gender equity within the sciences. In the interest of journalistic integrity, I should inform you that this is not the entire interview. Aside from editing for length, I have redacted the sections relating to the family dog.

When you were a student, did you ever run into the “girls can’t do math or science” thing?

Well, I have to tell you that the only person who I ever got the sense from that math and science were not something that girls in general should be good at was my own mother.

Wait, really?

Absolutely. It definitely colored my perspective on science, which, I’ll be honest, was not enhanced by the shoddy science education I got in middle school. I really did come into high school convinced that I hated science. Part of it, I know, was that my mother sent the message that science was something boys did.

Do you see belief in that stereotype present in your own students? How open would you say your girls are to a career in the STEM fields?

I don’t get the sense that they think they are limited because they’re girls. I think it’s more of a matter of personal interest. There are definitely girls who are very interested in the sciences, and boys who are as well, but I don’t think anybody looks at it as a gender difference. It’s just what you like to do.

Do you think that’s just the climate at your school, or do you think the stereotype is weakening?

I have a really hard time judging that because I don’t get much of an opportunity to go into other schools’ classrooms. I know it is a topic that gets talked about a lot, and I know that educators still perceive it as an issue elsewhere.

Women in science have never been well represented. I remember a textbook that just had a couple pages about “women in science,” and then four hundred pages of dudes. How do you go about educating your students about the women scientists out there?

It has to happen in bits and pieces. About a week ago, I asked my students to describe their mental image of a scientist. To nobody’s surprise, the picture that they described was old, white, male, lab coat, frizzy white hair, anti-social, no interpersonal skills. I try to do a lot of things to dispel that image. One of the first things I do is show them this wonderful film that I have called “Understanding Science.” It’s really just scientists of every color, age, gender, field workers, lab workers, whatever, geeking out about why they love science. Even though we don’t specifically focus on [the demographics], I do point out in passing all the different kinds of people that are professional scientists.

I also have a film on Einstein that talks about some of the women that are never mentioned in the books, particularly the very poignant story of how the physics behind nuclear fission was discovered. Otto Hahn won the Nobel Prize for it, but it was really his lab assistant Lise Meitner who figured it out. There are several other female characters in that film who the kids have never heard of, so I do have them write on that specifically.

What do your kids say about it?

They want to know why they haven’t heard about these people. They find it ridiculously unfair. I think some of them recognize that their exclusion was a reflection of the times. In the book Big Bang [written by Simon Singh] this is repeatedly brought up, these women who were relegated to assistant positions or not paid at all. The kids are really bothered by it. It’s a good history lesson for them, I think.

Other than that, I mainly tend to talk about my colleagues. I know a lot of scientists and educators of all different sizes and shapes, if you will, so I try to talk about all those people.

If the exclusion of women scientists was mainly a sign of the times, why do you think they’re still so under-represented?

That’s a very good question. I don’t know.

But things have changed a bit. I think the classic example is the story of how DNA was discovered. The two people who got the Nobel Prize were James Watson and Francis Crick, but they couldn’t have done it without the crystallography work of Rosalind Franklin, who was working in a neighboring lab. She wasn’t acknowledged for it until after she died. She is definitely in the textbooks now.

In some sense, the textbooks keep away from a lot of male figures, too. It really tends to be just the big, big icons. Einstein, Newton, Galileo. I also have to wonder, too, if part of the [gender disparity] is because the only people we see represented were the heads of their labs, so to speak.

Why do you think it’s important for kids to learn about science even if they don’t end up entering a scientific field?

We live in a world that is entirely depedent on science and technology. Who do you know in our first-world society that could function without it? Look at how science and technology leapfrog off of one another. It’s changing so fast that you can almost not keep up with it.

I know that for a fair contingent of my regular biology students, mine is the last formal science class they will ever take in their lives. A huge part of science education is not training anybody to be future scientists, but teaching people how to be science literate. If you are science literate, you then – as a consumer, voter and taxpayer – can make intelligent decisions about the way that science and technology are going to impact your life. How far do you want to go in keeping an elderly parent alive? How do you feel about public funding for stem cell research? Do you buy the genetically modified tomato in the grocery store? These are not issues that are going to come down the road, these are issues that are here now. If you don’t have some sense of science literacy, you’re either going to make bad decisions, or somebody who has a vested interest in one side or the other is going to manipulate you into making decisions that benefit them.

On the surface, an interdisciplinary subject like astrobiology sounds more like a college course. Why do you think it’s important to teach a class like that at the high school level?

Well, first and foremost, because they’re interested in it! Kids love looking up at the sky. Let’s face it, galaxies are beautiful, and black holes are scary and cool, and it’s all amazing out there! Kids like learning about amazing stuff. [laughter]

But the other factor was a realization that we teach biology, chemistry and physics extremely well, but none of it is any different than when I went to high school thirty years ago. The world has changed, and we weren’t doing as good a job as we could with keeping up with it. And we teach these foundational courses independently. You go to biology, and you learn your quota of biology stuff, and then you’re done. You close the little biology box in your brain, you go on to chemistry, and you close that box, too. You never allow the contents to mix. You never use it to create any kind of understanding. It’s no wonder kids aren’t inspired to go into science careers, because nobody ever made any real sense out of it for them. Astrobiology is so interdisciplinary that you have to put the pieces together. It’s really fun to hear the kids say, “Oh, that’s why I learned that!”

The other wonderful thing is that cutting edge science is changing practically daily. The neutrino thing the other day had me practically suicidal. People always make discoveries right in the middle of my teaching when I don’t have any time to change my lesson plans. [laughter] But it’s a great way of showing kids that not only do we not know everything there is to know, but we hardly know anything of what there is to know! There’s so much left for them to discover.

(Image credit: Hark! A Vagrant Editor’s Note: Psst. Kate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant book came out this week!)

Becky Chambers is a freelance writer and a full-time geek. She blogs over at Other Scribbles.

Well this is an interesting new thing. It’s a video called “Let’s Talk About Evolution,” that features a wide range of female scientists, doctors and researchers. Produced by Matt Shipman, David Wescott, Jamie Vernon, Kevin Zelnio and Andrea Kuszewski, the video allows “scientists to explain, in their own words, the importance of evolution to science — and the related importance of teaching evolution in schools,” according to TheSCOPEteam’s YouTube page. “Our goal is to convey the fact that evolution is an amazing, uplifting discovery that has served as the genesis of countless advances in many fields of science. We also wanted to highlight female role models in the science community.”

Some very intelligent, thought-provoking things are said but the group is still asking for further entries to add to the series. “Keep it positive: focus on the importance and wonder of evolution, and not on divisive name-callin,” they wrote. And if you’re interested in seeing what each of these women had to say un-edited, you can watch their full submission on TheSCOPEteam’s YouTube channel.

(via tipster Matt)

Watch Mr. Wizard, a science education program that ran during the 50s and 60s, purported to teach children about the “science behind ordinary things.” But, if you’re like me and you’ve never saw the program, this fan cut video might lead you to believe it was just a show about an old guy being, well, kind of a dick to children. Then again, maybe I wouldn’t have given up on organic chemistry in college if Mr. Wizard had been there to correct my every move.

(via The High Definite.)