Math Art: Fractals

Not really sure what fractals are - other than art created from math using computers. Click on image to see full size.

Created by Wolfgang Beyer with the program Ultra Fractal 3.
Licensed by Creative Commons -

There are also some great images on flickr from the New York Public Library, and LIFE magazine has posted amazing photos on Google.

Links for teachers

Biology: what glowing hamsters can teach us about genetics (video of animals bio-engineered); reprints of antique medical illustrations - cross reference with cool art; European Molecular biology lab creates 3-D digital embryos - kinda like Google Earth on a REALLY small scale.

Psychology: - study shows cognitive therapy is as good as antidepressants; study looks at why failure inspires some and demoralizes others; book review - The Time Paradox, re: how individuals think of time shapes personality; Brain science - the source of genius;

• Science: Richard Feynman on the essence of Science;
• Language: Merriam-webster announces top 5 words of the year.
• Art and Music: the youtube symphony orchestra puts classical music online; Free downloads of Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash duets; the white album turns 40; 10 fun facts about Picasso (source for images); reprints of antique medical illustrations - cross reference with biology.
• History: world history in images from 1949 to 1989 in under 5 minutes - to the tune of Billy Joel's We didn't start the fire (video).
• Green issues - the environment: green cars at LA auto show.

image from http://neatorama.cachefly.net/images/2008-01/homer-simpson-brain-mri.jpg

Grants and resources for instruction in the arts

Recently in discussion of grants and funding available on campus, someone said, "Why isn't there any money for the arts?" Well, there is, for example the National Endowment for the Humanities, and The Wallace Foundation. Edutopia (a George Lucas educational foundation) has a post on the best places for grant information.

Susan Turner, who writes grants for the college, advises to start early and not underestimate the time needed. She notes that potential grant requests relate to a project—usually within a program area—that can be described and budgeted. All potential requests for funding will be prioritized by the Provost.

Grant requests are based on a problem or need that can be clearly stated. So the first step in submitting a request for funding is to complete the summary section of the approval form The next step will be to discuss the concept with the appropriate dean(s) and secure initial approval. Then submit it to Dr. Sangki Min and he will review all requests with the Provost. Susan will contact the successful requesters to discuss the request and design a realistic work-flow schedule for getting a proposal out the door! Her first concern is developing that work-flow schedule (back dated from the submission date) so that there will be adequate time spent on the research and writing and reviewing stages.

All grant requests should include a timeline of who is responsible for what stage as the project is implemented.

Intercultural Book Club: _After Dark_ by Murakami

The physical descriptions of characters intrigues me - men seem to be described initially, but the initial lack of description of the female characters might mean something. Halfway through it I've finally gotten a description of Mari, but not really of her sister. Eri, the model, maybe needs no description because Japanese and Chinese models fit a type: tall and willowy of stature, with higher-bridged and more angular noses, and lacking the epicanthic fold. The mind wandered to how class and status define "beauty" and how the genders see differently. Ethnic groups see differently too. Japanese readers see something exotic in Denny's, the way someone from Kansas might find a Teppanyaki house.

Doesn't the ICC have Roger Shimomura prints in storage? (art seen here is his). Though I recall the prints the school owns are earlier and more conservative works, but a lot of his later work - or what you find in the Nelson or at KU's Spencer museum - show that split world / past-modern/ Pop-schizo thing that I kinda see emerging from this book.

Resources for study.

• Quick and dirty plot summary and cursory analysis
• Washington Post review
  

Special thanks to E.K. for finding the book on CD and reminding me to get on my homework.

More teaching resources from the web.

With the election there's a load of great content that might connect to students' lives.

• The last presidential debate in 10 easy minutes (video)
• Standford's course on presidential elections (lot o' links + video)
• The geography of the US presidential election - part 1 (Spoiler alert: the whole Red/ Blue state dichotomy is misleading and trite). Stanford lecture (almost 2 hour video)
  

In the world of literature:

• Academy award winning animated video of Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea
• This year's Nobel prize for literature goes to...
• Free Yale course on the american novel since 1945

Business and Economics

• Nobel Prize (in Econ) Paul Krugman on the current "readjustment/ crash" (word choice depends on your portfolio).
• Free Yale course on Financial Markets

See Also:

• Art:a horse paints -is it art?
• Geography and culture: gaming software used to create virtual tour of BeiJing's Forbidden City
• History: PBS documentaries on the 1929 crash
• Debate: Batman vs. the Penguin

Free courses by Yale including:

• Milton, Greek history, The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877, Fundamentals of Physics , France Since 1871, game theory

and seasonal botany photo

700 lbs - so it says.

Web resources for teachers

Going to try a new format. Too much fun (and potentially relevant) stuff; if it isn't shared quick it could be lost, so minimal descriptions

Video of scholarly and education merit to provoke discussion (or digression):

1. Anthropology: KSU's web celeb anthropologist Michael Wesch
   
2. Biology - crab rides a jellyfish; Learning about memory and aging on YouTube
3. Business: Yale professor explains financial crisis in 10 minutes
   
4. Chemistry;
5. Physics (including a boomarang in zero gravity);
6. Art: THe 50 greatest art videos on YouTube;
7. Collections: NYTimes top 5 online video lectures - and Open Cultures top 75 online educational videos - part of their "signs of intelligent life on youtube collection". Free Engineering and SCience courses from Stanford online; source to watch complete documentary films for free;
8. Pedagogy: Father Guido Sarducci breaks it down (learning and retention- Remember Saturday Night Live in the late 70's? funny because it's true)

See Also

• Education and technology: research shows people are more likely to lie in email;
  
• Brain Science: how the mind works - Brain Rules reviewed; What Magic teaches us about neural processing (2 articles), what it feels like to have a stroke (neuroanatomy part of TEDS talks - best stuff on YouTube); 2008 election and neuroscience
  
• Language: argument that English is a user-defined and user-modified technology; Chinglish recognized as full-fleged dialect (anyone have info on Spanglish?); Stanford's online writing classes; podcasts can teach you almost any language
  
• FREE AUDIOBOOKS: The Gutenberg project - a huge mass of audio books on line - I only bookmark human read titles, see also the growing collection by Literal Systems; 1984 by Orwell:
• How to (DIY's): how to make garden lights out of LED lights and mason jars; How to make online video's without getting sued (copyright info).
• Pedagogy and books to consider: review of book How Children Fail by John Holt;
• History: animated video of Howard Zinn's History of the US Empire
  
• Election related: a non-partisan project helps community organizers to find neighbors who think they are registered but actually aren't; 2008 election and neuroscience
  
• Of arcane scholarly interest: info and links to photos by famed Harvard Ethnobotanist (combined ethnography and botany);

Teaching with embedded video

Our campus community has an impressive online video presence.

In fact, in the most recent online video to go "viral," you can see a Fort Hays debate coach lose it and moon for rebuttal. One of our own acts as the voice of reason and calm. You may have seen it on network news. YouTube pulled the video, but it's up on Live Leak, viewable at Boing Boing (It is intense - contains very coarse language and, as I said, an exposed rear-end).

The Strawberry Fields Community Garden Project, produced by the school's economics club in conjunction with the Strawberry Hill Home association, shows community involvement and applied, active learning. It features Dr. Medhi Shariati, as well as several students you see in the halls or in class. It's the featured video this week to your right.

The music department represents us with class through many videos of the Blues Devils. Different musicians and musical genres show up. Sometimes the camera is on a tripod, and sometimes on the shoulder of someone in the back of the audience, but the obvious sense of fun makes them worth checking out.

The track team also shares video to assess and improve performance.

See the growing list of examples of our excellence at the forefront of online shared video.

2008 Summer Institute

The Value of Goals

Judging from initial feedback, the 2008 Summer Institute on Course Redesign succeeded rousingly, and expectations were high due to faculty interest in pedagogy and the renown of the speakers (see Team-based Learning website and books published).

Dr. Dee Fink challenged us to imagine our ideal class: bright, engaged and motivated. What would you want these students to be able to do after the class-in life? At the right we have the aggregated responses.

They asserted that curriculum design won’t work if you don’t know your outcome, what you want students to do at the end of the course. This allows for backwards design and makes choosing learning activities easier. This likewise facilitates the assessment of learning.

I wonder how past and present colleagues (particularly in the humanities) feel about setting goals and measuring our own success in promoting student learning (individually – not in any comparative sense. Let’s not digress into NCLB. Please take a minute and do the survey to the right - a quick and anonymous assessment itself).

Some think of teaching as an art and resist the idea of intentionality in creation. My mother, the artist and art history teacher, used to point out that great artists were well-trained. Also, the Latin root for "art" gives us also artifice, artificial, etc. Artists make the difficult look deceptively easy.

A final note: the conclusions of recent empirical research on Latino Students published in Excelencia in Education call for "short-term measures of academic progress to guide improvement in curricula instruction, and support services for Latino students."
The study notes that their conclusions would serve any student population.

For more online resources on assessment see our Bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/gdixon/assessment