Saturday, March 31, 2007

playing with podcasts

just checking out how to podcast.
Got an mp3 file here - boring as hell.
Think I need to give this more work.
Back to the drawing board

Friday, March 30, 2007

Mr Hell's Science

Newton's Dark Secrets

Came across a wonderful video today called Newton's Dark Secrets. You can view it here, and you can download it also, although you will need to download their video-player to view it.
The video makes the point that Newton wasn't quite the rational hero of science which text-books make him out to be.
However it does seem to offer a fairly comprehensive overview of his life, including a nice description of how Newton came up with Calculus.

Guillaume Martin called in to the school today to say hello. He's doing astrophysics with philosophy of science, which sounds wonderful. This is in Edinburgh.

As far as I know, Ireland is one of the very few countries in the western world which doesn't have a History of Science, Philosophy of Science or Sociology of Science department in any of our colleges or universities.
And now with our obsession of all things monetary it's unlikely that any will be created, at least in the near future.
Queens do have a History of Science department, led by Professor Peter Bowler, which has led to some pretty interesting findings in their specialist area, the history of evolution. If you ever get the chance to hear him speak, do.

In case there's anyone out there who clings to the traditional notion that philosophy has nothing to do with science, here's are two wonderful cartoons from youtube which suggest otherwise.

Dr quantum's double-slit experiment here, and Mr Hell's science here
They're both about five minutes long.
(I need to figure out how to embed video links - I'll put it on my 'to do' list)
Enjoy!

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Teaching 'bout evolution of the eye

Was at a very interesting lecture at the ISTA AGM in UCC over the weekend, where Dr Jeremy Pritchard gave a lecture entitled 'The evolution of evolution'. He spoke about how the eye was a difficult subject for Darwin to explain.
While the audience was mostly Biology teachers, I got to thinking about how I could introduce evolution into my own teaching.
We do a little bit on short-sightedness and long-sightedness in the Leaving Cert Physics course (under the heading of Lenses), and this would be an ideal spot to open up a discussion.

Dissecting a cow's eye used to be allowed, but no longer is, but there is a link to a nice video of it, plus some other useful links here although it can take a while to download.

There is also a movie clip of how the eye itself could have evolved here, and an animated version here

Every so often I notice that the school library receives a copy of a journal/magazine entitled (I think) creation science, or something similar. I must look into it to see why we get this.

The Applied Maths class and the religion class got together a couple of weeks ago to discuss/debate many of the issues that bring Science and Religion together and also which bring them into conflict. I went very well, hopefully we can build upon it and do something similar in the future.

Thursday, March 15, 2007

video.stumbleupon.com

I came across this site quite some time ago, but it must have been in its early stages because I didn't appreciate its potential at the time.
www.video.stumbleupon.com is an ideal starting point for videos on any given category, and it cross-references all the major video sites, such as google, youtube, metacafe etc.
I have just spent the last 6 hours browsing through its science category. Very impressive. It offers a lot of potential for science teachers, and indeed teachers in general.

I have just spent the entire evening browsing through the science/tech category and it is indeed very impressive.
There is usually a reference somewhere along the bottom to the original video, and sometimes a direct link to it.

these videos can then be saved for you within the site itself (assuming you have registered), or can simply be added to your favourites folder.

Alternatively you can download them directly to your desktop with a suitable video downloader program. This may mean that you have to view them within youtube or videogoogle because many of the video downloader programs recognise these but not the stumbleupon.com site.

As with my last post, this may offer a possible alternative to the mainstream video sites which are banned in schools, although there's no guarantee that this site won't itself be banned.

Anyway . . .
On a more immediate front, young Harper in form 5 has been bugging me about why light can travel through glass, but not concrete, and because there aren't enough people who ask questions in this world I need to put some resources together, if only to point him in the right direction.
It's late.
Maybe I'll do it tomorrow . . .

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

vidipedia as alternative to banned youtube and googlevideo?

Have been locked out from my website for the last two months and it has been extremely frustrating. Was told the problem was at my end so ended up reformatting hard-drive with all the problems that brought with it, only to find that problem still remained.
Was eventually told last night that the problem was with "ownership issues" and apparently everything is sorted now.

Anyways,
found vidipedia last night and got to thinking that this might be a very nice way of watching video-clips which are currently on googlevideo and youtube, but which are banned in schools.

You can download youtube videos directly, and with a small bit of trickery you can download from googlevideo also, then just upload on to vidipidia. Too easy to be true?

I'll check back in a week or so and if everything is still there, I might make a start. I also need to check that this site is not banned, but I wouldn't think so.