Posted 20 Jun 2014 / 0
Julie Noor of Duke University shows how a very simple classroom experiment in fly breeding to the F3 generation can force students to answer the following question in the affirmative: “Have you ever seen evolution actually occurring?” It is powerful when students are able to report that they have seen “evolution in action”.
A Minor Post, Conferences, Natural Selection, Population Genetics, Society for the Study of Evolution
Posted 20 Jun 2014 / 0
Jim Costa of the Highlands Biological Station points out that Darwin’s scientific explorations in his own backyard were as profoundly important to his theories as his voyage on the H.M.S. Beagle.
A Minor Post, Conferences, Evolution Education, History, Society for the Study of Evolution
Posted 19 Jun 2014 / 2
After landing at Raleigh-Durham airport today I am ready for Evolution 2014! It has been four years since I last attended the annual meeting that brings together members of the Society for the Study of Evolution (SSE), the Society of Systematic Biologists (SSB), and the American Society of Naturalists (ASN). I do not always get the chance to attend this conference, so Read More
A Major Post, Conferences, Evolution, Society for the Study of Evolution
Posted 10 Jun 2014 / 2
When I was in graduate school working towards my doctorate, we were required to take “comprehensive exams” to stay in the program and qualify for candidacy. This made a lot of sense: I was lucky to be in a program whose required courses created a very strong background in my disciplines, and the comprehensive exams Read More
A Major Post, Assessment Methods, Conceptual Teaching Assessment Project, Higher Education, Teaching
Posted 05 Jun 2014 / 0
The New York Times “On Separate Islands, Crickets Go Silent“
A Minor Post, Adaptation, Articles, Behavior, Coevolution, Convergence, Evolution, Host-Pathogen Evolution, Natural Selection, Phylogenetics
Posted 02 Jun 2014 / 17
I love Moodle. It is an amazing tool for delivering course content, assessments, and feedback to students. But if you are a power Moodle user, you know that it can take some instructor massaging to make it as user-friendly as your students prefer. One of the things about Moodle that frustrates and confuses students is the way that different “sections” (usually Read More
A Major Post, Moodle, Teaching Tools
Posted 30 May 2014 / 0
For the past couple of years I have been playing around with a really cool tool called EnviroAtlas, a project of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. This past semester I created two classroom activities that use EnviroAtlas, implementing them for the first time in my Ecology for Architects course. The EnviroAtlas tool was in beta-testing Read More
A Minor Post, Biodiversity Loss, Biomes, Bogs & Wetlands, Citizen Science, Computer Science, Conservation Biology, Data Limitation, Deserts, Ecosystem Services, Education, Educational Software and Apps, Environmental Justice, Eutrophication, Grasslands, Habitat Destruction, Invasive Species, Long Term Ecological Research, Macroecology, Pollution, Ponds & Lakes, Population Pressure, Public Policy, Quantitative Analysis, Rivers & Streams, Sustainability, Teaching, Teaching Tools, Temperate Forest, Temperate Rainforest, Urban Ecology, Water Supply, Web
Posted 30 May 2014 / 0
Very nicely done! The monologue is great, but then the “performance” of the balanced climate change debate is really what drives home the point here. Don’t watch networks that present false “debates”.
A Minor Post, Belief, Climate Change, Film, Television, & Video, Political Science, Public Outreach, Public Policy, Risk & Uncertainty, Science (General), Sustainability
Posted 30 May 2014 / 0
I have corresponded with Cath Dennis of the University of Aberdeen, as we both share an interest in how to bring some of the foundational work exploring cooperation into our classrooms. She has just published one of her classroom activities — an “analog” version of Robert Axelrod’s iPD tournaments — in the Journal of Biological Education.
A Minor Post, Articles, Cooperation, Evolution Education, Evolutionary Modeling, Game Theory, Reciprocity, Teaching Tools
Posted 21 May 2014 / 0
I am proud to announce that a paper on which I am co-author, “A review and synthesis of late Pleistocene extinction modeling: Progress delayed by mismatches between ecological realism, interpretation, and methodological transparency“, has been published in the June 2014 issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology. The paper looks at the history of modeling aimed Read More
A Major Post, Anthropogenic Change, Articles, Biodiversity Loss, Climate Change, Community Ecology, Ecological Modeling, Extinction, Modeling (General), My publications, Predation
