Week After iTeach

After a 3-day visit from New Zealand friends, a big birthday celebration, and a publication deadline yesterday I am pleased to have time by the following Thursday to reflect on iTeach, and to review notes and prospects. That was one high-octane week in Fairbanks! I hope to keep hearing from the rest of the cohort.

Fads in Science

Checking with Chris Lott yesterday, I hoped to be reminded where I got the idea for spread-eagling the geological time scale for the last 4.8 million years (see previous blog). He suggested that it came from Bill Bryson’s 2003 book, “A Brief History of Nearly Everything.” Last night, and again this morning, I tore through that book, and failed to find the passage that we both suspected was somewhere in those 500 pages. No luck yet.

Nevertheless, poring through this one book reminded me of the fickleness or the faddishness of the bases for what we think we know about the way our planet has developed. Two examples:

1. After Hutton, Lyell and Darwin, gradualism (“uniformitarianism”) so thoroughly dominated natural philosophy that the previously dominant paradigm (“catastrophism”) was driven out of vogue. Noah’s Flood of the Bible was the bathwater. Several babies went out with the bathwater. In the early 20^th century, geologists were reluctant to accept evidence for catastrophic flooding in NW U.S. states, associated with repeated outbreaks of Lake Missoula. And in the late 20^th century (~1980) paleontologists resisted accepting evidence for the destructive impact of a comet or asteroid near the Yucatan Peninsula and extinction of 70 percent of living species, including dinosaurs. Finally, the pendulum has swung to admit that catastrophes do explain some of Earth’s evolution.
2. Upon the voyage of HMS Challenger in the 1870s, oceanography was indelibly stamped with the identity of being ship-borne. Exclusively. So discredited were the earlier practices of naturalists’ noting what washed up on the beach that publishing any but shipboard observations went completely out of favor. People failed over and over to notice that shallow-water marine organisms were often overlooked by oceanographers. Over 50 years passed, during which nobody officially “noticed” (published) the fact that the blue mussel really does live widely along Arctic shores. Finally, beachcombing has returned to favor.

Deep Time

All this week, I’ve helped carry the flats of garden plants: out onto the deck in the morning, and back into the living room in the evening. This is the process called “hardening off” that we use to prepare plants for independent productivity. The learning we’ve been exposed to in iTeach feels somewhat like a hardening-off process. Will I take root and become productive in a distance-delivery mode with suitable digital-age skills to keep up with students?

On Thursday, we were exposed to questions of copyright, intellectual property, and hints of turmoil over this broad area of where ideas come from. This topic both fascinates and perplexes me.

I wanted to share with colleagues a difficult conceptual problem at the end of this iTeach experience: the depth of geologic time. How long has planet Earth been around? In a word, about 5 billion (with a b) years. In another term, about one-third as long as the universe has existed since the Big Bang, some 15 billion years ago.

Lots of attempts have been made to display the development of the Earth over time in a rational and memorable way. Students have a terribly hard time, judged by “evidence” and “assessments” grown out of “activities.” The last two times I have explored deep time, I’ve use the images below.

The point of this suite of images is the extraordinary length of time that it has taken for Earth to evolve to having a mantle of ocean, atmosphere and terrestrial systems teeming with multicellular life. Concurrently, students are meant to sense how recent or shallow our human footprint has been on the surface of this tapestry. In effect, one or two swipes of a fingernail file over your outstretched middle finger on the right hand remove the equivalent of 10 thousand years of written human history from this suite of images.

I’m at the point of converting these raw materials from what became a classroom Powerpoint image suite to something more appropriate to distance teaching. Everybody’s suggestions are most welcome.

Learning Activities, Effective and "Flop"

One of the most engaging periods of learning for Beringia students was a visit to Georgeson Botanical Garden. They were asked to relate the success of experimental plantings of exotic shrubs and trees from different parts of the world. They were fascinated (working in small groups) to find that Siberian shrubs and trees grew very well, compared to other high latitude sources.

My hopes to expose North Slope students to the rich structure of tundra plants and animals went nowhere. A brick of vegetative mat uprooted in winter proved to have a very active population of red mites. When they thawed out, and when students looked at them through dissecting microscopes, the laboratory evacuated with alacrity that would have drawn praise from the Fire Marshall.

Course Information

Welcome to "Discovering Beringia," an undergraduate course undergoing development and diversification. Here follows the basic syllabus or outline for the course. As a web-based course, its "platform" may be Blackboard, Moogle, or other structure. This blog will advise you of its disposition.

Course Syllabus

GEOS F 392 (Cross-listed: BIOL F 392, RD F 392)[1]

“Discovering Beringia” 3 credits (3 + 0)

Instructor of Record: David W. Norton, 218C O’Neill, 11:00 am to 1:00 pm MWRF. 907.474.7746; ffdwn@uaf.edu {NOTE: There will be guest instructors frequently during this course}

Textbooks:

O’Neill, D. 2004. The Last Giant of Beringia: The mystery of the Bering Land Bridge. Boulder CO: Westview Press vii + 231 pp.

Ruddiman, W. F. 2001. Earth’s Climate: Past and future. New York NY: Freeman xxii + 465 pp.

Hopkins, D.M., J.V. Matthews, Jr., C.E. Schweger, and S.B Young (eds.) 1982. Paleoecology of Beringia. New York NY: Academic Press xiv + 489 pp.

Flannery, T. 2001. The Eternal Frontier: An ecological history of North America and its peoples. New York NY: Grove, 404 pp.

Marshak, S. 2005. Earth: portrait of a planet. 2^nd Ed. New York NY: W.W. Norton. 748 pp.

Supplementary readings from peer-reviewed literature will be assigned and made available through ERes, or on a course-specific web page

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Origin and successive refinements to the scientific (geologic, biogeographic, climatological and archaeological) evidence for episodic terrestrial connections between Asia and North America since the Mesozoic. Reconstructions of ecosystems in the subcontinent of Beringia. Significance of Beringia to high-profile scientific topics and issues, such as global climate change, peopling of the Americas, and species extinctions. PREREQUISITES: One of the following---GEOS 100X, GEOS 101X , BIOL 105-106X, BIOL 102, BIOL 104X, or permission of Instructor

COURSE GOALS

A. General

1. Acquaint students with the historical developments by which broad scientific consensus on the previous existence(s) of land bridges vs. marine transections of these bridges has been achieved and extended;

2. Develop a trans-disciplinary forum for discussion of the persuasiveness of ecological, paleontological, geologic, and other discipline-specific evidence;

3. Familiarity with several methods and styles of undergraduate instruction and discourse;

4. Experience connections between cutting-edge scientific investigations and instructional curricula in the sciences.

B. Student Learning Outcomes:

1. Mastery of this regional (Western Arctic) interdisciplinary theme, which is fundamental to the development of high-latitude earth and biological sciences, and to human geography;
2. Practice the observational and communications skills that scientists have applied in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries to the building of this unifying theme;
3. Grasp the manner in which geological, paleontological, biological and other scientific disciplines marshal evidence when contributing to a unifying theme in sciences;
4. Become conversant with the cutting edge of Beringia theory and the bases for hypothesizing a land bridge connecting Asia and western North America, particularly from late Mesozoic and early Tertiary geologic, floral and faunal events and patterns;
5. Develop the capability to evaluate the reliability of proxy data used in paleoclimate reconstructions.

Instructional Methods: Various modes, including lectures, audioconferencing, ERes, field trips.

Course Calendar:[2]

Week One: “Greenhouse Earth” 100 million years ago; Continents, seas & sea level, tectonism; Tectonic scale climate changes; seasonality, plants and animals; Geologic Time Scale.

Week Two: Biogeographic patterns by the end of the Mesozoic; K-T catastrophe and mass extinctions; Transition from “Greenhouse Earth” to “Icehouse Earth” throughout the Tertiary, and suggested mechanisms for this transition.

Week Three: The Beringian Paradoxes of the Quaternary; Paleogeography; Key Earth Processes; High Latitude Seasonality; Water and carbon cycles; Orbital scale climate changes.

Week Four: Early notions of Asia’s and Alaska’s floral and faunal similarities; Personalities in Beringia studies; Beringia in the Pleistocene; Evidence from Glacial and Periglacial Environments.

Week Five: A Review of Radiocarbon and other Dating methods; Grouping, segmenting and naming intervals in the flow of time; Review of Proxy Data and hypothesised mechanisms.

Week Six: Beringia’s communities and ecosystems reconstructed; Beringia’s significance in “peopling of the Americas” debates; Late Pleistocene changes in Beringia; Significance of Beringia research to projected climate changes.

Course Policies:

Participation in class discourse, hence attendance, is especially important. As the course develops, students may elect to replace one or more exams with written or oral presentation to class exploring a topic related to Beringia and the Bering Land Bridge. Such topics would be mutually agreed upon with the Instructor.

Evaluation:

Class participation 50 %; Papers and periodic exams 30 %; Assisting students who have little formal science background with course material 15% Evidence of original thinking 5 %.

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[1] UAF -92 suffix designates a special topics course, in which instructional material is on trial before a course is formally adopted into the UAF Course Catalog.

[2] This Syllabus was based on a 6-week Summer Sessions schedule in which classes meet 4 days weekly for 3 h each day. North American Semester courses are based on 14 weeks of instruction, 3 hours per week

Another Fun Exam Question

Consider the interpretive map of North America here:
This geological interpretation is meant to represent the end of the Cretaceous, about 65 million years ago. Is the representation of Bering Strait and Beringia accurate? Why or why not?

Fun Exam Question

(Beringia)
Pick one geographic feature of Earth from the following list:

Drake Passage
Tibetan Plateau
Himalayan massif
Great Rift Valley
Straits of Bosporus
Missoula Lakes/ Channeled Scablands
Gates of Gibraltar
Isthmus of Panama

Now, compare and contrast Beringia's influence with your chosen feature's influence on climate, biogeography, how long the feature has influenced these parameters, and rate the feature accordingly as either more or less significant (far-reaching) than that of Beringia.

Public Assessment--Pros & Cons

Pros: Public assessment connotes outside, objective assessment. Removed is the subjective assessment by a single instructor one-on-one. The publicly assessed student floats ideas before numerous points of view, and learns skills of dialog in diverse contexts.

Cons: A very real danger that public assessment could discourage the brilliant, avant-garde thinker, or one who has a revolutionary concept or interpretation. Students who emphasize public assessment and persuasiveness at the expense of private assessment might fail to develop adequate skills of critical thinking, reflection, synthesis. Popularity or fad value of ideas and concepts can be seductive from an over-developed public assessment.

Using Wikipedia

If "no original research" is admitted to wikipedia, so as to prevent sources from developing an argument, does that make contents of wikipedia is opinion-free? Does the content of wikipedia aspire to be authoritative or authoritarian? Just wondering.

Enduring Understanding via the Essential Question

Based on what we know of planets in this and perhaps OTHER solar systems, is the evolution of Earth's climatic and biotic systems a unique aberration, or is it something to be expected of planets generally?

The one-sentence assignment

(Beringia course)
We know the particulars for a very few planets that orbit a single star in the universe, and someday we shall know the underlying principles that explain how planets change, or evolve in other solar systems.

add-ons for individualization

My web browzer may not really look like me: I've thrown a strange mix of things into the toolbox wDownloadithout any chance to practice. Imagine doing a psych profile of someone by inspecting the contents of his shopping cart at the checkout stand:
Colorful tabs
resizeable textarea
zotero
Clear Cache Button
Pdf Downloat
ScribeFire

Chris Lott's Points

Intriguing: the geometric growth of information;
Irriitating: the speed at which the acceleration is proceeding;
Headscratch: Where is line between individ., group learning

Introduction

Introducing myself, Dave Norton

Without apology, I am an arctophile, fascinated by everything about the Far North. On the issue of whether there is a science of the Arctic, vs. merely a science in the Arctic, I advocate the former. As a friend once observed, “ignorance of the Arctic is an infinite resource.” Indeed, misinformation about Alaska and Arctic regions of our planet seems to be spreading faster than we can keep pace from our thinly populated high latitudes. In the current climate of growing fervor and sharp polarizations over matters connected with global change (aka “global warming”) we in the Far North bear an especial responsibility for minding that the record stay straight, and that passions not distort objectivity.
Beyond arctophilia, my motivations are starkly simple. I seek to be as interesting as possible in whatever I talk or write about. Nothing pleases me more than to be considered spellbinding by students or people sharing a meal or a cup of coffee. And if judges were to hold up scorecards at the end of my dive into a subject, I hope they would actually be judging my ability to infect students with the capability to be interesting themselves—in effect judging my dive by the waves radiating outward from the point of entry on the surface of the pool.

Why teach?

Although I have learned many things in perfect solitude, I have learned more and faster in cooperative–even highly interactive—group situations. In these interactive groups, the designations “teacher” and “student” become blurry and arbitrary whenever I have been the talking head in a classroom course or seminar. To understand this approach, consider an analogy from sports: the “player coach,” in which the designated authority sets an example by performing (learning) right alongside the rest of the team.
A corollary to preferring cooperative learning is my fascination with team teaching. One way to illustrate team teaching is with two people whom I consider the patron saints of team teaching, “Cah Talk: Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers” alias Tom and Ray Magliozzi on National Public Radio. Their informative weekly hour of banter with broadcast audience members (“students”) who challenge Tom and Ray with questions on the subject of automobiles (“cahs”) is a paradigm for cooperative learning, team teaching, and sharing understandings with a wide audience.

Over three decades, my rewards for being the teacher, or one of several formally instructors of record, in a variety of courses have come from cultivating a sort of hyper-learning environment. Hard for me to say whether or not these courses have enriched and advanced students’ understanding, but they have certainly enriched mine. Part of the explanation for my enrichment, no doubt, is that not one of the various subjects in which I have awarded undergraduate credits (e.g., Natural Sciences, Natural History of Alaska, Ornithology, Earth Sciences, Discovering Beringia, Human Anatomy and Physiology, Museum and Heritage Studies) represents a course that I took as an undergraduate or even a graduate student myself. Selfish of me, some might say, to learn so much from the folks who pay tuition for the privilege of earning college credits. On the other hand, by straying from rote learning and into subjects that I have had to master outside the formal classroom, perhaps I have avoided getting in a rut, while keeping the discourse animated with the excitement of my own discoveries.

Six-Week High Point

Ivan Papanin’s 1939 book in English, “Life on an Ice Floe,” consists of his daily journal entries on the subject of drifting with three Soviet companions from near the geographic North Pole to a point 1200 miles to the south, along the eastern coast of Greenland. The book is astonishing for the very fact that it was approved for publication by government sources within the highly secretive society of the Soviet Union. The account is further astonishing for the unmitigated courage displayed by the four pagonauts. While drifting through the winter months of 1937-38, they could not help wondering whether their countrymen really had the capability of rescuing them from the ice before it was dashed to bits or melted out from under them months after they started to drift southward in the Transpolar Drift stream. This drift had been suspected for decades, but only roughly confirmed in 1896. About four months into their drift, it became clear that something was terribly wrong: they were racing southward twice as fast as had been predicted, and might enter warm Atlantic water in midwinter.

Reading this nearly forgotten classic of Arctic exploration, I found myself riveted by the information, the human drama, the context of this historic achievement in a torrent of events leading toward World War II, and by Papanin’s terrifying assignment. It was the forerunner to a decades-long series of postwar (Cold War) floating research stations in the Arctic Basin commissioned by scientists in the USSR, the US and Canada. Most astonishing of all is to plot the trajectory of the 1937-38 drift of Papanin’s ice floe in comparison with six decades of more recent and technologically sophisticated oceanographic information. It turns out that Papanin, Krenkel, Shirshov and Feodorov were set adrift in the most perilous part of the most dynamic stream of Arctic sea ice. Their mid-February rescue by icebreakers and airplanes bordered on both miraculous and heroic. In deference to the experience gained from this close call, nobody has ever asked ice-drifting researchers to run the same risk as Papanin’s crew ran in such blind faith.

If I’m lucky, an opportunity will arise to challenge students with this thought experiment: If the Soviet icebreakers and airplanes had failed in February 1938 to reach Papanin’s pagonauts in time, what would have happened to Arctic oceanography, resource development, meteorology, and how different would our understanding be today of the Arctic Basin?

Balancing Information Diets

Wisdom suggests “moderation in all things—including moderation.” A judicious mix of sensory input is the way I read the morning newspaper. Almost daily, I tackle two word puzzles as a prelude to reading the rest of the paper. Hard news on the front page is followed by opinion pieces and letters to the editor several pages in. Then a quick read of several comics, a glance at local and national sports stories, and finally a pulse-taking of classified advertising. I try to keep one gem in mind from each section for the rest of the day. Each gem is a hedge against having nothing arresting to discuss in the event of encountering someone over a cup of coffee or at lunch during the day.

Refresh Rates For Course Contents

Parts of my courses lie untouched for years if students like the approach and organization of those parts. Most parts, however, are painstakingly reconstructed each offering. And once or twice during every course offering, more often in face-to-face classroom situations, I have figuratively wadded up and discarded the day’s plan; we talk about a topic that is entirely unplanned or extemporaneous, but which is on the minds of students. It is perhaps more difficult in distance-delivered instruction, but not impossible, to sense the chemistry of a group of students. “Changing course” is sailor talk for adapting, and I find it essential to adapt once in a while to the concerns among students. They must experience the instructor’s adaptive response, to appreciate their own influential bearing on the flow of discovery if they are to share in an effective learning environment.

Making the Familiar Strange

A good share of what is fun about teaching is the two-part recipe of making the strange familiar to students and–just as important–making the familiar strange. One example of the latter is exploring the bizarre properties of water, good old H2O, a compound that profoundly influences this planet, and makes it uniquely habitable to familiar forms of life.

This past March, while winter tourists from Japan were still numerous in Fairbanks, one elderly visitor made the familiar strange for me. He clearly belonged to one of the groups arriving by chartered jet from Tokyo. On the sidewalk outside one of our retail stores he stopped in a flow of pedestrians to search the sky overhead. At first I slowed to avoid bumping into this gentleman. Then I grew curious as to what arrested his progress. The throbbing engines of a propeller-driven airplane soon intruded on my hearing. Most Alaskans take for granted the comings and goings of venerable aircraft, relics built before the age of jets dawned, 50 or more years ago. Presently, a DC-6 cargo plane appeared, making its final approach to nearby Fairbanks International Airport. It dove and banked steeply with flaps and landing gear extended, looming larger in our view before settling out of sight onto the runway.

It dawned on me that this spectacle was undoubtedly a sight and sound strictly from the past in Japan. What went through our guest’s mind as he intently followed this DC-6? Such aircraft must have been common in Japan for a couple of decades following World War 2. This “senior’s moment” made me realize that we Alaskans fail to appreciate our being one of the last refuges of working airplanes that pre-date the era of jet flight.