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BioQUEST Resources

Registered for the 2010 BioQUEST Summer Workshop?
BioQUEST Resources | (0)
03.15.10

Spring is rapidly approaching which means it must be time to register for the BioQUEST 2010 Faculty Workshop at Beloit College this June 12-18. We will tackle current global health issues and consider the impacts of global warming on these issues. Visualizing statistics with Gapminder and WorldMapper and an introduction to Investigations in Human Biology and Global Health (2010) will be featured.

Faculty participants spend time together – and importantly – work together on curricular concerns that are mutually compelling. We consider this intense summer experience an unique opportunity for you to explore contemporary problems in biology that you can introduce into your own classroom, laboratory, field or computational experiences. You will have an extended opportunity to collaborate with undergraduate science educators and researchers. Several projects started at a BQ summer workshops are ongoing years later.

Phase I

During this two day phase, we will collaboratively explore data, tools, and resources focused on global health curricula. Based on these experiences, groups of participants will share their extended work from one or more sessions on Tuesday after dinner.

Phase II

During the second phase of the workshop, participants take on the role of adopters, adapters and reviewers to consider implementing investigative global health approaches in their own courses. Small groups will share their curricular modules on Friday.

To learn more about the schedule, travel and housing, or featured speakers, please visit our site at http://bioquest.org/summer2010 .

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Cyberlearning at Community Colleges (C3) Project
BioQUEST Resources | (0)
02.08.10
We are pleased to announce a recently funded collaboration between BioQUEST and a host of Digital Library, Professional Society and Community College Partners. The Cyberlearning at Community Colleges (C3) Project is a 3-year effort to build a community of biology faculty who are actively exploring innovative uses of digital library materials, networked computing and communications technologies, and e-science resources.

The bulk of the project funding will support a series of face-to-face workshops for community college biologists. These meetings will be associated with the annual meetings of the C3 Scientific and Teaching Societies which include:
- National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) annual meeting;
- American Society for Microbiology Conference on Undergraduate Education (ASMCUE);
- Human Anatomy and Physiology Society (HAPS) annual meeting;
- The BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium summer faculty development workshop; and,
- The Botanical Society of America (BSA) annual meeting.
The project activities are centered around an online community at c3cyberlearning.ning.com. These resources are open to all interested biology educators and we encourage you to visit and have a look around.

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Access to BQ Workshop Presentations, Resources, and Participant Projects
BioQUEST Resources | (0)
11.20.09
If you look at the BioQUEST calendar, you will see an array of undergraduate faculty workshops and some K-12 teacher and student workshops. Did you know that you can access the presentation materials, resources, and participant projects from BioQUEST workshops over the past four years? BioQUEST workshops are associated with specific disciplinary or pedagogical content and are easy to find by clicking on the calendar links.

BioQUEST is committed to the support of open community resources in science education. This means that any BioQUEST site visitor can access curricular materials from our extensive collection of downloadable resources as well as the presentations and resources from our faculty workshops.

Visit the selected workshop sites below to view the presentations and workshop resources by staff as well as participant-generated curricular materials.
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Interactive, Collaborative, Quantitative Biochemistry Education in the 2.0 Era
BioQUEST Resources, Teaching and Learning | (0)
07.26.09

Today Srebrenka Robic and I presented at the 23rd Annual Protein Society meeting in Boston at their Educators Luncheon. Attached please find a copy of our presentation (pdf or ppt).

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What’s a blog?
BioQUEST Resources | (0)
03.11.09
So, you can take this question literally and answer it with the wikipedia definition. However, the best description I have found describing a blog is by Andy Carvin at the PBS Teachers blog. As a jumping off point I have excerpted the beginning of his post here:

May 22, 2006

What Exactly is a Blog, Anyway?

by Andy Carvin, 12:01PM

If you don’t know what a blog is, you’re not alone; according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, nearly two-thirds of Internet users don’t have a good idea of the meaning of “blog.” In case you fall within this group, you’re in luck, though – you’re looking at a blog right now.

But this is just a website, right? Yeah, I get that a lot. On several occasions while doing workshops with both educators and non-educators, people have asked me if blogs are just websites. Yes, it’s true, blogs are a type of website, but there’s more to it than that.

continue reading Andy Carvin’s post …

So what is the “more”?
- Blogs Offer Independence AND Togetherness
  - An online content management system – such as the WordPress platform that we are using – frees up daily dependence upon a web developer, designer or administrator. The software installs in — no kidding — 5 minutes. You can update your own content and post media such as images, video, slideshows, and podcasts with minimal effort.
  - Multiple people can share in the maintenance of the blog. No need for multiple copies of expensive HTML editing software, FTP’ing files, and worrying about over-writing each other’s versions of the document.
- Blogs come in hundreds of different flavors
  - Whether you start with the “classic” or “default” themes that come pre-installed or select from the many, many, many freely available themes, you can change the look and feel of your blog with a touch of a button. For example, compare three of our blogs: SCOPE, Summer2009 and BioQUEST.org.
  - Many enjoy the built-in features that allow for a very visual presentation of your content, while others enjoy its ability to maintain a public diary which invites and supports a dialog with its readers.
  - Some enjoy the fact that Wordpress (the most prevelent blog software) is an open-source (i.e. community) project which invites people to create plugins to add features. We are currently using plugins that do things like support forms (e.g., Where Are We? Evolution Survey) and automated page translation (just click on one of the flags near the top of the page).
These are just some of the “more” that bioquest.org is trying to take advantage of. Please take the time to tell us what you think about what we are doing by sharing a comment on this page!

Next time we will share some information about how to find your way around in a blog. All that dynamic content requires some new surfing strategies.

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