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.

• Resources for the BioQUEST Summer Workshop June 2009
• Resources for the UTK Numbers Count Workshop May 2009
• Resources for the Numbers Count Workshop at Agnes Scott College January 2009
• Resources for the Plant IT Workshop at Texas A&M July 2008
• Resources for the BioQUEST Summer Workshop June 2008
• Resources for the Botany and Plant Biology Workshop July 2007
• Resources for the BioQUEST Summer Workshop June 2007

Share this post:

Please continue reading for information on the following events and opportunities:

• ASM/JGI Bioinformatics Institute: Incorporating Bioinformatics Research in Undergraduate Education
• Science Faculty with Education Specialties Project
• Workshops on Active Learning with Video Analysis
• Live Webcast of “Evolution in Extreme Environments” Symposium

This information is being provided through the BioQUEST blog but you should contact the individual projects (see embedded links below) for additional information.

============================================

ASM/JGI Bioinformatics Institute: Incorporating Bioinformatics Research in Undergraduate Education

Washington, DC, March 10-13, 2010
Application Deadline: November 15, 2009

Are you thinking about introducing bioinformatics into your curriculum?

At the ASM/JGI Bioinformatics Institute you will:

• LEARN to understand, interpret, and use molecular sequence information to solve problems and effectively teach it to your students.
• START to understand the underpinnings of BLAST – how the program works, and how to incorporate it.
• DISCOVER tools involved in weak-pattern searches and other protein analysis tools, comparative genomics, and evolutionary analysis.
• CONNECT to other faculty who are using bioinformatics in their classrooms.

For more information visit
http://www.facultyprograms.org/page02a.shtml

============================================

Science Faculty with Education Specialties Project

We are a group of Science Faculty with Education Specialties (SFES) interested in identifying other SFES across the nation.  While all college and university science faculty are education specialists in some regard, we define SFES here as individuals who either: 1) have been specifically hired in science departments to specialize in science education, OR 2) have transitioned to a role as a science faculty member focused on issues in science education after their initial hire.

If you are an SFES or think you might be an SFES, please complete our brief, 3-5 minute survey at the link below.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/National-SFES-Search

Beyond a national research study of SFES, our long-term goals are to foster a national SFES professional community and to promote cross-disciplinary SFES conversations.

Sincerely,

Seth Bush, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Nancy Pelaez, Purdue University
James Rudd, California State University, Los Angeles
Michael Stevens, California State University, Stanislaus
Kimberly Tanner, San Francisco State University
Kathy Williams, San Diego State University

============================================

Workshops on Active Learning with Video Analysis

January 5-7, 2010 in Orlando, Florida
July 12-16, 2010  in Portland, Oregon
Summer, 2011 at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY

http://livephoto.rit.edu/workshops/

Video analysis is the use of video as a scientific measurement tool. Students find active learning with video capture and analysis both educational and compelling.

These NSF-funded workshops are for university and college faculty interested in using digital video analysis in student research, lectures, tutorials, homework assignments, and laboratories. They will cover techniques for making measurements in areas such as mechanics, thermodynamics, wave propagation, electricity, magnetism, and optics. Participants can apply these techniques in both chemistry and biology. Curricular materials and video clips will be provided to participants. Follow-up sessions and on-line communication will allow participants to share videos, activities and ideas for teaching.

There will be no tuition or fees for these workshops. Room and board for faculty and instructional staff from US institutions will be provided, and those with demonstrated need who teach under-represented students may apply for partial travel stipends.

============================================

Live Webcast of “Evolution in Extreme Environments” Symposium

Friday, November 13th, from 8:30 am to 12:30 pm, MST

Are you interested in evolution, but unable to attend this year’s National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) conference in Denver?  Would you and your students like to learn more about evolution in “extreme environments”, such as high altitude, in the deep-sea, or in caves?  If so, you will be excited to learn that for the first time, the annual NABT Evolution Symposium will be accessible via a free, live webcast on Friday, Nov. 13th from 8:30 am to 12:30 pm, MST.

For full program information, including speaker names, talk titles and times, and the link to view the live webcast, please visit
http://www.nescent.org/NABT09Webcast.php

In addition, all of the talks will be recorded and placed on NESCent’s website for free access after the conference.

Share this post:

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).

Share this post:

I can’t believe the workshop is over… a week passed so quickly and there was so much more that I wanted to accomplish! BioQUEST can’t thank Harry Richards, Program Manager for SCALE-IT, enough for arranging and participating in our curriculum development workshop at NIMBioS. It is definitely on my short list for best workshops ever!

Even though the our curriculum workshop has concluded, our materials live on! At this workshop we had a number of participant projects that pulled together bioinformatics, structural biology and mathematical biology to explore diverse topics like the Asian flush, HIV, and tasmanian devil. In addition, participants shared about their own projects as well as told us about their favorite sites and we captured it all for others to benefit from!

If you missed this workshop, but would like to attend another please checkout our calendar of upcoming events to find a workshop or presentation close to you!

Word cloud courtesy of wordle.net

Share this post:

Ever wondered about the largest human gene? Know what the smallest human gene is? These questions were investigated by a group at the BioQUEST/SCALE-IT faculty development workshop running right now at the at NIMBioS Center at the University of Tennessee. Check out this (and other) Participant Projects here!

Share this post:

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.

Share this post:

Pea image by zaser shared under (cc).

Welcome back! This is the second BioQUEST Blog Update and we have a great collection of resources and materials to share again this time around.

First, a quick thank you to all of you who shared notes of encouragement and interest with us after the first update. We have started to refer to the blog as the cyber-BQNotes, in reference to our print newsletter, because it is an important tool for sharing information with the community. The biggest difference is that the blog updates are much easier to produce and they accumulate over time as new content on the web site.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions drop us a line at bioquest@beloit.edu. You can also use this address to sign-up to receive these updates via email (or to stop receiving them). We send out updates every 2 weeks and we will never share your contact information without your permission.

In this BQ Blog Update we are excited to highlight:

• A profile of the Understanding Science Project
• A report from the IUBS BioEd Meeting in New Zealand
• An introduction to blogs and blogging
• Some preliminary analyses from the Evolution Survey

We also want to remind you:

• Apply Now for the BioQUEST Summer Workshop
• The Where Are We? Evolution Survey will close on March 18.

Share this post:

We will be collecting information from the Where Are We? Evolution Survey for about one more week (through March 18h, 2009). There has been good participation so far but we are still a little short of our goal of 50 responses. This post contains some data summaries for the surveys that have been completed up to this point. Please take 5 minutes and make sure that your voice is heard by completing the survey at http://bioquest.org/blog/2009/02/waw-evolution/.

From the first two graphs you can see that we are getting very broad representation across institutional types and years of teaching experience.

There are many interesting data to explore from the survey. We are very much looking forward to digging in and sharing our results when the survey wraps up. Until then, we will share one set of questions where the preliminary data look pretty interesting. The survey asks respondents to choose between pairs of “community resources” that they think would help them teach evolution more effectively. The choice for survey submitted before today are represented below. How would you answer?

Add your data to the collection by completing the Where Are We? Evolution Survey. If you have already completed it, consider sending it to a colleague who might be interested in participating.

In a couple of weeks we will share these results and post a new survey on finding and sharing teaching resources online.

Share this post:

A Report from BioEd 2009

The International Union of Biological Sciences’ annual educational meeting, BioEd 2009, was held in Christchurch, New Zealand, from Feb. 12-15. These dates were chosen to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, and 2009 also marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species. The conference’s theme, Evolution in Action, was thus highly appropriate.

The conference opened with a powhiri, a traditional Maori welcome featuring a ritual challenge, singing, and feats of agility. Several brave participants also volunteered to take part in a haka or posture dance, with greatly entertaining results. After cutting a birthday cake and pulling crackers for Darwin, participants had the opportunity to see the premiere of the play “Collapsing Creation,” about the challenges Darwin faced in publishing his theory.

Conference participants represented a unique balance between evolution research and teaching: high school biology teachers comprised about 25% of the participants. Sessions on preparing teachers for evolution education and Darwinian medicine helped bridge this divide, interweaving insights from current research with new pedagogical strategies. For example, an overview of human settlement patterns in the Pacific based on genetic and archeological data (Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith, Allan Wilson Centre, New Zealand) might be followed by a lesson plan for speciation in which students conduct experiments that directly challenge their own naïve views of unchanging species (Lee Traynor, Leibniz University, Germany). This mix of topics led to some fascinating teatime and dinner discussions on methods for bringing current research into the classroom and engaging students in active and collaborative learning.

The four plenary lectures were also well chosen to span a diversity of topics while representing the organization’s international character. Presentations included Darwin’s systematics work on barnacles (John Buckenridge, RMIT University, Australia), strategies for adapting primary literature for classroom use (Anat Yarden, Weizmann Institute, Israel), evolution education and the nature of science (Douglas Futuyma, SUNY, USA), and sexual selection in the evolution of human mating systems (Alan Dixson, Victoria University, New Zealand). The conference wrapped up with the play “Unnatural Selection”, performed by four very talented New Zealand high school students, and a preview of October’s IUBS meetings in Cape Town, South Africa.

Several high school teachers in attendance mentioned how much they enjoyed the opportunity for in-depth conversations with researchers, and many research-oriented participants equally appreciated the ideas for new teaching strategies. In response to this demand, the organizers established a blog to help maintain the collaborations begun at the conference. The conference also highlighted one other challenge common to many international societies, including SMB: the language barrier. The IUBS has taken an excellent first step by linking their website and associated materials to a web-based translator. Given the international nature of such conferences, any additional strategies for facilitating multilingual presentations could greatly enhance the experience for speakers and participants alike.

Dr. Anton E. Weisstein
Biology Department
Truman State University
weisstae@truman.edu
http://www2.truman.edu/~weisstae/

Editor’s Note:

Thanks to Tony for sharing this meeting wrap-up. The following links have more information:
BioEd 2009 – the meeting website.
The Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Ecology & Evolution – hosted meeting (they will have links to the meeting resources posted soon).
The International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS) – sponsored and organized meeting. IUBS is a non-governmental, non-profit organization, established in 1919 that promotes international and interdisciplinary cooperation in biological sciences research.

This report was originally written for publication in the Society of Mathematical Biology Newsletter edited by Holly Gaff. Thanks to Tony and Holly for making it available for posting here as well.

You can find our original posting on the meeting here.

Share this post: