Mailund on the Internet

I got an email this morning pointing me to Scitable at Nature.

What Is Scitable?

A free science library and personal learning tool brought to you by Nature Publishing Group, the world’s leading publisher of science.

Scitable currently concentrates ongenetics, the study of evolution, variation, and the rich complexity of living organisms. As you cultivate your understanding of modern genetics on Scitable, you will explore not only what we know about genetics and the ways it impacts our society, but also the data and evidence that supports our knowledge.

I browsed around a bit and there are a nice collection of short articles describing various areas of genetics and genomics.  I haven’t tried out any of the learning paths or any of the other features yet.  I have to finish a grant proposal so that has to wait.  Anyway, you might find it interesting to check out.

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Blogging

• How blogging can hurt your career as a scientist… (On becoming a domestic and laboratory goddess)
• Nature on conference blogging (John Hawks)
• European publishes want a law to control online news access (Ars Technica)
• This is my job (Uncertain principles)

Psychology

• The bigger the ego, the harder the fall (Not exactly rocket science)

Web publishing

• The hazy future of web typography (Ars Technica)
• Posting correctly-aligned LaTeX formulae in a WordPress blog (Eli Bendersky)

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I just found out this morning that one of my students has started a blog.  Good for him, but the title (asand on the web) and the tagline (computer science, bioinformatics, mathematics and other good stuff…) sounds familiar somehow ;)

Of course, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

I look forward to reading his blog.

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I’m reading on teaching right now, going through links provided by Peter Beattie here.  Quite instructive.

Anyway, that is not what this post is about.  I just saw this one quote from the piece I’m reading right now and wanted to share it.

In fact, students, too, may resist authentic teaching — at least at first. For one thing, they may prefer to avoid unnecessary intellectual challenges such as those entailed by a more active, probing form of learning. The introduction of a nontraditional science program led one 10th grader to exclaim, “We see what all this is about now. You are trying to get us to think and learn for ourselves.” Exactly right, replied the teacher, relieved and grateful that the message was getting through. “Well,” the student continued, “we don’t want to do that.”

Indeed.

I hope that is the problem I am having lately.  Otherwise I’m just a crappy teacher – something I cannot rule out – which would be pretty bad for my chosen career.

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…for completely relating to the beginning of this song?

My second computer was a Vic 20.  I know that that puts me in the young category amongst most of my colleagues, but it certainly puts me in the “older than dirt” category amongst my students.

Oh well, enough time wasted on youtube tonight.  I have to finish two papers this week, so I have to get up early tomorrow, so off to bed with me…

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