Gleanings of the Week Ending March 23, 2013

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

First Nations Holistic Lifelong Learning Model - Graphic used in Aboriginal Worldviews and Education course on Coursera

Redtail hawk and heron bird cams - First redtail egg laid on 3/14, herons expected soon….at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology site

Photos of Glasswinged Butterfly - butterfly without pigment in their wings found in Central America

Sakurajima Volcano Eruptions - photos and video from February

Some Great Ideas For Spending Spring In The National Park System - I am going to enjoy the National Cherry Blossom Festival this year…but the other ideas on this list sound good as well.

Pantanal: Liquid heart of South America - Video about the giant South American wetlands

What Coke Contains - It is pretty complex

Which Google Reader Replacement Will You Use? - Aargh! I hate when things like this happen...Google Reader was my favorite way to keep up with my RSS feeds.

Where Siri Has Trouble Hearing, a Crowd of Humans Could Help  - Combining the best talents of machines and people for speech-recognition. What other problems might use this same approach? And use very inexpensive labor. Is this a new kind of sweatshop?

Monarch Migration Plunges to Lowest Level in Decades - Sad. Years ago we raised monarch caterpillars to butterflies that we released. Now we rarely see monarchs in our part of Maryland.

US Home Energy Use Shift (Charts) - Changes between 1993 and 2009 (space heating down….appliances, electronics, and lighting up).

AmpleHarvest.org - A site to help coordinate gardeners that may have seasonal surplus with food pantries near them. 

Gleanings of the Week Ending March 09, 2013

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles I read this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

What’s Happening to Great Lakes Ice - Compare 2010 and 2013 then watch the video of ice forming this winter

Vibrant Paint Patterns Brighten Up Urban Landscapes - Color in Beirut

The Science of Smart - Infographic.

Visual Storytelling through Intricate Paper Designs - Design in cut in paper always seem appealing to me. I probably include collections of them in my gleanings every time I find them. these are by Australian artist Emma Van Leest.

'Behind The Brands' Oxfam Report Evaluates Social, Environmental Impacts Of World's Largest Food Companies - None of them are doing very well when it comes to women, small scale farmers, farm workers, water, land, climate change, or transparency.

Education Indigenous to Place: Western Science Meets Native Reality - Article from the Alaska native Knowledge Network from 1999. The argument for integrative thinking relative to place rather than deep specialization (which has been the trend for some time in the sciences and medicine) is beautifully made in this article.

Top 25 Wild Bird Photographs of the Week #38 - My favorite is oriental dwarf kingfisher. The size and shape of the head/beak make it clear that it is a kingfisher but the colors are extraordinary. I am in awe of photograhers that capture birdlife so vividly. My most recent (and poor) attempt is at the right; at least you can tell that it is a redwing blackbird.

Namibia: The Big Empty, part 1 - A short video from National Geographic

First Confirmed Sighting Of Rare Whooping Cranes At Natchez Trace Parkway - Hurray! Maybe an effort to establish an Eastern Migratory Population of these cranes is succeeding.

Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud - TED talk

The Healthy Matriarch

Many of us enter our 60s without major health problems and have refined our strategies to sustain that health as long as possible. What are the top 5 things you are doing toward a healthy you? Mine are: 

• Take at least 12,000 steps per day (using a Fitbit to measure ‘steps’)
• Sleep 7-8 (but not more than 8) hours per day (also measured by the Fitbit )
• Eat a healthy diet - lots of fruits and veggies, some meat and grains, some fat (olive oil and nuts) - and take reasonable supplements
• Sustain or reduce weight to ‘normal’ for my height
• Continue a high level of continuous learning 

OK - I combined a whole lot in the ‘eat a healthy diet’ item and the ‘continuous learning’ items.

Eating a healthy diet requires tweaking. Your food should help you feel good - not bloated, tired, or break out in hives! Supplements are the backup of diet - not the main event. Take supplements for those vitamins and minerals that you cannot get through diet and keep up with the research. For example, recently there has been quite a lot in the media about the pluses and minuses of taking calcium supplements…with the minuses currently winning when it comes to people that do not have bone density issues already.

‘Continuous learning’ makes it to my top 5 for sustaining health because healthy mind is so closely linked to healthy body. Whatever one does for ‘continuous learning’ needs occasional tweaking too. This year I have added Coursera to my regime and reduced the number of physical books that I read (even though the net books read is about the same…it is just a shift in media type). And I am on the lookout for volunteer activities that will be ‘learning experiences.’

The gist of all this is - articulate what you are doing to sustain your good health. It’s a way to make sure you are focused on the things that are right for you.

Free Online Courses - Coursera

I had mentioned Coursera in several other blog posts (here and here). There was a news story about it this past week - More Elite Universities Offer Free Online Courses - that prompts me to write about them again.

The tangential learning has, on two occasions, been more significant for me that the main topic of the course. I was prompted to learn more about Genetically Modified Organisms by the Obesity Economics course (the topic came up in the forums….and off I went). The Critical Thinking course actually prompted tangential learning by asking students to pick one of 4 topics to practice their critical thinking skills. I picked Population and enjoyed the references provided plus the forum posts the students produced. It increased the critical thinking I do about items in the news.

The quality of the courses is inconsistent. Some of the videos are patched together from live lectures while some appear to be made with a web cam on the speaker’s PC. Almost all the videos switch between the speaker and charts with varying amounts of expertise. Sometimes the charts are created by the speaker as the lecture proceeds (like a white board) and other times they are formal charts. Sometimes the charts are available for download and sometimes not. Most of the courses have multiple choice questions embedded in the lectures although often it is just one question at the end of the lecture….and sometimes the embedded quiz is missing altogether.

The Modern World course is providing a good framework for things I learned long ago in school and via reading since then. Somehow the history courses when I was in school in the ‘60s and ‘70s rushed through the World Wars and what happened afterwards….up to the present. The energy that daround the early history of the US - from colonization to just past the Civil War petered out too soon. And the courses were only looking at the US perspective. World history classes also seemed more enthusiastic about Greek and Roman times than the 1900s. The increased discussion of ‘why?’ is also quite a welcome upgrade. Even in college in the 1970s - I don’t recall the history courses trying to help the student understand the perspective of people at the time to increase the understanding of why decisions or events were happened.

The forums are interesting but overwhelming for the larger classes. Several of the courses I am taking have over 10,000 students from around the world! If the course requires posting as part of the course - then there are a huge number of posts. Some are enlightening….some interesting….but wading through the ones that are not is time consuming/impossible/frustrating.

It is true that because they are “free” and not for credit - people that sign up may not complete the course requirements. Are they collecting data on why people do not complete the course? It is not obvious that they are. I’ve dropped one completely because I signed up for too many courses at one time and have gone into ‘sponge’ mode on another (i.e. just reading the forums rather than posting) because I am just too overwhelmed to dive into posting. Still - I am getting what I want from the second course even without completing all the requirements.

The bottom line of the whole experiment for me is that Coursera offerings are a worthwhile addition to the bevy of activities I use to continue to learn new things.

Bravo to Coursera and the universities that are contributing content!

The Joy of Free Courses

Years after college, I am still in the mood to start classes in September and January. The rhythm of the school year is evidently one that will last all my life.

It is easier now than ever before to study at your own pace and without traveling to a university. Courses are offered using all kinds media - videos, forums, simulations, readings. And many are free. In some cases, formal credit for the course is offered upon completion.

Coursera is my favorite for free online courses with 212 courses that are freely available. I have enrolled in 3 courses that will start up this month; it’s such a thrill to have a richness of topics from which to choose. I found it challenging to choose just three! I’m signed up for:

The Modern World: Global History since 1760

Science from Superheroes to Global Warming

Critical Thinking in Global Challenges

I’ve already selected another that will start in February (Aboriginal Worldviews and Education) and one in April (Nutrition, Health, and Lifestyles: Issues and Insights).