Note that I’ve blogged about related issues before as part of Blog Against Theocracy. I hope I had something new today.

It looks to me that Reiss was very unreasonably pushed out.  The people who did the pushing, I’m guessing, didn’t actually read the text of the talk.

Here’s an excerpt:

Many scientists, and some science educators, fear that consideration of creationism or intelligent design in a science classroom legitimises them. For example, the excellent book Science, Evolution, and Creationism published by the US National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine asserts “The ideas offered by intelligent design creationists are not the products of scientific reasoning. Discussing these ideas in science classes would not be appropriate given their lack of scientific support”.

I agree with the first sentence but disagree with the second. Just because something lacks scientific support doesn’t seem to me a sufficient reason to omit it from a science lesson. When I was taught physics at school, and taught it extremely well in my view, what I remember finding so exciting was that we could discuss almost anything providing we were prepared to defend our thinking in a way that admitted objective evidence and logical argument.

In an interesting exception that proves the rule, I recall one of our advanced level chemistry teachers scoffing at a fellow student who sat with a spoon in front of her while Uri Geller maintained he could bend viewers’ spoons. I was all for this approach. After all, I reasoned, surely the first thing was to establish if the spoon bent (it didn’t for her) and if it did, then start working out how.

So when teaching evolution, there is much to be said for allowing students to raise any doubts they have (hardly a revolutionary idea in science teaching) and doing one’s best to have a genuine discussion. The word ‘genuine’ doesn’t mean that creationism or intelligent design deserve equal time. However, in certain classes, depending on the comfort of the teacher in dealing with such issues and the make up of the student body, it can be appropriate to deal with the issue. If questions or issues about creationism and intelligent design arise during science lessons they can be used to illustrate a number of aspects of how science works such as ‘how interpretation of data, using creative thought, provides evidence to test ideas and develop theories’; ‘that there are some questions that science cannot currently answer, and some that science cannot address’; ‘how uncertainties in scientific knowledge and scientific ideas change over time and about the role of the scientific community in validating these changes’.

Having said that, I don’t believe that such teaching is easy. Some students get very heated; others remain silent even if they disagree profoundly with what is said. The DCSF Guidance suggests: “Some students do hold creationist beliefs or believe in the arguments of the intelligent design movement and/or have parents/carers who accept such views. If either is brought up in a science lesson it should be handled in a way that is respectful of students’ views, religious and otherwise, whilst clearly giving the message that the theory of evolution and the notion of an old Earth / universe are supported by a mass of evidence and fully accepted by the scientific community”.

I too can pull interesting exceptions from both my own schooling and my own teaching.  My high school physics teacher was the very highly regarded Dick Sentman.  We sometimes watched Wile E. Coyote breaking the laws of physics. I think it helped me understand school science content about as well as anything I did in school.  He didn’t make claims, of course, that we could pause while falling.

Obviously, this is a different ball of wax — there aren’t many people out there who think that the physics of Warner Brothers is the physics of the real world.  There are a lot of people who believe that the creation story of the Bible is how the world was created. And we, as teachers, don’t want to make light of that.

It is different.

But we also know that the research on how people learn is clear.  If we want durable understanding to develop, we must engage existing conceptions related to the scientific conception.  The National Research Council’s Committee on How People Learn put it this way:

1. Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information that are taught, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom.

Pretty clear, if you ask me.  (There are links to research on how people learn on the Learning Links Page of the blog).

How can we forbid talking about these key conceptions about the origin of life on Earth and expect kids to understand evolution?

It’s essential to remember what we’ve been doing for a very long time has failed miserably.  Close to half of Americans think the world is several thousand years old (as opposed to about 4.5 billion years old).  The reject evolution.  That suggests to me the new to do things fundamentally differently.

Ironically, Reiss also notes:

One very rarely changes one’s worldview as a result of a 50 minute lesson, however well taught.

I guess the same can be said of the Royal Society’s worldview.

Some Technological Tips for Creating and Using Virtual Fieldwork

Making A VFE of the Niagara Whirlpool: Part 1

Making a VFE of the Niagara Whirlpool Part 2 — About Pictures & Panoramas

Making a VFE of the Niagara Whirlpool Part 3 — Putting Panoramas into Google Earth (You are here!)

What’s in this post?

• How to embed pictures and other media in Google Earth (GE)
• Making “zoomable” pictures using the ZoomImage Creator (and embedding those images)
• I created some icons for Google Earth and posted them to photobucket.com.
• The current version of the Google Earth VFE of the Niagara Whirlpool

When I want to place a picture in Google Earth, here’s what I do:

See the screencast of this process by clicking here.

• Post the picture to the web using a photo sharing website or, if I want to make a photo I can zoom in on, use the ZoomImage Creator.  More on the ZoomImage Creator below.  It’s cool!

Some of the big photo sharing sites (in alphabetical order):

• • flickr.com
  • photobucket.com
  • Panoramio.com
  • picasa.com
  • shutterfly.com
  • snapfish.com

• Create the placemark in Google Earth at the desired location.
• The placemark’s information window will open when you place the placemark.  If you close it, you can reopen the placemark window in GE by holding down the ‘command’ and the ‘i’ keys together.
• Copy the link from the picture’s website, preferably along with appropriate html code.
• Paste the html into the placemark window.  If you only have the URL without the code, look at another placemark formatted the way you want, open the placemark’s information window and copy it.  Replace the URL of the photo from the copied placemark text with the URL of the new photo.  The URL may be included twice.  If it is, replace both occurrences.  One may be a thumbnail image and the other a link to the full sized image on the web.
• Verify the location of the placemark.  You can drag it whenever the placemark window is open.

Some New Icons for Google Earth:

I wanted to be able to look at the lay of the land within Google Earth (GE) from the standard aerial view and be able to tell where one looks when bringing up embedded photos.  You can add custom icons to GE, and if you post them to a website, they’ll work for any user.

So, I made a bunch and posted them to Photobucket.  I’ve been exploring the various photosharing websites and chose Photobucket for this task as they make it really easy to link to your images and accept things in some formats that other sites don’t.

Picasa also facilitates copying html code fairly well.  You can see that in the video above.  Flickr allow you to write blog posts to your blog from a photo’s page — click on the “blog this” button.  That creates a blog post in your blog, which is kind of cool, but they don’t offer up the html code to cut and paste in a conspicuous way.

When you look at my icons album in Photobucket, you can see the html code in a couple of different formats that make for easy inclusion in either a website or GE.  Both Google Earth and websites rely on html for formatting.

Putting Icons on the Map

D’oh!  The description below has been simplified greatly by the combination of Google Earth and Picassa. Here’s my Picassa photos mapped.

1. Upload your pictures to Picassa.
2. Click on the individual photo you wish to map.
3. Click on ‘add location’ on the right side of the individual picture’s page.
4. Add the location.
5. Click on ‘View Album.’
6. Click on the ‘View Map’ button.  This brings up the map view (”No duh!” as some might say).
7. Click on ‘View in Google Earth.’

This should be a remarkable time saver for VFE creation.  The placemarks appear as tiny thumbnails of the photos.  The placemark pop up boxes are still editable — you can add text or links by clicking on the placemark and hitting the ‘control’ and ‘i’ keys.

Skip down to the next heading

Here’s the complicated procedure I used previously.  It might be useful for thinking about how to do certain things, but not embedding photos.

In Google Earth, it works largely the same way for putting in icons as it does for putting in pictures.  So, here’s the code for one icon using HTML:

<a href=”http://s517.photobucket.com/albums/u335/dugganhaas/Google%20Earth%20Panorama%20Icons/?action=view&current=PanoramaIconNW.gif” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://i517.photobucket.com/albums/u335/dugganhaas/Google%20Earth%20Panorama%20Icons/PanoramaIconNW.gif” border=”0″ alt=”PanoramaIconNW”></a>

Most of the time when I’m writing my blog, I’m using the visual editor which makes writing the blog pretty much like writing in a word processor.  When I want do certain kinds of things, like put in a Youtube video or add an image from somewhere else on the web, I can edit in html, though I’m certainly a novice at that.  Sites that make the code obvious like Youtube, Photobucket and the National Academy Press make it a whole lot easier.   Since the html code is provided, all I need to do is:

• copy the code for embedding,
• switch back to the blog,
• switch from visual to html editing,
• paste the html code into the desired location (the text will still be readable to clue you into the right location),
• switch back to visible editing, and,
• there it is!

Or, here it is:

Unfortunately, I don’t know how to make the icons rotate with the map, so they only face the correct direction if north is at the top of the page.

Making Zoomable Images with ZoomImage:

Two cool websites I learned about today:

• The Gigapxl Project at http://gigapxl.org/. This has panoramas of a growing number of places (not yet including anything in the Niagara region of New York State) that are of a billion pixels.  High resolution digital cameras are now taking pictures with about 10 million pixels (that is, 10 megapixels).  These are whopping big images and the way they show up in Google Earth is way cool — turn on the Gigapixl Layer in Google Earth and then fly into those pictures.  This really does allow you to take a closer look at whatever they happen to take pictures of, but that’s a pretty small set right now.  A couple of pictures that might somehow connect to VFEs are of Angel’s Window in the Grand Canyon and Newspaper Rock in Utah.  There are quite a few more of interest, too.  It’s cool to look at on these websites, but it’s cooler to fly around through them in Google Earth.
• The ZoomImage Creator at http://vigh.org/zoomimage/.  This site allows you to upload a high resolution photo and convert it into a Quicktime VR image which allows you to zoom within the picture.  The picture is posted to the web and available for download.   It’s worth noting that this didn’t work in Firefox on my Mac but it did work in Safari.  I’ll add a note if I figure out the problem.

Images from the Gigapixl are already in Google Earth, so you’ve already got them.  If you’re making a VFE of one of the locations where Gigapixl pictures are available, you’ve got a nifty resource.

It’s a little more complicated for getting the ZoomImage pictures into Google Earth, but it’s doable.  It is a movie, so this means you can put movies of other things into your VFEs as well, using the same formatting.  Posting Youtube videos is doable as well, but requires some different coding.

I found the code for embedding Quicktime Movies on a presentation sharing site called Slideshare.net.  Here’s the link to the presentation with the code.  The presentation is from Mike Bryant at Discovery Education.  In the same presentation are code snippets for other kinds of media.  Note that scrolling down gives you the presentation text in a format where you can cut and paste.  But, I can easily embed it right here:

Here is the text and the code for a Quicktime Movie in the Google Earth VFE of the Niagara Gorge.  It should work for web pages too.

This outcrop is near the top of the Whirlpool Rapids Trail.  Note that the image is zoomable.
<br>
<br>

<object width=”189″ height=”360″ classid=”clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B” codebase=”http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab”>  <param name=”src” value=”sample.mov”>  <param name=”autoplay” value=”true”>  <param name=”controller” value=”false”>  <embed src=”http://vigh.org/zoomimage/sessions/mov/546024494/UpperTrailWall1.mov” width=”189″ height=”380″ autoplay=”true” controller=”true” pluginspage=”http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/”>  </embed>  </object>
<br>
<br>

The image can be downloaded here:
http://vigh.org/zoomimage/sessions/mov/546024494/UpperTrailWall1.mov
Click on the arrow icons to open thumbnails of photographs taken from the marked location.  Clicking on the thumbnail will take you to a higher resolution copy of the photograph in your browser.

And, when I switch to the HTML editor and paste in just the code (the stuff between the <br> <br>s), it looks like this on the blog:

Use the shift key to zoom and the mouse to pan.

Here’s
Download.

Cool, huh?  And, again, you can create your own with The ZoomImage Creator at http://vigh.org/zoomimage/. After you make them you can link to the image on the web and/or download it. 

Here’s the current draft of the Google Earth piece of the VFE.  A website is under development, too.  More will be added to the Google Earth piece as well.  I’ll like head back to the gorge next week.  If you’re in the area and want to come along, let me know.

Click on the image below to download the file.

The Niagara Whirlpool VFE in Google Earth (First Draft)

Note that servers need to allow kmz (Google Earth) files to work properly.  Edublogs apparently allows Google Earth files.  Colgate did not.

First, the how to:

On the VFE Workshops Page, I’ve added materials related to our most recent workshop.  That includes:

• the session PowerPoint, with the beginning of a Taughannock Falls State Park VFE and;
• a short video on how to embed pictures in pictures.

Some other resources for Taughannock Falls:

• If you’re after just some of the pictures of Taughannock, more than 40 are on a page I created on Flickr.com and,
• here’s the central part of the PowerPoint in pdf format.  Note that the links embedded in the pictures are preserved in the pdf.

And, just a couple of nice pictures of the falls:

It was pretty dry in August of 2005 when this picture was taken.  The people by the water’s edge give you a good idea of scale.  The falls is 215 feet high.  If you go today, you’ll note that the toungue of just below and to the right of the crest of the falls is missing its left half.

Here’s a picture taken from below the falls from just over a year later.  Do you see the difference?

There are more pictures on the Flickr.com page.

I wanted to share the simple and nifty way I made the “how to video.”

The Jing Project has free software for capturing video of your computer screen and, at least for the time being, allows you to share those “screencasts” for free.  The video tour on the homepage gives a good overview of its basic use and has the download link.

I was initially puzzled by where the icon went when I started the software.  It practically goes out of sight into the corner.  I could make an introductory video on how to use just about any bit of software with Jing – except for Jing itself as it intentionally goes into the background when in use.  And, besides, Jing has a page of “How do I…” videos.

Now, just a few thoughts on the What Fors:

Why embed pictures in pictures?

This is one small way we can simulate the field experience.  We want students to do things geologists do when in the field even when we can’t get students actually into the field.  One key thing is simply that, when in the field, you can take a closer look at the things of your own choosing.  Sarah Miller’s Virtual Fieldwork Experience of the area around Norwich, New York is a good example.

The examples for Tuaghannock provided here really only give the opportunity to look more closely at things I, as the teacher, chose.   Hopefully though, you can see how to build on that as you gradually develop your own VFEs.

What can you do with how to videos?

If you do a computer activity in class, you can create a set of the key technological steps.  That could let you focus on teaching your content rather than how to be a technician with the particular software.  If your kids are using PowerPoint, for example, your primary goal as a science teacher is the science they present, not the stylishness of their slide transitions.

Using Jing when you don’t have the Internet in your classroom…

This past year, I taught in a classroom without Internet access.  I used Jing to show certain animations from websites that didn’t save to my computer’s cache.  I could, for example, play sequences of weather maps from here: http://www.hpc.ncep.noaa.gov/html/sfcloop/namne_wbg.html

Closing thoughts and questions…

It turns out making the video was about the simplest piece of this post.  I don’t think I’d have guessed that were I the reader.  Wow.  It seems as though something’s changed in the way I can post pictures on the blog to make it more complicated, and embedding videos too.

What uses do you see for these technologies?  What other techniques and technologies will or have you employed in VFEs (or teaching other stuff)?