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Free teaching tools
Recent Major Posts
- Pratt Institute holds 124th Commencement, special gallery show
- Rhett Bradbury’s Master’s Thesis explores how gaming can foster political leadership
- Envirolutions asks the Pratt community to identify where there is “room for improvement”
- My review of Railsback and Grimm’s “Agent-based and individual-based modeling” textbook published in Ecology
- Envirolutions club launches its “Room for Improvement” campaign
- Dumb radio ads provide smart insight into the diverse nature of human societies
- Is selective rejection of science really a problem?
- Pratt Envirolutions Students Bring Recycling Bins to Campus
- Concept mapping as a creative tool
- Governor Cuomo makes the connection between natural disasters and climate change, calls for building in resilience
Recent Minor Posts
- Pratt Professor Ágnes Mócsy releases “Smashing Matters” short film
- NPR piece suggests that economics are pushing us towards nutrient recycling
- Just in case you missed it the first ten times: E.O. Wilson likes group selection, Jerry Coyne does not
- Allen MacNeill predicts resolution of Ev-Coop debates
- Martin Nowak to lecture on the compatibility of god and the evolutionary process
- Understanding kin selection and reciprocity when strategies are culturally propagated
- “Earth Hour” seeks to re-focus our attention on all the earth provides
- Seth Horowitz on our perception of sound
- Forward on Climate Rally seeks to shift the national dialogue on anthropogenic climate change
- Quantifying the climate value of that 40-acre woodlot
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What I am reading now
Category Archives: Teaching
Rhett Bradbury’s Master’s Thesis explores how gaming can foster political leadership
Rhett Bradbury has been a crucial member of Envirolutions over the past two years. Our only graduate student member, Rhett started coming to club meetings during his first semester at Pratt. Rhett’s skills as a graphic designer have had a profound effect … Continue reading
Posted in A Major Post, Mentoring, Political Science
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Up-Goer Five text editor challenges you to make accessible explanations
Scientific American blogs “Science in Ten-Hundred Words: The “Up-Goer 5″ Challenge” THE UP-GOER FIVE TEXT EDITOR Oh, and by the way the title of this post would not pass the up-goer five test! Thanks to one of my Pratt students, … Continue reading
Posted in A Minor Post, Pratt Institute, Public Outreach, Teaching, Web
Tagged Tony Wylen
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As the nature of university-level teaching changes, should we re-assess the credit hour?
The Chronicle of Higher Education “The Curious Birth and Harmful Legacy of the Credit Hour” The Chronicle of Higher Education “In Defense of the Credit Hour“
Posted in A Minor Post, Articles, Higher Education
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Roberts Publishing releases an iPad version of their majors Evolution textbook
iTunes “Evolution: Making Sense of Life” I don’t own an iPad so I won’t be playing with this anytime soon, but I am very curious about the impact of this first-of-its-kind majors Evolution textbook for tablet. I am not sure … Continue reading
G. Kim Blank on making writing work better by eliminating the term paper
The Chronicle of Higher Education “Let’s Kill the Term Paper” I have been experimenting for several years with various forms of “Reading Response Questions” that challenge students to either summarize or pull the most important ideas out of what they … Continue reading
Posted in A Minor Post, Articles, Assessment Methods, Student Writing, Teaching
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Does American faith in genetic determinism limit the achievement of our students?
National Public Radio Shots “Struggle For Smarts? How Eastern And Western Cultures Tackle Learning” This piece went in a direction that I just did not expect. There is so much focus on the role of rote learning versus problem solving … Continue reading
Concept mapping as a creative tool
If your brain is anything like mine, thoughts pretty much constantly race across it. As I consume media — especially media designed to inform — these thoughts intensify. As I read or listen or watch, my brain makes rapid connections between … Continue reading
ESA 2012 Overall Impressions
What was the ‘big news’ at this year’s Ecological Society of America meeting? Given that this meeting is composed of so many different meetings running concurrently, this just might be an impossible question to answer fairly. But for me, this … Continue reading
Posted in A Major Post, Altruism, Biodiversity Loss, Conservation Biology, Cooperation, Ecological Modeling, Ecological Society of America, Ecology Education, Ecosystem Services, Environmental Justice, Group Selection, Marine Ecosystems, Multilevel Selection, Public Policy, Punishment, Resource Consumption, Social Capital, Sustainability, System Stability, Talks & Seminars, Teaching, Teaching Tools, The Evolution of Sustainable Use
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Preview of the 2012 Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Portland, Oregon
I am off to another Ecological Society of America (ESA) meeting, my sixth and the society’s ninety-seventh. As I already covered in a previous post, I will be presenting a poster entitled “The Evolution of Sustainable Use, a flash-based classroom … Continue reading
Evolutionary Games Infographic Project launches with its first release of graphic packages
In the Fall of 2011 I began a new project with Greg Riestenberg, a graduate student in Pratt’s Communications Design program. Given the ubiquity — especially in recent times — of evolutionary game theory, you would think that someone would have produced … Continue reading
Molly H. Adams earns top honors from the Critical and Visual Studies program
Me with Molly and B. Ricardo Brown (coordinator of the Critical and Visual Studies program) at Pratt’s Honors Convocation I am proud to report that a student who I have both taught and mentored, Molly H. Adams, has won top … Continue reading
The tragically early passing of Fred Rubino, an influential Brooklyn educator
Not surprisingly, where I am today has a lot to do with where I came from. My passion for teaching, driven in large part by the faith that educators can transform the lives of their students, predates my arrival in … Continue reading
Evolutionary Games Infographic Project: First images
UPDATE: The images discussed below are now available for free use on the Evolutionary Games Infographic Project page. This post described earlier versions of our “conceptual” evolutionary games infographics for the Prisoner’s Dilemma, Stag Hunt, and Hawk-Dove games. The latest versions of … Continue reading
Posted in Evolutionary Games Infographics, Game Theory, Information Design, Teaching Tools
Tagged Greg Riestenberg, Hawk-Dove game, Prisoner's Dilemma, Stag Hunt game
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Eco-mysticism in the Ecology Classroom, Discontinuity in Evolutionary Theory
After many semesters teaching an introductory Ecology course to non-majors, I have gotten a pretty good sense of the misconceptions that they bring to the subject. Most students receive little or no high school education in ecology: the majority of … Continue reading
Proper set-up for Concept Mapping with VUE
As I have indicated on my Interests page, I am very much interested in the process of Concept Mapping. I have been using a wonderful concept-mapping tool, the Visual Understanding Environment (VUE), to create concept maps for my teaching, research, … Continue reading
Posted in Concept Mapping, Information Design
Tagged Computer Set-Up, Visual Understanding Environment
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Easy-IPD version 1.0 released!
After a full semester of development, including a round of in-classroom testing with real live Pratt undergraduates, I am proud to announce the release of the Easy Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma (Easy-IPD) interface, a free web-based teaching tool that allows students … Continue reading
