Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Global Physics Department

Announcement: Next week John Burk (@occam98) will show us how he uses Tracker in his teaching. Wednesday 3/30/2011

Tonight was the second installment of the physics educators elluminate chat. This time we had 15 different people log in and join us. Here's the recording of the bulk of the session.

Tonight we tried having a mini-presentation at the beginning (me talking about "momentum is king") and then we chatted for about 20 minutes about issues around teaching momentum, force, and energy.  The one sentence version of my take is that momentum is king, force keeps track of momentum swaps, and energy is a handy way of figuring out how much momentum an interaction can swap in total. We then group edited a google doc with our names and interests  to try to facilitate the community building that we're clearly all craving (why else would we be online late on a Wednesday night when, say, some of us are on spring break enjoying a fun stay at a hotel with 5 pools, ping pong, a basketball court, and where kids eat free!). Then we broke into a spontaneous discussion of Standards Based Grading (since, as one participant emailed me later, there were some serious heavy hitters in that department present).

Please think about joining in next week. We'll stick with the same time (9:30pm EDT/8:30pm CDT) on Wednesday. We don't have a theme for next week yet but I hope one will grow organically in the next few days (along with a possible presenter if that fits).

Here are the useful links again:

What's in a name?
I've coined this phrase "Global Physics Department Meeting" and I'm not sure if it has legs. I guess I'm trying to capture the spirit of the meetings as people are enjoying sharing with each other.

6 comments:

  1. I'm sad I was only able to join for a few minutes tonight and I think it was after you left Andy.

    Side, but related note: If anybody teaching Physics and using SBG is going to AAPT summer meeting/PERC, you should really consider presenting something at PERC about SBG. This year's PERC theme is assessment and I think there will be some very interested folks.

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  2. On Joss' side note, I am on the PERC organizing committee. So you can contact me.

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  3. I'm going to teach my first physics course soon. I would join, but I'm working at that time on Wednesday night. If the meeting time can change once in a while, I'd be able to participate.

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  4. I'd love to hear more from folks about days/times that work better. We picked Wed because scichat is on Tues and we picked 8:30 for a balance between east and west coasts. I'm in the middle so I'm pretty flexible.

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  5. @Andy I'm on the west coast of the US, and I simply work unreasonably late (frequently until 9 or 10pm) - it might actually be pretty hard to accommodate me for the time being. I'll keep track of the meetings though and join the first time I'm free.

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  6. Found out about the group from the Michigan Physics Teachers group. It's worth staying up late for, can't wait for next week!!!

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