planetwater

ground- water, geo- statistics, environmental- engineering, earth- science

Archive for September, 2009

Identi.ca Updates for 2009-09-15

without comments

Written by Claus

September 15th, 2009 at 10:00 am

Posted in identi.ca

Identi.ca Updates for 2009-09-14

without comments

Written by Claus

September 14th, 2009 at 10:00 am

Posted in identi.ca

Bewertungsportale

without comments

“Bewertungsportale” are sites where users can rate something, a product or in some cases other human beings. I know of course about such sites. Ratings for products have been around in germany for quite some time now. Typical examples are the ratings on books at amazon.de. A community for recipes has been also around for a while, where the recipes are rated. However, yesterday at barcamp Stuttgart, Dr. Carsten Ulbricht provided us with some deeper insights:

Recently, a site has gained a lot of publicity where it’s possible for (high-school) students to rate their teachers. A teacher has recently taken this site to court. She argues that her personal rights are violated. As I learned , three german courts, the Landgericht Cologne, the Oberlandesgericht Cologne, as well as the Bundesgerichtshof argued in this particular case, that the personal rights are not violated. There will be a trial at the Bundesverfassungsgericht, however it’s not expected to rule differently.

For students and teachers at the university level, there is a somewhat comparable site: meinprof.de, a site for the university of Stuttgart does exist, however I haven’t registered yet so I couldn’t find out what students say.

A whole variety of portals where users can rate things exist. One example for an online version of something that used to exist in book form for ages is restaurantkritik.de

Public attention comparable to spickmich.de might soon be attracted to sites where medical doctors are rated. The german assurance company AOK is planning a comarable site.

In the USA there exist two more rating-sites, one for lawyers, and one, quite exotic, against boyfriends:

Written by Claus

September 13th, 2009 at 2:55 pm

Posted in

Tagged with

What Makes a Great Teacher

without comments

I’ve recently taken a short course with Jacob Bear (see my summaries of days 1, 2, 3, and 4). This short course is still very actively in my mind. Jacob Bear was such a great teacher, and learning with his guidance was highly enjoyable — the way it should be. Hence, I want to share some thoughts today, on what I think makes a great teacher. I think it doesn’t hurt to think about this topic a little bit, because in our daily live, especially in an academic environment, we tend to have a lot of “teachers”, because we tend to want to learn regularly.

There are a few basics. In order to be a good teacher, you have to know your subject. You have to really know it, ideally by heart (which happens automatically if you are prepared). Ideally you don’t want to teach topics which you are currently learning yourself. I think, ideally you want to teach a little less than what you actually know. This is not because you want to hide knowledge from your students, but this is because you can’t be as confident on things you are just learning as you can be with things you have dealt with and worked with for some time.

I think it does not hurt if you are doing some research in the field you’re teaching on. Some can mean that you are doing or have recently done research in this field, or it can mean that you’re actively following what’s going on in the field via literature or via discussions. The point is, you want to know what the research community is currently up to. Also, I think it doesn’t hurt if you have written something like an overview of a topic. Writing an overview help you tremendously in organizing ideas and additionally this writing could be of help for your students. You also should have good slides and talk well.

From Good to Great

But what makes a teacher better than a good teacher? During that short course, it seemed to me like the “tipping points”, the decisive factors were the “little things”, the things that don’t jump at you immediately. Particularly, these were three things related to the “style” of presentation. Usually, as an engineer, I would consider style important, but not the decisive factor between good and great. These three things were (1) that the teacher was getting to the point, (2) that he was consistent, and (3) that he used brilliant illustrations. I am going to explain what I mean by each of these three.

Getting to the point means that the teacher knows at every instant where he wants to go, and what he needs to explain, successively, in order to get there. This implies that he also knows where he’s coming from, that he knows details on how he wants to explain a given thing (and how he does not want to explain that thing), and how things are related. If these relations are known and available to the teacher, this knowledge will almost automatically influence the language he uses. He knows what he wants to stress, and he will use his voice or other rhetorical features to point things out. Jacob Bear was the master of using repetitions. Generally, every single word had its weight, meant something special. He was very precise. But once in a while he would repeat something he just said, usually summarized and maybe with wording changed. By those repetitions he stressed the important things that he wanted his students to remember because they were the key building blocks necessary to understand what was about to come.

The second small thing I call “consistency”. During the entire four days of the course, whenever we talked about porosity, it was represented by the greek small-case letter “phi”. Every single time. This might require some extra time at the beginning, because you need to lay the foundations for your terminology, abbreviations, indexing conventions, mathematical formulations and symbols. However the rewards are worth the effort: as a student I didn’t have to think twice what phi in a given case meant. It was porosity. Always.

The third and final little thing are illustrations and sketches. They have to explain well what needs to be illustrated. That means they have to be concise [sic!] and well readable. Don’t get me wrong. They don’t have to be animated using fancy software. They don’t even have to be in colour. In fact, Jacob Bear just used chalk and the chalkboard. With a few lines he was able to illustrate exactly what needed to be illustrated. And that forgives slides that were sometimes not optimal. On the other hand, if you can explain something very well by words in a sentence, that might even be short, then do it! However, usually in an engineering-related field, a simple sketch can work a lot for you!

I don’t think using fancy media or animations alone make a great presentation. Sure, used wisely, they will not hurt. I don’t think age is critical. Sure, experience never hurts. However, for a good teacher to turn into a great teacher, he has to be able to get to the point, he needs to be consistent, and his illustrations need to be well made!

Written by Claus

September 13th, 2009 at 12:52 pm

Posted in

Tagged with ,

Identi.ca Updates for 2009-09-12

without comments

Written by Claus

September 12th, 2009 at 10:00 am

Posted in identi.ca

bcs2

without comments

Tomorrow is BarCamp Stuttgart! Mehr Infos: siehe goodnews Stuttgart

Logo BarCamp Stuttgart

Logo BarCamp Stuttgart

Ich war noch nie auf einem, habe schon einiges gehört, und freue mich Leute zu treffen, mich auszutausche, und neue Dinge zu lernen!

Sonntagmorgen.com sind auch da! 🙂

Written by Claus

September 11th, 2009 at 11:45 am

Posted in

Identi.ca Updates for 2009-09-08

without comments

Written by Claus

September 8th, 2009 at 10:00 am

Posted in identi.ca

Identi.ca Updates for 2009-09-08

without comments

Written by Claus

September 8th, 2009 at 8:36 am

Posted in identi.ca

Jacob Bear Short Course – Day 4

without comments

The course is over. Instead of blogging immediately about day 4, I spent the evening in Torino and hung out with some people from the course. At this point I have to point out how nice the city of Torino is, how nice and willing to help the people are. In the town, during the days of my visit, I was asked at least three independent times, if I needed help! On the final evening, we sat down on a bench on one of the plazas, and an elderly man started to talk to us in Italian, slowly and very well understandably. He ended up walking with us through the old city four over an hour and pointed out places of interest. It was just wonderful!

On the last day we covered heat transport and transport with fluids of variable density, especially sea water intrusion. From a historical point of view it’s interesting that because of sea water intrusion, density dependent models were the first “contamination” models to be developed. That is before dispersion was developed, and hence sea water intrusion was treated with sharp interfaces. We learned about the “Hele Shaw Model“, which Jacob Bear has used to model sea water intrusion before the use of computers was feasible. Bear developed during his M.Sc. thesis a horizontal Hele Shaw model. His first bookhas a full section on constructing Hele Shaw models. The idea seems from a former time, but such a model could have its uses for education!

In the afternoon, Dr. Rajandrea Sethi gave a presentation on how his group models colloid- and nano-particle transport under saturated conditions.

These were just amazing four days in Torino. It was such an interesting approach – to hear essentially a short but complete version of porous media theory in four days. Jacob Bear as teacher for this short course was amazing. Every word he uses has a meaning, everything he says builds up consecutively, and he stresses the important points. I will have many ideas to write about in the next little while for sure! 🙂

Written by Claus

September 6th, 2009 at 7:41 pm

Identi.ca Updates for 2009-09-03

without comments

Written by Claus

September 3rd, 2009 at 11:59 pm

Posted in identi.ca