Stolen moments (Vol 1)
13 May 2022
I’m in the process of designing a brand new lab course for Semester 2, and the next series of blog entries will be my attempt to “think out loud” and steal some time away from the pressure of looming deadlines... The focus will be on inquiry-based learning in molecular biology labs classes - starting today with DNA + Molecular Cloning. In molecular cloning, if one step fails, everything fails. It is very tempting to have students follow cookbook recipes for each part of the process, but it is more valuable for their learning if you give students more autonomy in the experimental design. You can soften the learning curve by limiting the parameters that students can change.
Stuck in our ways
17 February 2022
Hollywood likes to portray scientists as power-hungry industrialists, ready to veer into madness at a moment’s notice. A radioactive spider here, a zombie apocalypse there. That’s simply the price we pay for… innovation (?). I can’t speak for other scientific disciplines, but none of the biologists I know feel powerful at all. We are all very much at the mercy of the natural order and living organisms are behaviourally, cognitively, and genetically stuck in our ways.
Signal vs Noise
14 February 2022
When making a new video on any topic, I try to avoid reinventing the wheel. The topic for my classes this week is Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR), and I quickly found dozens of great video learning resources already available on YouTube. The reality is that making new learning resources is just as much about teachers’ professional learning as it is our students. Even if the video doesn’t add anything else to the online conversation, I’ve learnt so much through this process. This is how I need to continually hone my craft as a teacher.