2009 fall semester has started at UNM and I'm teaching Junior Lab (Physics 307L) for my 3rd and "final" time*. I've described in an earlier post the open science aspects of this modern physics undergraduate lab course. In a nutshell, it's a typical modern physics lab course with an important twist in that we operate completely using open notebook science (ONS). I still believe (but don't have proof) that these students are at an excellent stage in their careers to learn skills and habits in ONS. We've been through about a week of the course, and already I can see that we again have a great batch of talented students! I wish I could fast forward a decade to see what they're going to be achieving in the future. Right now, though, you can see their mug shots on our course people page on OpenWetWare.
The thing that inspired me to dust off this blog is the realization that even though we've already started the semester, there's no reason we can't continue trying new things throughout the semester. So, if you're aware of new (or old) technology that you think would be good for ONS, I think we have several students who would be interested in testing it out in a real ONS atmosphere. If you do, please post a message here, or on the friendfeed thread. As noted earlier, OpenWetWare is the foundation for our ONS. But we've started to include other tools as well, many of them integrated into OWW thanks to Bill Flanagan's hard work. One big change this year is that I think students are likely to use Google Docs as a way of recording spreadsheet data. Tables in WikiMedia are just too annoying. And now, Google Docs are easily embedded in OWW pages. You can see an example of an embedded spreadsheet in Tom Mahony and Ryan Long's open notebook.
There's another thing that I'm excited about that may make ONS much easier for us. Currently, the standard method for uploading photos or other documents to OWW is inconvenient. It can take a good minute to snap a photo of your experimental setup and then go through a convoluted process of emailing it to yourself, saving, uploading to OWW. I think we're close to a good solution that leverages Evernote's nice application for mobile phones. I recently discovered that you can easily make public notebooks in Evernote, and that these public notebooks have a nice RSS feed. Tom Mahony noticed that there is a MediaWiki widget for embedding an RSS feed in a page. He even implemented a test public evernote feed in his OWW notebook (see this page). So, now we're to this point:
* The tradition in the department dictates that I must demonstrate teaching diversity in order to obtain tenure. There is also the belief that instructors become bored and their teaching stale after 3 semesters of teaching a course. I think these are fairly common beliefs in physics departments around the country, and it means that next fall I'll have to teach a new course. I find this policy de-motivating and inefficient, and will do my best to help the policy evolve over the next many years.
The thing that inspired me to dust off this blog is the realization that even though we've already started the semester, there's no reason we can't continue trying new things throughout the semester. So, if you're aware of new (or old) technology that you think would be good for ONS, I think we have several students who would be interested in testing it out in a real ONS atmosphere. If you do, please post a message here, or on the friendfeed thread. As noted earlier, OpenWetWare is the foundation for our ONS. But we've started to include other tools as well, many of them integrated into OWW thanks to Bill Flanagan's hard work. One big change this year is that I think students are likely to use Google Docs as a way of recording spreadsheet data. Tables in WikiMedia are just too annoying. And now, Google Docs are easily embedded in OWW pages. You can see an example of an embedded spreadsheet in Tom Mahony and Ryan Long's open notebook.
There's another thing that I'm excited about that may make ONS much easier for us. Currently, the standard method for uploading photos or other documents to OWW is inconvenient. It can take a good minute to snap a photo of your experimental setup and then go through a convoluted process of emailing it to yourself, saving, uploading to OWW. I think we're close to a good solution that leverages Evernote's nice application for mobile phones. I recently discovered that you can easily make public notebooks in Evernote, and that these public notebooks have a nice RSS feed. Tom Mahony noticed that there is a MediaWiki widget for embedding an RSS feed in a page. He even implemented a test public evernote feed in his OWW notebook (see this page). So, now we're to this point:
- Snap photo with mobile phone, using Evernote application. (Actually can be any kind of note, photo, voice note, etc.)
- Photo is stored by default in your public notebook (or you move it over manually).
- RSS feed embedded in OWW shows new content.
* The tradition in the department dictates that I must demonstrate teaching diversity in order to obtain tenure. There is also the belief that instructors become bored and their teaching stale after 3 semesters of teaching a course. I think these are fairly common beliefs in physics departments around the country, and it means that next fall I'll have to teach a new course. I find this policy de-motivating and inefficient, and will do my best to help the policy evolve over the next many years.
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