Ffff! Ffff! Dusting off my blogs maybe? Junior Lab for the 4th time!

I am a lousy blogger, but I am considering dusting them off this fall.  The main reason is because the research in our lab is heating up, and some students (Larry and Andy) are getting close to finishing their PhDs.  For the most part, I have found that short comments and conversations on FriendFeed are a better way for me to communicate with people, compared with blogs.  But I think blogging will be useful for describing our research results, as it will allow use of figures and better formatting.  And maybe it will help the students a bit in terms of publicity.  Soooooo, as a way of dusting off my blogs, I'm going to make a short little blog here on my teaching blog, just to get warmed up.

Junior Lab just finished it's second week.  (You can read about our Open Notebook Science Junior Lab course in prior blog.)  I'm excited that I get to teach it a 4th time, despite being told that this would not be possible last year.  This year, we have 19 students -- 3 more than the "maximum."  Since I interact with each student one-on-one, It's going to be a lot of work, but a lot of fun too.  I have an excellent TA, Katie Richardson, who already has provided good ideas for the course.  She suggested promoting interaction early on, so that lectures will be more likely to involve student questions.  So, the first "real" lecture was earlier this week, and we did a fun exercise, brainstorming on what is needed to carry out "good" science.  You can see our exercise on the OpenWetWare page.  I also posted this to the Science 2.0 room on friendfeed, and I'll embed the thread below if I can figure out how.  It was not a "good" scientific exercise, but I was still very happy that "reproducibility" (loosely-defined) emerged as the ingredient with the most votes.  This led naturally to discussion of how to keep a good primary lab notebook.  OK, hopefully more to come on my other blogs!
Related FriendFeed threads:

Open Notebook Science @ UNM Physics, Round 3 -- If you have technology for us to try, let us know

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:

1. Snap photo with mobile phone, using Evernote application. (Actually can be any kind of note, photo, voice note, etc.)
2. Photo is stored by default in your public notebook (or you move it over manually).
3. RSS feed embedded in OWW shows new content.

Only step #1 requires user involvement. But the problem is that currently the image is not actually displayed or uploaded in OWW, and there isn't a good way to selectively show only relevant parts of the feed. But it seems to me those are very solvable steps. I think this will be a very nice feature, because over the past couple years, I've seen all my students struggle with barriers to getting information into their electronic notebook. So, any steps that are removed are a big deal.


^* 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.