7/20/14: FOR ALL OF YOU, MUD-LOVERS…

Mud IS fun. Come to the Elkhorn Slough!

Granted, the seals, sea otters, all their pups, etc. are really cute. Still, mud is fun.

If you are not convinced, ask the Earth Sciences MPC students. They just spent a full day at the Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Reserve where they studied the changes in sedimentation in the area of the last years and how that translates into energy levels. They probed the area (at Kirby Park) with different types of corers. These direct methodologies allowed them to study sediments from 400-500 years in the past, when the Slough was a different environment. Along the tidal channel, with the aid of Ron Eby (ESNERR) and the help of Geoff Shipton (Triton Imaging Inc.) they studied the underwater sediments with a seismic source (on loan from CSUMB) that can see under the channel floor sediments 2000-4000 years old.

This area has been a playground for the Earth Sciences Department at MPC (thank you Fred and Tom for your ongoing support!) for a couple of years now and we hope this collaboration continues in years to come. It has also been a place for research introduction to a summer intern in the Science Internship Program at UCSC. This SIP intern has surveyed a portion of the Slough with the same equipment the MPC students practice with, completing a study that started in 2011. Her work will tentatively be presented at the 2014 AGU Fall Meeting.

The Slough is an area everybody should experience at least once. Even if you are not interested in rocks or sediments. It is in our own backyard yet most people I teach had never been before our trip. The staff is very knowledgeable and helpful and always have education as their main goal. Great place for everybody. Go, hike its trails, go bird watching, rent a kayak, explore, and let me know what you think.

7/16/14: THANK YOU JON

This is my last mandatory entry for this summer’s COTL5. I am not sure if I will keep on writing after this but if I do not, I want to thank all the readers and followers for taking the time to read my blogs this month.

I would like to wrap up with a few ideas on how to use social media in Geology classes and what I might try next. Before that though, I owe Jon a HUGE thank you for making me doing this in the first place.

For the last few months, myself and a few colleagues at MPC have been learning the basics of online teaching and how to use (or not to misuse) the available current tools. I have been using USGS Twitter feeds in my Moodle website for when we talk about earthquakes, have used live feed/skype from NASA to see in class the launching of rockets or real time offshore research operations, and have online weekly journals where the students have to research and update geological information in a state of their choosing. That is as crazy as I have gotten..

I would like to add some type of ‘controlled’ geological blog, or maybe a geo-wiki, which will give my students more freedom but it is something I have to think carefully as I can foresee a few problems re: privacy. I would also like to have all my students following (Twitter) USGS, NOAAA, maybe NASA, so they are all updated with the latest events. In a regular class, only half of my students have the technology for that so this is something that will have to wait.

Lots of great ideas and looking forward to the future with social media!

7/9/14: JAMES HUTTON AND THE SOCIAL MEDIA REVOLUTION

In a short period of time I have seen the ‘revolution’ of learning Geology with my own eyes…for geologists, James Hutton is considered the father of modern Geology and he was very ‘cutting edge’ during the 1700s. If I compare the tools I had when I was learning Geology (exams, lecture-types lessons, one book or two in the library everybody was ‘fighting’ for…) with the extra ones my students have today (Moddle sites, ebooks, Animoto videos, forums, online journals, online quizzes, Internet access, etc), well, it is a quite a jump. Having a Facebook account and/or tweeting about an event (did you feel that earthquake?, there is a tsunami warning, did you know?, etc) maintains people connected and informed which is after all what we want when we learn. All major Geology players (USGS, NOAA, NASA, FEMA, etc.) have a place to share their data and connect directly with your Facebook, Twitter, Google, email (used less and less every day). Our students already use most of these tools so it should be easy for teachers to integrate those in a classroom.

I tend to have a hybrid class using as many tools as I can trying to reach everybody’s styles and also making the learning experience fun and interactive. Yesterday we learned about elastic waves coming from earthquakes and how P (primary) and S (secondary) waves interact with materials and how we use them to learn about the layers of the Earth. Even in a class like mine (face to face) social media and internet/online tools are a great help for teachers. That doesn’t mean we forget about the ‘traditional’ ways, just maybe add here and there something different..

I just uploaded a USGS Twitter feed on my website so my students next week will get to gather real time information about earthquakes from it (if you are in my class this summer, you have been officially warned!). This is something I could have not been able to do last year because I did not know how and if you are going to use these tools in your class (*you should*) you need to learn them very well before presenting them to your students.

A Blog I use frequently is AGU's Blogosphere, where I get latest information on events (volcanoes, landslides, earthquakes). As I said in my last post, geological events can change really fast and Social Media is a perfect tool to keep up with what is happening around us. I am sure most of my colleagues would agree.

Let me know what you think-

07/04/14: SOCIAL MEDIA PROS AND CONS AND HURRICANE ARTHUR

This week Arthur started as a storm in the Atlantic that now is expected to make landfall as I am posting this today as a Category 2 hurricane, with peak winds around 105 mph.  On the right you see is an enhanced infrared satellite (GOCE) image of Andrew at 7:15 am EDT (NASA).

I wish all in the East coast to be safe and ready paying attention to announcements, evacuations, warnings and of course, staying safe with social media updates. 

This current event made me change my initial post about how to be safe in social media adding first pros and cons, in particular when we deal with catastrophes like this hurricane.

PROS

Most emergency agencies are currently encouraging the use of social media during disasters. As an example, the Mississippi Emergency Agency (MEMA), the second most followed state management emergency in the country behind New Jersey, primarily uses Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as vehicles to get the message out, in addition to most traditional approaches (TV, newspapers, radio, etc).

This is not a new trend. As Susan Brooks (2014) points out, during Hurricane Sandy, millions of Americans turned to Facebook, Twitter, and even Instagram for information about the storm’s projected track, the location of streets and towns that were flooded, how to place requests for federal help, and the location of open shelters. According to information from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), social media users sent over 20 million Sandy-related tweets during the height of the storm despite the severe cellphone and power outages. Eleven years earlier, hundreds of families in the same neighborhoods of New York and New Jersey waited for hours to hear from relatives due to the same types of outages.

CONS

There were many instances of this as Hurricane Sandy made landfall in the Northeast. Many false reports of evacuations came out. Many photos of the destruction also went viral. Though most of these images were in fact real, they were just from different times (some months or years ago). It made it difficult to decipher the true information, like the evacuation of NYU Hospital’s NICU and PICU (more information: Steve Parker, Jr (@sparkerjr).

A SAFE SOCIAL MEDIA

There is a nice summary about the risks of posting in social media I’d like to share with you. As you can see, the article explain the backlash when you make your information public: identity theft, damaged reputation, threats, cyber bulling.. As someone said on TV yesterday, ‘we are our own enemy’, we give away our privacy the moment we post something’. Something to think about.

HOW TO BE SAFE IN SOCIAL MEDIA FROM MY STUDENTS TO ME

For this portion, I asked my students (all adults) for their opinion. It happens that what they told me was exactly what I would have told them. It is nice when it all works out..(: These are their (and my) strategies when dealing with social media:

·         Use nicknames if you deal with minors (names, pictures)
·         Never post your current location. If you want to post something about a place (let’s say in Facebook), wait until you are back home to do so. If you post: ‘I am going to such park in 1h’, well, some people might follow you for the wrong reasons.
·         Do not post anything personal or something that you might regret in the future (potential bosses will see everything you post)
·         Once in the Web, always in the web (even if you think you deleted it…). Use caution.

Happy 4^th of July!