Welcome Saki in Liberia

Saki is a student of chemistry in Liberia. A while ago the President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia visited Emory and we have been working with universities there ever since. I connected with Saki, a student there because he was interested in studying Chemistry and reported that there was a shortage of textbooks. The faculty in the Biology and Chemistry Departments rounded up scores of books and sent them to Saki and his classmates. Today Saki has my copy of Analytical Chemistry with my name on it and is working on a project to analyze clays for heavy metals. What could be better?

Check out his blog, http://www.sakitango.blogspot.com, and say hello.

A scientist in a B school

People are curious about my ongoing Executive MBA experience at the Goizueta Business School. What is a scientist doing there with those business types, they ask. Having a great time, really. Chemistry is great fun, loved NMR and liquid crystals, but now as a Dean, I deal with numbers, people, projects, budgets, and administration more than glycolipids. I have enjoyed the courses, been challenged at times, and been really excited to learn about a completely new world, where everything has the powerful $$$ before and after it. And yes, it has been extremely useful already.

Take Organizations Structures course. Prof. Robert Drazin pointed me in the direction of a great paper that compares organization model of universities to a, get this, “garbage can model.” They refer to decision making in universities as organized anarchy. Ideas, people, solutions, and problems are dumped into a “garbage can” and solutions emerge, without a rational process. (Contrast that with the “Star” model of Galbraith for example where organization’s structure is designed with a careful balance of strategy, people, structure rewards and processes.) Those of you in higher ed admin will appreciate the reference to “organized anarchy” especially when you try to propose a rational way to solve a problem or make a change and before you know it someone has proposed something else and someone else has agreed for all sorts of incomprehensible reasons and finally something evolves that has noting to do with the original problem. My project for the course, take an existing problem and propose a solution with the garbage can model and contrast that to the rational “Star” model. Love it.
(Cohen, M. D., March, J. G., & Olsen, J. P. (1972). A garbage can model of organizational choice. Administrative Science Quarterly 17(1): 1-25.) Galbraith, Designing Organizations, (http://www.amazon.com/Designing-Organizations-Executive-Strategy-Structure/dp/0787957453)

PreMeds, listen up!

Everyone is rethinking premed! “AAMC/HHMI Committee Defines Scientific Competencies for Future Physicians
New Report Offers Blueprint for Designing Premedical and Medical School Curricula” and exciting news within. See

Here at Emory, we are already working on it. This Fall, the very new PreHealth Mentoring Office will open its doors for business. Note the word Mentoring. It will be about mentoring: long term, relationship building, opening doors, holistic, promoting excellence and success and everything else that comes to mind when you say, Mentor. Lucky Emory premeds! Stay tuned for more.

An empty college quad?

95% of the 18-19 year-olds surveyed in a sweeping EDUCAUSE study said they used Social Networks (SNs). The study looked at about 23,000 college students at more than 90 institutions. They spend anywhere from 5 hours to 9-10 hours in these spaces, blogging, updating their profiles, and on average, 19 hours online on all kinds of activities – schoolwork included. With so many hunched over their laptops (80.5% have laptops) or internet capable cellphones, creating content, blogs, videos whatever (30%), and “connecting” with friends, who is left on the college quad?

You’d think this group would ask for more IT in their classroom, but only 59% felt a “moderate” amount was acceptable. Well, with what is currently available under the name of e-learning, this lukewarm reception is hardly surprising. The study digs deeper. When asked about online courses, negative responses were clustered into four categories, no face to face, potential for cheating, technical problems, and the need to “teach themselves.”

This puzzles me. For a generation that is comfortable hanging out online in SNs – clearly, face to face is still important. And the negative response to the need to “teach themselves”, the increased cognitive demands of self study, tells me that the online learning still has not figured out how to deliver effective scaffolding and adaptive learning environments. They are not complaining about the need to teach themselves when they spend time on World of Warcraft – they teach themselves pretty fast in that environment. So how do we fix this?

CItation: Salaway, Gail and Caruso, Judith B., with Mark R. Nelson. The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2008 (Research Study, Vol. 8). Boulder, CO: EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research, 2008, available from http://www.educause.edu/ecar.
http://connect.educause.edu/Library/ECAR/TheECARStudyofUndergradua/47485

Patriotic I scream, I mean ice cream

I made liquid nitrogen ice cream for a sixth grade science class – in red white and blue.  Never, ever forget to wear your gloves when you do that.  My fingers have not recovered yet, and it has been an agonizingly, painful week. But this is not the science matter I wanted to talk about.  First I noticed, all the boys were clustered in the front.  And all the girls were in the back of the room.  And all the questions came from the boys.  Well, not all.  But noticeably more.  And when I asked the teacher to pick three volunteers to stir the icecream (My hand was pretty useless by then) she picked all boys!

Now I am sensitized to these sorts of things.  Thanks to our own wonderful Pat Marsteller’s mentoring, I have read my way through The Chilly Classroom (The Chilly Classroom Climate: A Guide to Improve the Education of Women, by Bernice Resnick Sandler, Lisa A. Silverberg, and Roberta M. Hall.) and “They’re Not Dumb, They’re Different: Stalking the Second Tier (Occasional Paper on Neglected Problems in Science Education)” by Sheila Tobias and know all about the differential treatment girls and female undergrads get in science classrooms, but I did not expect to see it.  Each one of you should visit your middle schooler’s classroom and watch the dynamics.  Who gets called on to answer in the science classes?  Are the girls still getting the mixed signals at this particularly sensitive time?

The good news is that as I was leaving, a couple of girls helped me carry stuff back – and inundated me with questions.  What is absolute zero? How cold is that? How do you make it that cold?  What if we were on Pluto  and we took this can of nitrogen there?  Don’t you love thought experiments?  The Tibetan monks are really good at these.  After today’s close encounter with liquid nitrogen, I am all for less hands on and more thought experiments!
(Link to the book on Amazon) They're Not Dumb, They're Different: Stalking the Second Tier (Occasional Paper on Neglected Problems in Science Education) (Occasional Paper on Neglected Problems in Science Education)

Collaboration Spaces

FirstClass is extremely popular at Emory.  Even before Facebook came on campus, Emory students were obsessively checking for new messages on Learnlink (our FirstClass client) and the coolest professors (my dear colleague, Matthew Weinschenk for example) on campus would chat with their students during student friendly hours (like after 11 pm!)  But it never really got the online collaboration piece right.

Online collaboration is  a critical component of the learning experience for this generation.  My three kids, 9, 12 and 17 hit the computer even before they throw their backpacks on the floor.  Their homework is online, their teachers’ powerpoints are on line and yes, their friends are on gtalk and AIM.

At my start-up, Inquus, we are trying to work out all the different dimensions of online collaboration.

These are exciting times because successful online collaboration for today’s digital youth has to yet to be implemented.  Visionaries (Terry Anderson, George Siemens and others) have defined the ideals and the shortcomings of today’s solutions.  We know in theory what scaffolding to provide, what affordances we ought to provide and the outcomes we desire.  But what will this look like?

So we pulled out the lego blocks and we are having fun imagineering the learning space. What will promote stickiness for this demographics?  What environment will be easy enough for them to use so it is truly useful?  What will get them motivated so that they spend more time in this collaborative learning space, and less on Club Penguin?  If we build it, will they stay here?

Of course, our best consultants are the 10-17 year olds who crowd our home computers, playing games.

Science Matters to Tibetan Monks

Yes, it does matter to Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns. This May, with about 15 faculty and students from Emory and Georgia Tech, I will travel to Dharamsala, India to run the second Emory Summer Science Institute for Tibetan monastics and nuns.  Yes, that is right.  Monks want to learn science with a passion.  Sessions include physics, biology and neurosciences, some math and some chemistry.  And philosophy of western science.  We learned so much from the monastics while were there. About ourselves, about teaching and learning in science.  About other ways of problem solving and other knowledge systems.

Last year a smaller group offered the first summer institute and it was a mind blowing experience.  If you are a science educator, when was the last time you had 40 keen minds just concentrating on your every word, with passionate interest and deadly focus?  And the questions were some of the most clever, thought provoking, original questions I have ever heard.  And yes, we did not always have an answer.  I’ll post some of them in future posts.

Scientific Method and Lean

It is appropriate that I start with the Scientific Method. Didn’t your chemistry course start with a long description of the scientific method? Well, I was reading this article, “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System”, by  Spear and Bowen, HBR 1999 and a real world application of the scientific method just blew me away.  What a great example to share with your intro chemistry freshmen who are all thinking, “Why do I care about the Scientific method? I am not a scientist, duh!”

I encourage you to read this article, but in a nutshell, it talks about how TPS nurtures a scientific community  in its plants, where everyone, right down to the gal who tightens the bolts, is encouraged to think scientifically, use the scientific method to problem solve, conduct experiments and prove or disprove hypotheses. It is fabulous.

Hello world!

Who am I? I am a dean of science for the undergraduates at Emory University, in Emory College.  I am a chemist by training.  I am passionate about science education in general.  At this time, I am thinking a lot about internationalizing science education, bringing interdisciplinarity into undergraduate science education and innovative ways to use today’s technology with our students.  I will blog about Science and Religion, or teaching Tibetan monks science and learning from them, about  liberal arts education for pre meds and prehealth and about using today’ technologies to enhance learning.