Blogging on the Brain

So I think the presentation went pretty well! On Thursday, my fellow graduate fellow (Ashley Palmer) and I gave a presentation on blogging at Baylor’ s EdTech showcase. It ended up being a relatively small group (6 or 8 people) which was nice, as it felt much more informal and conversational. We talked about some of the issues that initially caused us some anxiety (technology, self-conscious writing, etc.) and it was good to realize how far I’ve come in the blogosphere since then.

I’m certainly still lacking in a lot of the technical aspects (I haven’t made any significant changes to my blog since I started it, you know, that whole “if it ain’t broke” thing…), but I feel I’ve moved past the paralyzing fear of judgment that kept me from blogging very frequently when I started. This is a good thing, I think, although it may lead to more grammatical errors, comma splices, and misspelled words for you to slog through. In addition, I have come to find blogging in itself a very rewarding and useful tool for me, which I wrote about a while back.

Anyway, as is usually the case after a presentation, I’m feeling all excited about this again. Maybe I’ll try changing some things up sometime, like *gasp* adding a new widget or something (don’t judge, that’d actually be a decent step for me!). At the very least, it feels good to want to blog. Hopefully that feeling will continue for a while!

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the keynote luncheon at Baylor’s Educational Technology Showcase. The keynote speaker was Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium. In addition to his impressive background in education, Dr. Johnson is also, apparently, quite a talented photographer and used many of his own photographs as a part of his presentation, which I quite enjoyed.

His talk was entitled “Seven Channels of Change,” and it outlined seven ways that we’ll see computing/technology change in the coming years. Dr. Johnson could be considered an expert in this area, as he – with the NMC – have recently published their 14th edition of the Horizon Report, which outlines emerging technologies in education (and is currently being translated into 10 languages!). As an introduction to his talk, he used two photographs he had taken to illustrate what he wanted to get at.

Both were pictures of water, one of a small waterfall taken in 1/5000th of a second, the other a 5-second time-lapse of the stream that waterfall was a part of. He said that at any given point, the image we have of technology is like the short shutter-speed waterfall – it’s hard to tell what’s happening, what direction things are going it, and what the nature of the water is really like at all. He then said that what you can see over time (as in the long shutter-speed photograph of the stream) is how the water moves, how it gets around obstacles, and where it’s heading. I really enjoyed that analogy, and I think it also served to put us non-tech people at ease by showing us something that we could easily understand.

So here are his seven channels of change:

7. Computing in Three Dimensions: this allows for a level of precision in manufacturing, etc. that would be unattainable using any other method.

6. Games are Reality: He made the point that games have been used for centuries as tools for learning (he used the example of mancala, a very old game that essentially teaches how to count quickly), and we’re just talking about changing the method of delivery

5. Keyboards are for Old People: A very good point – keyboards really aren’t necessary for computing, we’ve just adapted to them because we were already used to the typewriter.  We’re already moving away from it with new interfaces like the iPhone/iPad that’s totally dependent on gestures. (Check out these videos of a new interface called sixthsense – crazy stuff!)

4. Users ARE the Content: This one is becoming more and more evident all the time (consider Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc.) He also showed us all the options you can use on Google Maps (which I had previously been unaware of – look at the “more” tab in the window) which is entirely user-generated content.

3. Collective Intelligence is the New Knowledge: This is related to #4 above, in that we don’t do things like read critics’ reviews of restaurants anymore, we read reviews of “normal people” that have been there.In addition, a lot of us “hear things first” through social networking sites like facebook or twitter, not the news.

2. The Network is Everywhere: As seen from space, the area of cell-phone (and therefore internet) coverage is actually more encompassing that the electrical grid, which is pretty impressive.

1. The People are the Network: The internet really isn’t about connecting to files or folders or printers anymore as much as it’s about people connecting with other people.

So overall it was a very enlightening and very enjoyable presentation! Today is the second day of the Showcase, and Ashley and I will be giving a presentation on blogging, which I’ll be sure to blog about later!

The day start off with what turned out to be one of my favorite presentations of the conference – a talk by Steven Greenlaw of University of Mary Washington. He walked us through a course he taught last year on the 2008 financial crisis. The crux of the presentation was challenging us to think about (1) what learning environments should look/be like today, and (2) the possibility that we should be teaching the way we practice our disciplines. He spent this course (a seminar in international finance) teaching only a little bit, and mostly having students read on their own, then come into class to teach, interact, and discuss. Grades were based on engagement and insight, and some of the students agreed to continue the class project through the summer – after they had graduated! – so that they could produce the final outcome of the project (availiable at www.financialcrisis2008.umwblogs.org). Awesome stuff.

So my initial response (other than very much enjoying the presentation) was, as usual, something to the effect of “that’s great, but would it work in the sciences?” I think that it could, if not in the exact same format it was carried out in the economics class. There were several features of this class that I think we’d do well to apply to more of our courses regardless of the content:

1. Working on a current issue in the field (for economics, the recession was great; for neuroscience, maybe we could spend time working on a class project looking into the legitimacy (or lack thereof) of using fMRI “lie detection” as evidence in court cases)

2. Running class more like training for practitioners.

3. Creating a genuine product as the driving force for the class

There are some potential issues as well, including:

1. Assessment

2. Covering course content

3. Varying student motivation (especially in a community college setting)

But overall, this presentation actually gave me something I could consider implementing in my own courses! Yay!

Next up was the session I thought I’d like the best, entitled Computational Thinking, by Jeannette Wing, the asst. director of CISE and NSF, as well as faculty at Carnegie Mellon University. First of all, for a person as smart as she is, she was remarkably personable and clear, and, even better, she spoke with a lot of enthusiasm about a topic that could certainly have turned out to be dull as toast. Anyway, her “grand vision” is that by the end of the 21st century, essentially everyone will be engaged in what she refers to as “computational thinking.” She went on to (thankfully) give us some definitions; she defined “computing” as the automation of abstractions, and “computational thinking” as “the process of abstraction.” This all sounded, well, very abstract to me, but after lots of examples about computational thinking in other disciplines, I felt like I was getting it. Unfortunately, when I was asked about it later that evening, I found I had sort of lost it. Oh well.

So overall – favorite session of Wednesday: the Card Sort task (which I’ll most likely try to use/write about again in more detail at some point); favorite session of Thursday: Steven Greenlaw’s presentation I talked about above. I really enjoyed the time I was able to spend down there and all the lovely people I met!

Caroline, my older sister; Angie - the bride - my younger sister; and me

So 2009 was a pretty good year – not nearly as productive as I would have hoped (as usual),but full of a lot of good things too. I’ve now been with the ATL for a full year – and what awonderful year it’s been! I also got to end the year by celebrating my little sister’s wedding out on the North Shore of Massachusetts on New Years’ Eve, which was a great way to ring in the New Year as well.

So after being absent here for FAR too long, it’s time to start, well, everything up again. Generally I try to keep some amount of productivity going over break, but this year I failed spectacularly at it.

Ah well, all I can do now is do it now…which brings me to the point of this inaugural post of 2010 – my to-do list for the year!

Far from being a way to depress myself with work I have to do, I find I work much, MUCH better when I can see what it is I need to accomplish, and then there’s also the added benefit of being able to cross things off once they’re done – which for some reason I find deeply satisfying.

So 2010 needs to be a big year. I feel like I’ve been in neutral for quite a while now, and it’s seriously go time.  So it’s time for the list:

1. Finish collecting my dissertation data. This should set me up to defend early in the spring semester of 2011…there is a very, very faint light starting to show at the end of this extremely long tunnel

2.  Run the Oliver Sacks reading group for the ATL. I’m very excited and also very nervous for this one, but it should be a good time, and at the very least a great learning experience!

3. Re-vamp the Behavioral Neuroscience lab. New instructor = new lab. We’re going to use primarily case studies to teach students about some general neuroscience as well as neuroradiology and diagnostics.

4. Work with the BIC (Baylor Interdisciplinary Core) on their “Natural World” course. This is the science course the non-science majors have to take. Interesting challenges everywhere in that!

5. Get at least one paper published. I am seriously behind the pub # I should be at at this point, and I’ve had a manuscript in the works for about 6 months now. I need to get on that!

6. Develop a new Seminar for Excellence in Teaching. I’ve given my “Neuroscience and Learning” one a couple of times now, and it’s time for something new. Maybe learning disabilities? Effects of technology on the brain? We’ll see what happens.

7. Present a poster at Society for Neuroscience. If I complete #1, this shouldn’t be a problem – and this year, SfN is in SanDiego – WIN.

8. Figure out what I want to do when I grow up. I’m currently thrashing back and forth about whether I want to look for a faculty position right out of the gate or look for postdocs, etc.

9. Start looking for a job. Clearly, this is contingent on #8.

10. Start my 3x a week blogging resolution again. It’s one of those things that I enjoy when I’m doing it, but as soon as I stop there seems to be some sort of a block from getting started again. Hopefully I can just stay in the habit this year!

Okay. I should get to work!

Well, considering it’s been almost a week since the NMC symposium ended, I figured it was an appropriate time to blog about my experience with the second day of the conference.

I ended up attending a couple of sessions in the evening, including the last session and then the closing remarks, but I’ll get to that in a bit. The first session I went to was The Futurists: Teaching Futuring and Innovation with Emerging Media from Cynthia Calongne of Colorado Technical University. While I have some notes from her presentation, my overwhelming memory of the session (again, a week later) was how amazing she was at manipulating the setting in Second Life. Again, I’m new to Second Life, but it was pretty cool -  she changed the stage to an open area of grass dotted with mushrooms and had everyone come in and sit on the mushrooms for the presentation. She had a big screen that she then used (although we had some technical difficulties on our end) for her slides, and she had us play a sort of interactive trivia game (as well as handing out free virtual t-shirts that you could then make your avatar wear – I can’t get over this stuff!) Anyway, it was a fun session.

The second session I attended (and the last one of the symposium) was Towards the Collaborative Global Design of a Virtual Museum of the Future by a panel of speakers. First up was Ted Kahn, who builds “collaboratories” (one of my new favorite words) and told us about some pretty striking statistics – for instance, up to 80% of the jobs today’s current students will have are not even created yet – which is highly terrifying for those of us that are today’s current students. But he went on to talk about learning and the critical need for new/better STEM education in the US, because that’s most likely where a lot of these jobs are going to fall. (Tangential question: should we focus our education on where jobs will be or where our passions are? Is it bad if one perhaps influences the other?)

Ted went on to talk about The Millennium Project, where 15 global challenges facing humanity are being investigated. These included a lot of things like climate change, sustainable resources, etc., and are set up in a “virtual museum,” where people can explore and interact with the information. Some of these virtual displays are already being used by museums like the Smithsonian, and are predicted to play a more of a role in the future.

There were three other speakers involved, all of which were interesting and informative, but most impressive was the last member of the panel: Ji Yeon Bae – high school student from South Korea, presenting Virtual Museum of the Future: A prostpective User-Curator’s View. Ji Yeon has been involved in setting up a collaborative site with different types of information represented for the viewer/user to explore. She made a point of saying that the site is a very good way to connect to the present as well as a way to explore personal possibilities of future careers, giving good direction for what skills to develop. She was quite the impressive high schooler!

The closing remarks of the conference were great – a review of all the wonderful speakers and presentations from the last two days. As I listened to a reprise of Dr. C’s wonderful session, I realized that more than the information imparted in the sessions and all the preparation for the Second Life technical stuff, the conference for me was about realizing how excited and passionate this group of people is about the limitless possibilities of the future. It’s exciting (and a bit contagious) to be around. Optimism isn’t something you find in a lot of academic arenas, and it was truly inspiring to listen to the closing, then watch everyone’s avatars (avatars!) go out and dance.

This week I experienced yet another first: my first virtual conference attended in Second Life. I was only vaguely familiar with Second Life before this conference popped up, really only having heard a reference to it on The Office. So I signed up, spent a ridiculous amount of time personalizing my avatar, and found my way (miraculously) to the right place at the right time. The first session I went to, I was admittedly a little distracted, trying to keep track of the speaker (Bryan Alexander, who was here at Baylor last semester to do a workshop on digital storytelling), the ever-expanding chat box in the corner, and then totally losing focus watching people fly in and out of the stadium our avatars were seated in. Fortunately, by the next session I had gotten my bearings a little bit more.

The conference is the New Media Consortium’s Symposium for the Future. The NMC is a very cool organization that works to expand the uses of new technologies through lots of creative resources and very, very smart people. One of those people is Dr. Gardner Campbell, who I have the pleasure of working with here in Baylor’s Academy for Teaching and Learning, and who also happened to be yesterday’s keynote speaker.

His talk, entitled Two Painters, One Poet, and Some Sweet Soul Music spoke to the fears that many people have about the expanding use of computers in our society. He talked both of the Fear of Making and the Fear of Connecting. As far as the Fear of Making, Dr. C. cited the tales of Prometheus and Icarus, both very innovative men in different respects (creating fire and wings, respectively), and both suffering a not-so-fabulous end. Taking these stories at face value, the moral would be to not be too ambitious, because too much ambition leads to danger. Obviously, we don’t actually want to take that view, but I thought it was a great illustration of the history of fear in innovation.

He proceeded to talk about two artists: Andrea del Sarto, and Filippo Lippi. del Sarto was apparently a technically beautiful painter, but was unable to embrace his creativity, and ended up not showing the same inspiration as many of his contemporaries. Lippi, on the other hand, fully embraced his gift and his creativity. Dr. C puts in beautifully in a blog post of his:

This artist sees all the tangles that Andrea del Sarto does, but those tangles never spiral into cloying self-pity, angry accusations against beauty, or philosophical paralysis. Instead, this riven artist also mends the tears between creation and human experience, between person and person, between wonder and the disappointing brokenness of life.

These two examples were used to illustrate the possible attitudes toward the creative power we possess, and that we could channel into technological forms. (As a side-note, I appreciated the idea of creativity being channeled into computers and technology, being a scientist I think most people’s definitions of creativity are much too narrow, and I liked that we were talking about painting and computing in terms of the same drive…and maybe the same goal).

After talking about the artists, Dr. C. used a great progression of music to call us to pledge to stand together and confront our fears and uncertainties of the future – especially the future of technology.  This was a particularly moving ending for me, as I tend to relate a little too much toward the Prometheus-and-Icarus viewpoint sometimes when it comes to new technology. It was so good for me to hear that I’m not the only one, and that even if we’re all a little freaked out about it, we can take chances knowing there are others out there with the same doubts and fears, pushing forward just like we are. Thanks, Dr. C.

I decided to combine days 3 & 4 of the meeting because, quite frankly, there weren’t that many things I was excited about reporting. I’m almost completely certain that was due to my own lack of planning mixed with the distraction of being back in Chicago.

Anyway, the first notable session of Monday was the annual lecture on neuroethics – an area made popular by well-known coma/vegetative state patients like Terri Schiavo. The presentation was from Dr. Steven Laureys from the University of Liege in Belgium (I must admit, a great accent to listen to for an hour) and was entitled: Eyes Wide Open, Brain Wide Shut? (Un)Consciousness in the Vegetative State. He began by talking about the two components of consciousness: wakefulness (necessary but not sufficient), and awareness. He had a very clever graph that showed what disorders result at different points along those two axes. For instance, in the vegetative state you have wakefulness but no consciousness; in coma you have neither wakefulness or consciousness; and in locked-in syndrome (a very scary disorder), you have consciousness but may or may not have wakefulness.

The most interesting portion of his talk (I thought) was going through some of the imaging studies done on people in different states of consciousness. For instance, they used fMRI and/or diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to look at activity in the brains of people diagnosed as vegetative/locked-in/minimally conscious/coma/brain dead (as well as normal controls and normal sleeping controls) to determine the actual differences in activity in the different diagnoses. Not surprisingly, there was a continuum of activity – the lowest was obviously from the brain-dead group, with vegetative patients just above, followed by coma, minimally conscious, and then locked-in almost on par with normal controls.

The most obvious application of this research is its usefulness as a diagnostic tool. Where in the past there has been a lot of argument about whether or not patients are brain dead, vegetative, or minimally conscious, these tests could much more clearly delineate the differences between those diagnoses, as well as clarifying the possible prognoses for individual patients.

On Tuesday, I only had time to attend one session before heading to the airport, and it was kind of a strange one. It was given by Dr. Ben Barres of Stanford University, entitled How do Astrocytes Promote CNS Synaptogenesis? I was interested in attending because we often gloss over the importance of glia in the CNS and spend most of our time studying the neurons themselves. Unfortunately, once he got into the substance of the talk, it got very, very technical and I had a pretty hard time following.

I think the more interesting part of his presentation was when he stopped for a moment to thank one of the postdocs in his lab that had done a lot of this work – he clearly had a lot of respect for this woman and took a moment to address the lack of women in science. As he was speaking, he mentioned that he had written a letter that was published in Nature in 2006 after that infamous Harvard paper was published reportedly showing that boys are better at math and science than girls. Dr. Barres then mentioned that (as many people there already knew – he seems very open about it) he is a transsexual – which of course made the comment about women in science all the more interesting. He gave us a link to a talk he gave about the “dearth of women in science.” I haven’t watched the whole thing yet (it’s a little over an hour and a half long), but I certainly plan to.

The second day of SfN brought a couple of interesting presentations. The first was a talk by T.C. Sudhof of Stanford entitled “From Synapses to Autism: Neurexins, Neuroligins, and More.” I went to the session primarily because autism was in the title, plus the fact that I really didn’t know anything about neurexins and neuroligins, and I thought that maybe I should. As I sat through the talk and scribbled notes down, I felt like I was sort of following everything okay, but now looking back at my notes, I’m feeling a bit lost – I really should make myself do this the same day – sigh. Oh well. Here’s what I can make out from my notes:

Neurocircuitry is incredibly important to keep in mind when attempting to understand the massive processing capacity of our brains. These circuits have properties that depend on three things: 1. Intrinsic neural properties, 2. Synaptic connectivity, and 3. Synaptic properties. Neurexins and neuroligins function as synaptic cell-adhesion molecules, therefore modulating some of these circuit properties. Specifically, neuroligins increase synaptic density – sounds simple, right? Well, like most topics in neuroscience, it gets a lot more complicated really really quickly. Neuroligins do increase synaptic density, but sometimes these synapses aren’t really functional, and if they are, you may see increased excitatory post-synaptic currents (EPSCs) and no change in inhibitory post-synaptic currents (IPSCs), or you may see an increase in IPSCs and no change in EPSCs, depending, it seems, on which alternative splicing took place in the formation of the neuroligin.

So I think the moral of the story was that neuroligins may provide a common link for many of the current theories of autism (candidate genes, neuroanatomy, etc.) thus providing an underlying mechanism to explain at least a portion of the disorder. Cool stuff, but clearly I’m going to have to read up on it…

The second exciting session I went to was concerned with using neuroscience in the classroom, which is something I’ve been interested in for a while now. Unfortunately, it seemed to be more about how to teach neuroscience than use neuroscientific principles in the classroom. There was, however, one presentation (it was set up as a mini-symposium, which several speakers each talking for about 15 minutes) that caught my attention. The presenter, Dr. Sally Hoskins of City College in NY talked about using a curriculum called “CREATE” (see below) to use primary literature to teach science. I thought this was a very interesting idea, especially after having talked a bit with some people involved in Baylor’s Interdisciplinary Core (BIC) program, and some of the things they’ve been talking about with their “Natural World” course.

So, the first step in this curriculum is to find several papers from the same lab that the students will read in sequence of publication date. I don’t know why this hasn’t occurred to more people in the past, but what a great way to give students an idea of how science is really done! Not only will they see how long it takes to cultivate a line of research, but they’ll actually see a line of research and how the answers to one question almost always lead to more questions to answer!  So I thought that in itself was great. In addition, they outlined 6 steps (CREATE) the students use for each paper. Here they are:

1. C: Consider. Students take the paper and read the lit review section, and make a map of all the ideas and concepts in the paper. Every student’s map turns out differently, and it’s quite a bit of work for the student, as they’ll often have to spend lots of time looking up techniques or other things that they’re not familiar with.

2. R: Read. They’ll read through the paper and draw cartoons of what actually happened in the lab. They’ll also make annotations of the figures before they come to class.

3 E: Elucidate. Students use their maps from step 1 and re-write the question that’s being answered through the research

4. A: Analyze. Students transform any data tables and reorganize the information to aid in interaction with the material and understanding of the data.

5. T: Think of the next experiment. Students are not given the next paper from the lab until they’ve finished all these steps, so each student comes up with what they think the next experiment should be (I love this step).

6. E: Experiment. Students write their proposals for ideas from the previous step, and actually form mock grant panels to eventually pick one proposal from the class that they’d fund. Different groups almost always pick different proposals, again teaching students valuable lessons about grant writing and the differences in results just depending on the people sitting on the board, not necessarily the integrity of the proposal.

These steps are then repeated with the subsequent papers from the same lab. A couple other good ideas they put forth: First, the students never receive the abstract for the article. They found that, if given the abstract, students were much less creative in their reading and interpretation of the data. Second, the class often emails the author of the papers with a short survey – and they’ve actually received many replies! So I kind of love this idea. Now I just need to find a class to try it out on!

Fantastic TED talk by Oliver Sacks, one of my personal heroes, on visual hallucinations. If you’ve never heard him speak before, I highly recommend you check it out. He speaks with all the same warmth, curiosity, and knowledge that comes across in his writing, plus you get to listen to his fantastic accent!

Today I gave my Seminar for Excellence in Teaching (SET) on neuroscience and learning for the second time. I gave it for the first time last March, after a horrendous week of computer crashes and lost files, so I expected to be more comfortable this time. That turned out to be true to a certain extent – once I got started I think I had a lot more confidence than last time, but I had other types of uncertainty this time. First of all, I obviously wasn’t as active in preparing as I was last time. I certainly re-read (or at least skimmed) the bulk of the articles I used to build the presentation in the first place and I added some new stuff, but as I walked into the classroom, I found myself worrying I may have missed some huge advancement in the last six months, etc. But it went fine.

I got my feedback, and I’m happy to say it was mostly positive! Most of the criticisms were that the presentation time was too short and people wished we could have gotten into more detail – so that was a plus. Apparently there were one or two people present that either really didn’t like the material or didn’t like me, but I’m trying to focus on the other 18 or 20

So that’s about it for now. After the SET I had to teach a 3-hour neuroanatomy lab and I’m exhausted. I always forget how different “presenting” feels from “teaching.” Much scarier and much, much more tiring. Although I have to admit, it was nice to hear some applause at the end. What do you think the chances are of getting my students to do that after lectures?

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