Beloit College Mindset List

Each year, Beloit College publishes its Mindset List. According to the website, the list, "a creation of Beloit’s Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride and Public Affairs Director Ron Nief, it looks at the cultural touchstones that have shaped the lives of today’s first-year students."

There are 75 items on this year's list, ranging from social, cultural and technological events. I was, considering my current media literacy studies, particularly interestedin #75:

75. They have always been challenged to distinguish between news and entertainment on cable TV.

Certainly helps us figure out a course for our students, doesn't it?

Mapping History

Great website from the British Library related to maps and mapping:

http://www.bl.uk/learning/artimages/maphist/mappinghistory.html

More of our West Virginia Adventure

Chris O'Neal and I spent last week in Lewisburg, West Virginia, with middle school and high school science teachers. We were learning to use the NOVA5000, a "student learning appliance" (part probe/part laptop) as well as exploring gis and gps (mostly Google Earth) and other Web 2.0 resources.

We were so busy with some class work and two field trips that we hardly had time to post. One trip was just a few minutes away at the Greenbrier River Trail where we tried out the probes in the field and then did a geocache. On Thursday, we went to the western part of Greenbrier County and boarded a van for a tour of the coal mining industry. Our main destination was something called the "gob pile," a mountainous collection of coal and coal-related waste that can clearly be seen from satellite images. We went with several people involved in either the water monitoring or in projects aimed at bringing this monitoring to K-12 educators.

You can see more pictures from both our field trips at flickr:

Greenbrier River Trail

The Gob Pile

Fun Along the Greenbrier River Trail

We spent the morning along the Greenbrier River Trail in Caldwell, WV, doing water testing and a little geocaching.