Homework 1 - Personal high school experiences and how they might have been different with technology.

I attended Shaler Area Senior High School where the student body was 99.5% white and largely middle class.  I  was in the honors program which afforded me the option to take some slightly more challenging courses during my education. I took the three main science courses, Honors Chemistry, Biology, and Honors Physics.

As I remember it, many of my courses consisted of lectures where the most sophisticated form of technology was the occasional VHS video.  Most were ruled by the overhead projector and my computer science course (1989) introduced me to the next big thing, the "whiteboard".

My biology course would have been best served by some technology, manly by being able to project images and short videos of real biological specimens.  My instructor was not very good at explaining the working of ribosomes, and could have had immense use for a 3D generated video of ribosomes at work.  The many things in biology that are too small to see could have been modeled and brought to life.

Of course, the most important thing that was lacking then that is now available is the internet.  When preparing lesson plans and looking for inspiration, it is indispensable to have the internet from which to pull information.  It has enabled me to get phase contrast microscopy time-lapse images of cells undergoing mitosis.  It has enabled me to further my own understanding of the concepts I am to teach by learning beyond what I knew before.

If I need to demonstrate to students the structure of DNA at various levels of condensation, then I can do a Google Image search, and turn up multiple images that describe what it is that I would like to bring out.  If one image is too simplistic, or too complex, I am able to disregard them and continue looking for one that suits.

While searching, I realize that after I show students the image of histones, DNA, and nucleosomes, I would like an image to demonstrate the larger picture.  I find the following image that sums it all up nicely.

I don't need to always come up with a beautiful picture myself.  Others who have gone before, done research, and published stunning images with their research will have the fruits of their labor used to further the knowledge of the next generation of scientists - all because of a simple Google Image search.  It is this use of information that was often inaccessible, except to practicing professionals, by everybody else that makes the internet so wholly useful.  The ability to generate something useful, then put it out for all to see and use that makes it worth the effort of making it in the first place.  Whereas the work of many scientists were spatially isolated from one another before, that often catalogued and unused work may now be called upon at any time by anyone with internet access.