I polled the students in my flipped General Chemistry II class to see what they found useful for their studies. At the beginning of the Spring 2015 semester, we made a list of things they could do to help themselves learn chemistry. At the end of the semester I asked them to rate the things that we discussed. Here are some of the results. This post is a follow up to my earlier post The Flipped Classroom: To Video or Not to Video.
A vaccine against the HIV virus has proved elusive. A completely different approach that has the potential to replace a conventional vaccine was recently described by Gardner et al., in a letter in the journal Nature (1, 2). The paper describes a gene therapy approach in which a virus is used to promote long term expression in monkeys of a protein that blocks viral entry into cells. The expression of the protein protected the monkeys against several rounds of infection with simian/human immunodeficiency virus.
This post describes the publishing of the Schnoz of the Rings: A Parody of J. R. R. Tolien’s The Lord of the Rings (hereafter known as The Schnoz). It is also about how I used Linux (mostly) to produce my book. When I started the Schnoz, I was completely new to self-publishing. I found a book to guide me through the process: APE Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur: How to Publish a Book by Guy Kawasaki and Shawn Welch. Guy and Shawn take you through the three stages of publishing your book. In this post I am going to compare what Guy and Shawn recommended with what I did, especially in regard to using open-source software and Linux. In the last chapter of their book, Guy and Shawn tell you how they APEd APE. Here, I’ll tell you how I APEd The Schnoz.
The Schnoz of the Rings is going to New York and I’m staying home! The Independent Book Publishers Association is showing the Schnoz at their booth at Book Exp/Book Con May 27 – 31. At the same time, I’m running a countdown sale on for the Kindle – The Schnoz for 99 cents. What a deal!
If you are a member of Goodreads, I’m running a promotion there, too. I’m giving away ten paperbacks. All you have to do is sign up for a chance to win. The promotion runs until June 22.
The excellent image of New York is by William Warby (Flickr: New York Skyline) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Imagine a world without antibiotics, where any bacterial infection is potentially life threatening. The World Health Organization (WHO) declared in a report in 2014 (1) that a post-antibiotic era, “in which common infections and minor injuries can kill,” could start this century. A sobering thought.
Apparently, the suspicion that students can’t learn unless we professors speak knowledge to them is still very much with us.