Just realized that yesterday was my five year anniversary of working at the California Academy of Sciences! It’s been an incredible journey so far. I’m so grateful for my colleagues, supervisors, partners, and awesome young people I’ve had the pleasure of working with over the past 60 months. Here’s some snapshots of the hundreds of …
From the wonderful Poorly Drawn Lines.
Last Tuesday, I co-facilitating an educator training in Chicago for Science Action Club, along with my colleague Andrew. I enjoyed getting to share our latest unit Birds in Your Schoolyard with 20 after school educators. We worked hard to make it a fun training for them. They learned about and tested out the latest citizen …
This is an actual email that was sent to me not long ago — apparently “to benefit the very evolution of our species” and “turn our ripples into waves.” I added the emphasis, removed identifying information, but otherwise this is the exact email as sent. (Spoiler alert: I respectfully declined.) Hi Rik, My …
Jon Foley, executive director of my museum the California Academy of Sciences, has been outspoken in his concern about the current administration's views on science and environmental issues. He just published a new piece on his blog Macroscope (reprinted from Scientific American) that I could not agree more with. Read it all here.
My colleague Neal Ramus, Senior Manager of Youth Programs at the California Academy of Sciences, co-authored this helpful blog post on youth recruitment. He reviews some of the challenges in recruiting a diverse pool of youth for internships, workshops, camps and other opportunities for young people. Among the nice bits of advice: Successful youth programs …
Two thousand and sixteen was a big year for me at the California Academy of Sciences. Lots of pivots, adventures and new beginnings! Here’s some of the highlights. The biggest news was my transfer in the Spring from Digital Learning over the Science Action Club team. Shifting from managing my own youth program to being part …
My colleague at the American Museum of Natural History Barry Joseph posted recently to the DML Central blog a post on "the Digitallearnification of Museums". This was based on a presentation that Barry, Eve Gaus of the Field Museum, and I made at the Digital Media and Learning conference a couple of months ago at …
Guys, this is the most amazing arachnid ever , the Bird dropping spider (Cyrtarachne sp.). Apparently the pulsing is caused by contractions in the gut of the spider that contain pigmented cells. There is no consensus about the evolutionary advantage of this, but it presumably could be to mimic a predator or warn would-be predators. More pics …
We took some nice group shots today of my Science Action Club team in front of the Cal Academy for our holiday greeting. Such a handsome bunch! We're so diverse and coordinated we look like a stock photo.