Tonight I had the pleasure of visiting the amazing maker space at the software design company Autodesk on Pier 9, San Francisco. I was participating in a Bay Area Maker Educator meetup, along with 40 other teachers and education specialists from across the Bay. The invitation promised a visit to a maker lab that “we’ll all …
Cal Academy research fellow Bryson Voirin is studying the adorable, elusive pygmy sloth, a critically endangered species that can be found on just one small island in the Caribbean. I love how he has to "race" to catch them! More about pygmy sloths and their endangered status on the WWF site. More about Bryson's research …
The New Learning Times, a publication of the Teachers College at Columbia University, did a nice profile about me recently. I’ve reprinted some it below. See the complete piece by George Nantwi at their site. How did your educational trajectory and past professional experience shape your current work? I have a wide-ranging and circuitous educational …
I'm excited to finally be able to share the news about a new podcast I will be co-producing called "Object Oriented: Digital Learning in Collections-based Museums." I am honored to be co-hosting the podcast along with my friends Barry Joseph, head of digital learning at the American Museum of Natural History, and Eve Gaus, head …
Yesterday I had the opportunity to go on a snorkeling dive with Rich Mooi, curator of invertebrate zoology at the Cal Academy. Dr. Mooi is one of the principal investigators of the expedition and an expert on marine invertebrates, particularly sea urchin. He’s also an amazing illustrator and science educator. So really a triple threat! …
A few weeks ago, I learned that the California Academy of Sciences had obtained a pair of Google Glass, Google’s early adopter attempt at creating augmented reality eyewear. Since I’ve done a lot of work and thinking in virtual and augmented reality before, I was pretty excited to get my hands on these glasses. My …
The awesome Emily Graslie of the Field Museum of Chicago posted on her Instagram feed this simple but profound statement on the recent vandalism of the Mosul Museum by ISIS: "Imagine if all our display cases – like this one – were empty. As custodians of one of the great natural history museum collections in the world, The Field …
I'm incredibly excited to share the news that this April, I will be participating in the California Academy of Sciences' 2015 research expedition to the Philippines. I will be there as part of the educational outreach team on the trip, documenting what our researchers are doing there, connecting with local educators, and sending reports and …
I’m home with some illness, weak but not incapacitated. So I’m in perfect shape for trying out new digital products. Enter “Elegy for a Dead World,” a cross-platform digital game designed to inspire creative writing by the player. I came across “Elegy” in one of my feeds and decided to give it a go. Here’s …
"Interstellar," the new scifi film directed by Christopher Nolan, explores a number of complex and fascinating scientific phenomena and concepts, including black holes, gravity, wormholes, a fifth dimension, and in particular Special Relativity. As a scifi buff, I found the movie to be very entertaining. And as a science educator, I thought that there …