Category Archives: Uncategorized

Broadening Participation and Engagement of Underrepresented Minorities in the Geosciences Through a Near Surface Geophysics Field Experience

“Broadening Participation and Engagement of Underrepresented Minorities in the Geosciences Through a Near Surface Geophysics Field Experience.” This is a title of the a poster Dr. Kristina Keating will in December, 2019 at the AGU meeting in San Francisco. The … Continue reading

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What happened to the A+?

When you think about it, the most common grading scheme used at American colleges and universities doesn’t make a lot of sense. On a 4.0 grade scale a C is worth 2.0 points, a C+ is 2.33, a B- is … Continue reading

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The Future of GenEd

What is the future of general education (GenEd)? This questions was the subject of a one-day leadership conference organized by Inside Higher Education that I attended in Washington DC on April 17. A nice summary of the conference can be … Continue reading

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Conference on Diversity and Inclusion

This month I attended the 2019 Diversity and Inclusion Conference here in Philadelphia. This two-day event included an academic think tank, designed directly for dean, directors, faculty, and Diversity and Inclusion practitioners. The think tank was subdivided into groups, each … Continue reading

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Limited Edition GenEd Classes

Choosing GenEd courses Students can choose from a variety of classes to satisfy requirements in each of the breath areas of Temple GenEd. The current inventory of GenEd comprises over 140 classes.  Their is even an online course search tool to help … Continue reading

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Personal Portfolios of Evil

As I discussed in earlier posts, last fall I taught a new General Education class that satisfies Temple’s quantitative literacy requirement — Evil Plots — a class that is all about graphical miscommunication, whether deliberate or accidental. For their final … Continue reading

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AGU 2018 – Does rain increase or decease soil resistivity? It depends…

My student, Gina Pope presented a poster at AGU that garnered a lot of traffic (see my November post for the abstract). Apparently, there are quite a few research groups actively pursing time-lapse electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) for monitoring rain … Continue reading

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Presentations at Fall AGU

The fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union is in Washington, D.C., this year (Dec 10-14, 2018). The first year of NSF-Geopath funded field camp resulted in three submissions. The first reflection on the overall success of the camp. ED41C-1124: Using … Continue reading

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Benford’s Law, Fraud, Evil Plots and Geophysics

As mentioned in an earlier post, I’m teaching a new general education class entitled “Evil Plots” about how graphs, maps and other forms of visual data communication can be used to persuade or mislead.  The idea is to teach students … Continue reading

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Gen Ed Faculty Assembly

August 21st I attended my first GenEd Faculty Assembly as Director. Over 60 faculty and graduate students came to meet with their fellow Gen Ed instructors, share their instructional strategies, and gather new ideas for the coming semester.  My role was … Continue reading

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