Blogs

Aspirations, successes, challenges (1994-2005), and update

Serendip principles and principals participated in a national conference, SENCER, in Washington D.C this month.  Our presentation, Science Education as Interactive Conversation, is available for download, and we have some links to relevant materials.

Hands-on Activities for Teaching Biology to High School or Middle School Students has been very popular with science teachers, and is one of Serendip's favorite exhibits. Even if you're not in high school anymore, take a look at Dragon Genetics, just for fun.

New genres are created daily toexpress the time people live in. The genre in today’s world is technology.Within this new genre people have found a way to express themselves throughblogs. A blog is a place in which a group of individuals produce an ongoingnarrative. It is created for different communities to come together and expressany opinion on a political, social, economic, or emotional topic they mightfeel strong about. One of the main characteristics of a blog is the ability tomake the readers feel part of a community they can contribute to by writing. Blogginghas become firmly established as a web based communications tool.

What is free will? What is body image? Why do we blush? What is art? What is the self? Who am I? Drawing from years of clinical research and medical practice, V.S. Ramachandran invites us to explore some of these daunting philosophical questions through the principles and findings of neuroscience in his book A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness: From Imposter Poodles to Purple Numbers. Dr. Ramachandran has studied some of the most bizarre neurological syndromes ever recorded and in this book attempts to convey the promise that some of these problems may hold for science. In the book he discusses cases of synesthesia, hysteria, phantom

Imagine a room full of people sitting quietly at their desks and suddenly laughing one after another for no apparent reason or picture a large congregation of people in the middle of a park laughing in a circle. As uncanny as it may seem, this is happening all over the world. Recently, scientists have begun paying more attention to Laughing Therapy and its psychological and physiological effect on humans. Studies have shown that laughter, or even the anticipation of a merry experience increases health-protecting hormones while reducing stress hormones. Although additional research is needed, there is strong evidence that Laughing Therapy is beneficial to patients and could be used to in addition to standard procedure.

I did note that Alex wrote a piece on genderqueer students at single-sex colleges; and I felt I ought to say something, since I identify as genderqueer, for lack of a better word or concept. But the thing is, it's intensely private. And the thing is, the problem of my gender identity is perhaps the only problem which I can't solve by writing and talking about it. A friend of mine (one of those LJ friends I've never met) commented thus on one of my entries in early February: 

Part of the reason I wanted to take this course is because I knew we would talk about blogs. But I have discovered that while I very much want to think about blogging as a genre, as a medium, etc. I don't want to talk about it within the context provided (thus far) by this class. I want to talk about it with fellow insiders, apparently, not with people who have never blogged in their life, or who blog in vastly different ways from me; and not while in dialog with texts by outsiders (who persist in calling blogs 'diaries', ferfucksake, for example) who focus on the blog as a primarily public sort of thing, and who see blogging's claim to fame as being tied to its readership and its potential to impact, I dunno, politics or whatever.

"Perhaps we are hallucinating all the time and what we call perception is arrived at by simply determining which hallucination best conforms to the current sensory input." V.S. Ramachandran here communicates the uncomfortable notion that what we perceive to be real is not reality at all. My body as I know it may really have a different form entirely, I may be typing into nothingness and the ghost that I’m sure I saw at summer camp may have been more real than I am. Maybe new agers do contact extra terrestrials and your dead relatives never really leave your side. Maybe. Does a distinction