World Diabetes Day Fun Walk

World Diabetes Day landed on a Saturday this year, allowing for a well attended morning fun walk. First across the finish was a member of the Ardos family.

The female lead finishers.

Three young woman, including a Nakasone, headed in towards the finish line at the state hospital.

 Out on the road, septuagenarian Tadesy Yamaguchi is well ahead of a far younger pack.

College students joined in the run as well.

Although none of the kids made it out of bed on an early, dark, rainy, cold Pohnpei morning, all three were up for a hearty breakfast at the Joy Hotel.

I finished the sub-5k loop at a slow 26:45 joggling under the drippy gray skies.

Acids and Bases

Laboratory thirteen focuses on uses floral pigments as litmus solutions for determining whether something is an acid or a base.

Myleen works on extracting floral litmus solutions. Plants include the flowers of Hibiscus tiliaceus, Hibiscus rosa-sinensis, the orchid Spathoglottis plicata, and the leaves of coleus. Many other leaves and flowers were tested by the students.

The optimal goal was to find a single floral solution that exhibited unique color changes in reaction to an acid or a base. The floral fluid on the left, normally magenta, has turned pink in the presence of an acid and dark grayish-blue in the presence of a base.

Sally-Jean examines a print-out of X11 colors to determine the color of her floral solution. Alfonso records data.

Lynn looks down the table of unknowns to be tested, Warren at the far end.

Verne tests unknowns while making notes. Each term, even each period, tends to find different plants that work differentially well. There are differences in pigment concentrations in some flowers such as H. tiliaceus during the course of the day. This year the purple Spathoglottis orchid appeared to perform well, although it may have an anomalous reaction to mineral lime (calcium carbonate).

Face painting

Face painting at the school fair.

Facebook in Education

FaceBook now supports teacher's who want to set up a page, as opposed to a group, through which to connect with students. The difference between a group and a page is subtle but significant. A class page, as opposed to a group, permits a separate identity, such as "Mr. Jones' Ninth Grade Class" with a separate list of friends (termed fans for a page) from Mr. Jones' personal page. This helps separate family, friends, and students for a teacher. This is, as far as I know, a new capability. Up until about a year ago pages were reserved to people, and then to businesses for a price. Now anyone can start a page - which as noted operates differently than a group.

Buried in FaceBook is their own page on FaceBook in Education which attempts to track educational uses of FaceBook.

As a potential academic platform, FaceBook is maturing and gradually gaining new capabilities. Some of the pieces towards becoming an education platform are already in place. Presentations can be embedded into FB space using Slideshow ). File and document sharing is already possible using the My Documents application. Chat is already in place, one of the missing pieces is an online white board, but hints of that technology are already visible in the Visionboard application.

Community colleges have long specialized in bring college to where the student lives, as opposed to state universities that make the student come to the school. Our students already "live" in social media space. I expect that community colleges will probably be in the lead on finding ways to use social media to bring learning to their students.

G2 rainbow

I assess and mark physical science laboratories for grammar, vocabulary, spelling, science content, format, organization, and cohesion using a rubric. With 32 students and a laboratory due every week, I spend roughly six hours every weekend marking laboratory reports.

I realize that I could focus on a one type of error per week and ease my own marking load. This is an approach I have heard used in writing courses. I have found, however, that the laboratory reports improve across all of the areas I mark and improve rapidly early in the term. I hope to get some hard numbers of this improvement later in this term.

The result of this approach is that a laboratory report can wind up literally covered in ink early in the term. The amount of red ink would be enough to cause confusion. Thus I use multiple pen colors, red, blue, black, green, purple, even maroon. I prefer to use Pilot G2 pens - I do a lot of writing and I appreciate the smooth, easy feel of the G2.

I am apparently not alone in this preference - the company claims the pen to be a number one selling gel pen in the United States, they have a strong gel pen market share globally, and there is a cultish following to the pen. Thus I was excited to see a pack of twenty G2 pens in more colors than the seven color Newtonian rainbow.

With the price of G2s on this island, I will only need a small bank loan to afford this 20 pack! I have visions of twenty times the number of comments - or at least an eleven-fold increase (there are duplicates in the twenty pack and only eleven colors produced by Pilot).

By this time each term, the every weekend grind has me wondering whether my writing-across-the-curriculum each and every week is worth the effort I expend. Every weekend has me dragging papers around with me. Yet when I look at what is being turned in at this point in the term, I can see that the students have individually benefited. I am getting better written, more coherent laboratory reports. And the students are now used to cranking out a paper a week. What looked impossible to them the first week is now simply routine.

Some professors spend their every moment engrossed in their research and writing, taking time out only for an occasional lecture of a few hundred students, and leaving to teams of graduate assistants the task of marking and grading. They make important contributions to their fields of research and their names are remembered in their field for those contributions.

I publish not and leave behind no permanent edifice of contributed knowledge. Yet I have no regrets. Every year I again meet former students - this is the nature of living on a small island - and come to know of the impact their education has had on them in life. On a good day, my contribution is to others, not to a field of research. Each has their importance in the role of higher education.

Children of the sunset

I remember with fondness the rare occasions my own father would take me to work with him on a weekend. Relatively empty on a weekend, I had the run of the thirty-first floor. IBM Selectric typewrites ruled the secretarial desks - there were no computers at that time. Within a few short years, however, the typing pool would be replaced by a work processing center, and not to many years after that the word processing center vanished and every secretary had their own word processor.

On an occasional weekend I bring the next generation to the office, an office on the ground floor and located much closer to the equator than that of my own father.

Two of my three with the sunset behind them as we head home.

Cumulus clouds

A line of cumulus clouds formed west of campus at 08:16 on 06 November 2009. The wind was a south wind and the formation was moving northward. This fall has seen the southwest and south winds of a developiong El Niño side of the ENSO cycle. From the north end of the complex rain can be seen falling away.