danaleeling

Chapter ten of the textbook opens with legends and stories of plants and then moves into psychoactive plants. The connection is that psychoactive plants are also often sacred plants in traditional cultures and almost always have origin legends or stories attached to them. Plant legends lift a plant up to a higher plane. Here on Pohnpei Piper methysticum is nonphysically elevated to where no one can step over the plant when the plant is laying on the ground. The class opened by asking each student if they did drugs. Then, with the textbook open on the smartboard, the five types of psychoactive compounds were covered: Euphorica : Drugs that cause a pleasant sensation of warmth and comfort. Often highly addictive. Withdrawal from any drug often brings the opposite effect, in this instance depression and melancholy (sadness, emptiness, loneliness). Opium, morphine, heroin, codeine. Physical and psychic pain killers. Phantastica : Drugs that cause hallucinations, illusions, visions, peyote...

The day before laboratory Ace Hardware was searched for iso-octane, 2,2,4-Trimethylpentane, to no avail. Ninety minutes of perusing solvent and automotive additive ingredients surfaced nothing equivalent. The lab directions in the thin layer chromatography kit referenced acetone and isopropyl alcohol.  Acetone was available at Ace Hardware, ethyl alcohol and isopropyl alcohol were available at Ace Office Supply. Cheesecloth was not located. White cloth from the house sufficed. The hardware store lacked lime - they had bags of lime for track and field at one time. The possibility of lime in the gardening section was overlooked. Black nitrile gloves were also purchased and provided. Nitrile has only moderate to good protection with respect to acetone, but no one was coming into direct intentional contact with the acetone in the class except the instructor. The leaf pulp was squeezed through a white cloth causing contact with the acetone. The gloves held up due to the brie...

ChuuChok had an overnight retreat on Nahlap. The retreat went well. Nahlap remains a touch rugged as a destination as the resort continues to recover from a destructive storm that over washed the island and devastated the infrastructure a couple of years ago.  A few items that proved worthy was remembering to bring a kettle and a butane stove. The generator runs only at night. Mosquito coils are also recommended for an overnight stay. The group used two butane stoves, and three stoves could have proven useful. During the day rice has to be cooked on a butane stove. Two more stoves for cooking food and boiling water would be useful. Contributing to the ability of digital denizens to share their every waking moment was a power strip with USB ports  This also facilitated plugging in on island fans. There are two three-prong outlets in the nahs, one on each side. The group of 26 could have used a second power strip. Sunset Bringing f...

Legends and stories was again run as an optional exercise. Gone are the days when students know their own stories, tell their own legends. Of 23 students only nine had stories to share, and perhaps eight of these were read from smartphones. The eight were extant stories and legends available in a variety of sources. Chennelle presents The assignment was post-hoc restricted to presenters by creating a group in Moodle. The complication was that two students pre-submitted the companion iNaturalist assignment and then didn't present. The iNaturalist presentation must be unavailable until after presentation day. Then a restriction can be set up based on who presented.

Monday introduced the periodic table of elements, starting with hydrogen and the isotopes deuterium and tritium. Which was done perhaps more slowly than in past terms. Barely at diatomic hydrogen, the period was nearing an end.  Hydrogen and some orbital basics were only wrapping up at almost 40 minutes after the hour. This term I remembered to bring electrons using the shatter balls as electrons. These worked rather well, more symbolic than markers. Monday should end with Lithium, but in an unforced error a jump was to carbon, carbon's p-orbitals, and pairing carbon's unpaired electrons. Molecular chemistry is supposed to hold until Wednesday. Wednesday saw a backtrack to Lithium, necessary in part due to a quiz question. Then a stretched run back through lithium chloride and carbon dioxide. Then sodium chloride and finally water. The complexity of the drawings took time. Setting aside the reality of hydronium ions, H+ was presen...

The lab opened with a brief Crime pays but Botany Doesn't clip to once again try to make a definitions and concepts course relevant in an era of image recognition models. This also provided a buffer at class start to allow students to settle in. The full clip was not shown. Then a video on inflorescences was shown because inflorescences are not covered until the day after the laboratory. In an earlier laboratory the students learned to use the SnapSeed mobile app to reduce the size of leaf images and then build a Google Forms quiz using their leaf images. In this laboratory students learn to use SnapSeed to label images .  The intent of these two laboratories is for students to learn how to work entirely from apps on their smartphones. College courses continue to focus on desktop applications and desktop computers, learning that is appropriate to a laptop toting generation. No course intentionally teaches students how to use productivity apps on their smartphones. Yet few studen...

This image of Palhinhaea cernua will see use in multiple places within a Moodle ethnobotanical course. While the file could be uploaded each and every time the file is used, this consumes server space. This also means that any update to this image has to be done in multiple places in the course.  Once an image was previously uploaded, that image can be accessed by choosing to add an image from the rich content editor. In the image upload dialog box is the option to Browse repositories at the lower right. In the File picker choose Server files. Only the blue text is active, the grey arrows are not active. Click or tap on the blue text for the term and course where the image is located. Navigate to where the file was uploaded. In this example the file is located in a Book resource that holds images of plants. The chapters of the flora are titled alphabetically. In this instance a plant that was long known as Lycopodium cernuum was later reclassified as Lycopodiella cernua. More rece...