danaleeling

An official holiday on Tuesday and an unofficial holiday on Thursday may have contributed to decreased engagement as measured by page views on the Instructure Canvas platform. Click to enlarge While page views are down from week 14, the week 15 Tuesday national holiday had the same level of engagement as the day before, Monday on week 15. There is no obvious indication that the holiday impacted page views negatively, page views are down across week 15.  Other metrics on the platform were either stable or showed small amounts of growth into week 15. Assessment This week a brief look at learning as disaggregated by course and the relative impact of outcomes assessed by items on quizzes and tests versus outcomes assessed by rubrics attached to assignments.  Learning outcome assessment against a five point scale for courses reporting course learning outcomes. Week 15 saw 373 records added to the learning outcomes report.   Of the fourteen courses reporting learning, only...

 Laboratory 14 was the first time with actual hula hoops. Equipment included a variety of hoops. The green hoop would prove to be smaller than the other commercial grade hoops. The homemade hoops did not work as well.  In the spirit of toroidal objects. Lailani with Adriann timing Derisalyn Marcia Mercedes Lailani In the morning session, Lailani, Derisalyn, and Marcia would prove adept with the hoops and taught me a new circular hip motion that worked much better than my back and forth motion.  Cynthia turned in a slightly higher time that some of other students. Introduction I did lead off the 8:00 class with a few hoop videos. I did not find any I particularly liked or found more useful than others.  Part one was determining whether the period was the same for different hoopers. At this point I had not realized that the green hoop was about 10 cm smaller in diameter.  Part two looked at rotation period in seconds versus diameter in centimeters. Ten rotations w...

18 November was to be the final presentation - legends of plants, stories of plants. Only two students had a plant story to share, one student from Kosrae, one student from Chuuk. Of the Pohnpeian students, two said they knew a single story. On cultural grounds I did not permit them to share their single and thus last story. The rest had no stories to share. I used the opportunity to again note the loss of culture is not just a loss of language, it is a loss of identity through the stories that are told. Stories that inform one how to act, how to think, how to behave. I shared a story of Isokelekel that reminds a man that he is a man only as long as he is useful to his family, his kousapw, his wehi. This section of the course probably needs redesign work.  In a separate note, I am not like how the iNaturalist work is playing out in the course. I want more value add, more thoughtfulness. I am considering fewer submissions focused on including a short ethnobotanical "essay" in ...

Although the above chart is a tad confusing visually, the chart shows that Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of week fourteen showed upticks in the number of page views on the Instructure Canvas platform. Tuesday held steady week-on-week. This is the first sign of recovery in engagement since midterm. [Chart updated on Monday of week 15] Overall engagement as measured by page views for week fourteen exceeded the thirteen and week twelve values. Note that this was also the first five day work week since October.  [Chart updated on Monday of week 15] Engagement in week 14 can be seen to have risen over week twelve and thirteen in this chart as well.  [Chart updated on Monday of week 15] The number of assignments on the platform showed the most growth, with smaller increases in the number of discussions and media recordings. Assignments remain the dominant form of interaction on the Canvas platform.  Dashboard The record count in the main outcomes table is now 6024 row...

 Monday began with an introduction to the periodic table and the pseudo-structure of atoms. I began with hydrogen including coverage of the isotopes that contribute to the atomic mass not being exactly equal to one. Deuterium and tritium are what powers thermonuclear weapons, so-called hydrogen bombs.  Then I moved on to higher elements and orbitals. No, this is not the quantum reality, but a beginners mind is not ready for a quantum approach. Wednesday I moved on to bonding, starting with hydrogen-hydrogen bonding to fill the 1s shell. No, the orbitals are not correct, but they provide a visual model on which to hang the ideas of the valence shell structure. The leftmost NaOH was the end of my notes, the H₂ bonding was erased. These diagrams all have their issues... Mercedes testing a floral solution for a color change due to the addition of a known acid Thursday the students worked with using floral litmus solutions to identify whether substances were an acid, base, or neutr...