danaleeling

Page views are perhaps the only easily available proxy for platform engagement that is surfaced by Instructure Canvas.  Platform engagement can be seen in turn as a proxy for participation. There are 1137 students in 115 courses and 45 faculty active on the platform as of week eleven.  Total page views spring 2022 to date shows a pattern similar to that seen last fall, with the vertical offset being due to more students being on the platform spring 2022.  Spring 2022 peaked in week three with 1224 students on the platform and is now down by 87 students to 1137 students, a loss of 7.1%. Fall 2021 had 956 students on the platform in week three and dropped to 887 by week eleven, a loss of 7.2%. The drop in the number of students reflects withdrawals from courses. Students can withdraw with a "W" up to the end of week ten. That the two percentages are almost equal suggests that the loss rate might be a stable percentage term-on-term.  The same data with the spring 2022 v...

Failure is always an option. This spring the weather in February and March has been heavy rain. Few trees are in a fruit production cycle. Outdoor field walks have been wet, soggy, and muddy. I decided in advance to rerun the fruit salad exercise. But there were some miscalculations and oversights from early on.  I had bought a can of pears to "beef up" the pome section, and then forgot the can at home. The blueberries had been in a can too long and had a metallic taste, plus they made the salad an unappetizing color. None of the students likes the blueberries. And making things all the worse, the crushed pineapple was far more crushed than the label let on. Must be pineapple chunks. I would double the number of tropical fruit cans - that has the more interesting local fruits, get rid of the blueberries - they were a disaster - and use true pineapple chunks. The mangoes were well received, and the pears would have been a nice pome addition. Peaches or apricots would have work...

Monday I dragged out the DVD player - unused in three years - and showed Bill Nye's Light and Optics video.  As the video ran, I made notes from the video on the board  Including the greenhouse effect that Bill Nye covers during the video.  Wednesday I did demonstrations with the laser and objects filled with water to demonstrate refraction and total internal reflection.  I wrapped up with a viewing of a fish tank and the inability to see out the sides of the tank. Thursday I worked without reference to past boards in an attempt to freshen up the presentation. Note that I deliberately decided to refer to an "index of reflection for a plane mirror" this term to make the two parts of the laboratory more conceptually symmetric.  While Desmos allows the reflection table and graph to be in the object-image order and the refraction table and graph to be in the image-object order, my experiment with this sequence today would prove confusing, especially in the 11:00 cla...

Prior to class I nominally cleared a path for the class to traipse over. I opened with mention of test eight, the field final examination. The field final examination has the students provide the local name in their language and use for the plant. The final used to include scientific names, but the churn has been so fierce that names were changing on some plants twice in a single term. The instability in the scientific names has made them functionally useless for identifying plants in a non-major science course. Even if one learned the current scientific names, there would be little usefulness as most of the ethnobotanical resources out here are older and reference prior names for the plants. Despite the churn, the following reference the scientific names at present. Cross references to local names are available in the campus flora . I started with the plants next to the parking lot. The general area of the walk is behind the gym . A partial list of the plants in this area is on iNatur...