Module 1.  Test Driving the Course At A Glance

ETAP 640

I don't think of my job as student-centered, nor is it teacher- or self-centered, but rather, learnING-centered.  There's a job to do that's shared by the whole class together.

The main thing is to focus the students on the practical value of what they're learning by situating the assignments in real-world tasks, where the purpose is to provide something valuable to real people. 

In my early years teaching, I was confronted by a graduate student who asked a question which I was not sure of the answer or how to answer it.  When asked by my director how I was doing I mentioned the incident to him.  He indicated that I should not be doing any research on this but the student should seek out the answer to his question.  Later in the class the same student asked a question; I wasn't sure of the answer and suggested to him that he research his question and make a presentation to the class on what he found.  I told him where he could research his question, indicated a couple situations in the real world he could look at.  The next week he presented and commented to the class that the assignment I gave him was very interesting and rewarding for him.  I was gratified, regained my feeling of self-worth, and had a student and class that found the results appropo.  This action was "student-centered".

This website documents, in great depth, a large collection of chemical elements and examples of their applications, common and uncommon. Click any element tile above and you will find probably more than you ever wanted to know about that element. All these samples (well, at least the ones that fit) are stored in a wooden periodic table, by which I mean a physical table you can actually sit at, in my office at Wolfram Research. I decided to build this table by accident in early 2002, as a result of a misunderstanding while reading Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks. I won't bore you with the details here (see the Complete Pictorial History of the Wooden Periodic Table Table), but once it was finished I felt obligated to start finding elements to go in it (because under the name of each element in my table there is a sample area). Then I started building a website to document all my samples, and that's when things really got out of hand. A few months later my little table won the 2002 Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry, clearly the highest honor for which it is eligible. Sensing an audience, I began to take the website more seriously, which led to my being asked to write a monthly column for Popular Science magazine, which I've now been doing continuously since the July 2003 issue. Later I formed a most satisfying partnership with Max Whitby building high-end museum displays, selling element samples and sets, and filming video demonstrations of the chemical properties of the elements. This website now contains the largest, most complete library of stock photographs of the elements and their applications available anywhere, as well as a large and growing collection of 3D images documenting hundreds of samples rotated through 360 degrees. Try clicking on some elements in the table above: I think you'll be surprised what's lurking behind those little tiles. And if you like the pictures, you'll love the poster! After years of photography and months of assembling images, I published a photographic periodic table poster based on my collection:

I guess I can guide, so when the students get off course I can say hey you should check this guy out, or this writer out.