Ynyslas and Borth
You can grab all the photo’s here. There’s more to upload soon! If you took some photo’s yourself, do upload them to flickr so you are helping each other out.
Some things to help you along
Photo from flickr by Seryo
Creative commons license
Right.
We meet at 8.30am you have my email address if you have questions or issues.
We still want all of you to come on the trip.
For those of you who are coming still; some links
Sand dunes: a practical handbook
Coastal Sand Dunes: Habitat Conservation Plan
English Nature: Coastal Habitat Restoration
Images and Species Key From Aberystwyth University
Ynyslas vegetation succession and soil development
This is all. See you Tuesday!
organise it – graphic like
Bubbl.us (I like to pronounce it bubble-us) is a great online organisation tool, and the results are pretty cute too. It is very easy to use, smart students like you will get to grips with it in no time.
There’s numerous studies that show using a graphic organiser will improve your learning and planning. It can give you a structure where you were struggling to find one because things will make sense when you see them spread across the page.
The really nice thing about bubbl.us is you can use it collaboratively. To make your life easier when you’re writing up your trial investigation for example, I’ve set out a model for the information you could add!
Scroll around the image to see, sign up to bubbl.us. My username is thesciencefloor.
tweet tweet
If I remember rightly (and you’ll find I do) one of your tasks for this week is to sign up to some web-services, like twitter.
We’ve had a look at social bookmarking, twitter is an example of social networking. If I were the betting type, I’d bet you’ve all used a social networking site at some point. I know for a fact some of you have noisy myspace profiles from walking through the study centre to see if anyone is doing any actual work. I’ve had my facebook picture commented on so I know you know what that is. Myspace for old people or so the BTEC firsts tell me.
Twitter is a much more simple version of the “what are you doing right now” function in facebook. You write in what it is you’re doing right now.
As I write this my twitter tells (and you) that I’m looking at updating the wiki for the science floor. There’s a link as well to remind you what it is I’m talking about. I’m going to update it soon to inform anyone who cares that the rooms and labs for Aberystwyth are all booked.
Networking – I’m following a few people on twitter. A very smart ICT lady, a few science sites, my housemates and a couple of friends. When I log in, I know what they’re all doing.
What does this have to do with your coursework? That depends on you! If you network with each other you will see where you are all at and be able to give each other encouragement. If you’re online reading a great article, twitter about it and let everyone know. When you are writing up your coursework and trying, desperately to remember what on earth it is you did, look in your twitter archives.
If I check my twitter, reuters_science tells me that cigarette companies are trying to lure in young people with minty cigarettes. Digg_science tells me about the Voyager space mission and my people following me/people I’m following list tells me none of you have signed up yet…..
my username is tregreer.
note when you sign up for this use the same amount of caution as you would on any internet site. Don’t use your full name and don’t give away any personal details.
del.icio.us
Photograph By Daniel Hodson licensed under Creative Commons
Is Aberystwyth pretty I found some students pondering the other day. Yes. Yes it is, is the answer. It’s going to be a lovely few days spent in a lovely location doing lots of really very lovely Biology. Capital B.
One of the things that got identified in the trial investigation is the fact that a fair amount plants we came across, we didn’t at all know what they were. This is the sort of thing the trial investigation is meant to show you because as soon as you get to Wales, it’s going to be very difficult to rectify these issues there.
I mentioned to the trialee that the Natural History Museum website has a plant postcode database with the names and photographs of wildflowers native to any given area. It’s what we used to help identify the sorts of plants we wanted growing around the pond. I haven’t given you the link to the postcode database here though. Oh no, I’m far too clever/annoying for that.
Because, you see, I want to talk to you about del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is a particularly good example of a social bookmarking site. What the in earth is social bookmarking? I’ll tell you!
Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata.
Courtesy of Wikipedia
You see when you google for something, google will churn up answers that are based on how many other sites link to any given site. The google spiders operate on the basis of popularity, not strictly relevance. Which is useful for when you’re looking for a good flash game to waste your time on, but not so hot when you want to do some proper research.
The way del.icio.us works is instead of bookmarking a site to look at later, you add tags (see tag you’re it) to a site in ways that means most to you. This means you can sort through all of the sites you’ve tagged finding the most relevant ones for your needs. Way more efficient and tons less frustrating than google spiders.
That’s bookmarking, what about social? Well, there’s millions of people tagging through del.icio.us to even further refine the relevance of sites. I’m tagging merrily away ready for teaching next year. I’ve been tagging things useful for Aberystwyth and coursework as well. You can add friends in a network and share links this way. If someone has stumbled upon a good site, why should you have to trawl the internet looking for it yourself, when you can grab it straight out of their bookmarks?
My user name on del.icio.us is tregreer. I’ve tagged and bundled both the postcode database and all flickr photographs of Aberystwyth. See if you can find them….
Tag, you’re it!
a beautiful word cloud created at http://wordle.net
In my side bar you will see a Tag Cloud. What is this? you may well ask. If you click on a tag, it will take you to any post I have tagged with that particular subject. If I’ve made a post about rabbit populations and ecology for example, I might tag it with rabbit, population, ecology. If you wanted to then search my blog to see what I had to say about ecology, you would click on the ecology link in the tag cloud and it would show you every post I’d made that was relevent.
It’s a much more fluid way of organising your information than just headings or dates. It saves a lot of trawling around the internet looking for things.
The bigger and bolder a tag, the more I have used it. Follow the coursework tag and you’ll get nearly all of my posts for example.
Write a post about your trial and add any relevent tags. Look around other blogs and see how tagging can be useful.
Later I’ll talk to you a little more about the ways of organising information on the internet, but for now, tag away!
flickr
One of the tasks you have been set over the summer to help you organise your coursework is to familiarise yourself to flickr.
This website will store all of your photographs and hopefully throughout the duration of your coursework you will collect a few of these. I’ve set up a group called A2 Biology Coursework.
Register an account with flickr and email me your user name (or post a comment – they are all moderated so won’t be displayed if you don’t want them to be) and I’ll add you to the group.
This way, when you take a photo from your camera or phone, we can add it to the group pool. These photo’s can then be put into your coursework to make it slick looking and readable.
It’ll also remind us later how much fun coursework is.
Seriously.
Try before you buy
Setting up a transect: photo on flickr
Today a group of very dedicated biology students came to the science floor to undertake a trial of the experimental techniques they plan to use when they get to Aberystwyth.
Quadrat on a budget: photo on flickr
It was a very worthwhile endeavor I think, a few issues came up that will give them food for thought I hope. How do they plan to identify the organisms and plants they come across? What sampling methods worked for them? How will they measure a transect? What is the best method for detecting soil pH?
I hope to see a rough outline on their blogs about why they did this trial experiment and what they have learned through doing so.
For those who haven’t yet done a trial investigation, you seriously want to think about giving it a go before you set of Wales-ward!
pH of soil – paper method: photo on flickr
Remember – on the 14th of August most of you will be in to get your AS exam results. We’ll be in as well so if you have a spare hour or so to run a trial experiment and need some help or kit, then let us know and we’ll do what we can!
Hello Biologists!
Your exams are over and your A2 induction period has started. Scary isn’t it? You thought the hard work of the last few weeks was all over and you had summer stretching out in front of you… then all of a sudden teacher types start mentioning the dreaded C word….
Coursework……
It’s not all that scary, at least not for Biology. Today you have been given A2 coursework guidebooks outlining all of the details for the research and planned visit to Aberystwyth. Sat in your email you will find details to log into a blog just like this one and make it all your own.
The plan is over the summer you will follow the tasks in the booklet and use your blog in the same way a research scientist uses a lab book – to plan, spin out ideas, draft and reflect on your progress. The bonus of this over a lab book is that you will be getting a steady supply of help and comments. Within your small groups you will try to support each other and hopefully the coursework planning will virtually do itself.
There’s a few tasks and tips to get you going. If you lose a copy of your book over the summer, fear not, I have uploaded a copy here: A2 coursework handbook
Have a play with the tasks you’ve been set, customize your blog to how you like it and feel free to post comments with your initial impressions and/or expectations of the A2 coursework
