has written an
article
about my work at the BCRC. There was a more recent article that
had a picture of the intro labs I designed, but it didn't seem to
make it onto the web.
This is my unofficial faculty page. I have an official faculty page too, but this format gives me greater flexibility in describing what I'm working on and providing links into the projects I've worked on. I have a personal page too.
My goals as director are to: (a) serve as an advocate for improving undergraduate education, (b) develop and provide expertise for the implementation of instructional technology in biology, and (c) increase the scope and utility of the Biology Computer Resource Center (BCRC). Toward these ends, I work closely with the faculty of the biology department and serve as a liaison between the department and broader science education and instructional technology initiatives both within the university and at the national level. In 2006, I was awarded the "NSM Faculty Oustanding Service Award". A more whimsical, but still important example is my participation in Project Steve.
I am regularly invited to offer presentations on topics in science education and technology.
One of my goals has been to help my faculty think about teaching and learning. I was a co-PI on the Biology Course Redesign Project which has transformed teaching and learning in the Intro Biology course and has served a model for redesign efforts on campus. I co-chaired a departmental committee that established a set of learning goals for majors of the Biology Department. These goals are not content goals, but are expressed as skills and perspectives we want students to have the opportunity to develop. They have allowed us to shift the debate in the department from what students should 'know' to what kinds of activities students should be doing in every class.
Being in the classroom and working closely with students lets me ground my research and development in practice. In 2006, I taught one section of Writing in Biology and an online course Organisms, Diversity and Interactions, an online science content and methods course for middle-school teachers. In writing, students created a map showing the locations of patches of garlic mustard, an invasive species in Amherst. Previously I have also taught Information Technology in Biology Education (several times) which I hope to offer again in the future. I also am typically working with one or two students conducting independent studies associated with the informatics project.
I spend a lot of my time trying to make useful tools available to faculty who want to provide web-based instructional materials. During 2004 at BioQUEST, I was involved on a team that made some exciting models of gene expression. We created a model of the classic lac operon and another model I called Logical Promoter that illustrates how a series of genes could act as a logic gate. Subsequently, I've been working on some unknown problems for students.
I've also been working on using wikis for collaborative writing projects using blogs and wikis. We've set up a BCRCwiki for documentation and, after some pilot testing, a Course wiki with individual wikis for each course section. I've been using this extensively in the writing courses I teach and have given talks about it at ACUBE and elsewhere.
During 2000-2001, I set up a BCRC webcam to address the challenge of teaching using materials with 'pedagogically inconvenient' timescales. In particular, in our intro labs, students see things once a week for three hours. By having a webcam, students can revisit something during the week to see how its changed. We can also create timelapse videos, like this video of a vial of Drosophila being created to study genetic crosses. This work was supported by a UMass President's office Professional Development grant.
In 2004, I was elected President of the Esperanto Society of New England and in 2005, vice-president and webmaster of the Esperanto League for North America. (The website for ELNA, Esperanto-USA, was redesigned under my leadership.) I'm currently coordinating a project related to Esperanto-language blogging called Esperanto Day in which people are encouraged to draft a bilingual posting on Dec 15, 2006 (in their native language and in Esperanto) to reflect on problems of language from a local, regional, or international perspective. I've been writing some columns on Esperanto blogging at Global Voices. I have been an Esperanto speaker since 1989. An on-going creative endeavor has writing and translating haiku in Esperanto. I have conducted local readings of my haiku and offered workshops on writing haiku to regional and national Esperanto conferences. A on-going expression has been the development of a website with haiku authored in Esperanto. The design of this site, La Zne Hajkoj de Istvan Bierfaristo.
Soon after arriving at UMass, I undertook the establishment of a set of instructional technology resources for every course in the Biology Department and, more recently, Microbiology. Lately we've added wikis. I designed on a practice test system called Duck! Duck is available for dowload as open-source software under the GNU general public license. In retrospect, I've decided that I should have called it REPTILE Reduced Evil Practice Testing and Interactive Learning Environment).
In 1999, I performed a redesign of the Biology Department homepage. In 2002, I worked with Tom Hoogendyk to do it again and try to get it right. The new Department site is much more usable and aesthetically pleasing. As part of the new site, I also established the Gallery of Biological Imagery, which was an idea I had had for a while to make the incredible imagery which the department produces as a matter of course more generally available to the public.
The
Campus Chronicle
has written an
article
about my work at the BCRC. There was a more recent article that
had a picture of the intro labs I designed, but it didn't seem to
make it onto the web.
I am engaged in several instructional technology development projects. I seek to create problem-solving environments that allow teachers and students to collaboratively solve open-ended effects-to-causes problems. An ongoing effort, the Data Aggregation Project has involved using a web interface to a database that let students in a large course aggregate their measurements and download the results in a spreadsheet. Each group of students gathers only a little data, yet can work with the whole data set gathered by all 600 or 700 students. You can still get some of the data, if you're interested: comparison of plants grown in light and dark, root growth experiment, and hormone experiment. I've done a few presentations about this work.
I am a linux user and supporter and I have been fairly active in our local linux users group WeMalu. I coordinated a Linux Demo Days display and gave a presentation on compiling the linux kernel.
A project I originally authored in Supercard was ported to java yielding two applets, Nernst and Goldman, that let students explore the relationships among internal and external concentrations of ions, permeability, and membrane potential. It's interesting because it illustrates how scientists use simple models as heuristics to get benchmarks of what is happening in complex systems.
Phylogenetic Investigator
,
published by the BioQUEST
Curriculum Consortium
, allows students to explore the
fundamentals of constructing phylogenetic trees. I also wrote
a project called BugHunt! for illustrating that evolutionary
change takes place at the level of populations rather than individuals.
My research interests involve the study of problem-solving in biology. My dissertation (See abstract) focussed on expert problem-solving in phylogenetic tree construction. I plan to extend this work with further studies of experts and novices.
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