Category Archives: Teaching

Some Collaborative Tools for Science

Ania Truszczyn­ski invited me to give a lit­tle talk on the use of var­i­ous col­lab­o­ra­tive tools for sci­en­tists.  I enjoyed pre­sent­ing this as a chalk-talk, but alas no slides to link so here’s a list of ref­er­ence. Rather than the impos­si­ble attempt to be com­pre­hen­sive, this is restricted to resources I use reg­u­larly and have

Birth-death Tutorial for PBG Core

Ran a intro­duc­tory tuto­r­ial on birth-death mod­els for phy­lo­ge­netic trees in R today for Peter Wainwright’s sec­tion of the Pop Bio Core sequence. Notes below, in a man­ner that may sug­gest I was bet­ter orga­nized than real­ity might attest. Luck­ily the firsties are bril­liant… Get­ting Started Code is shown sec­tion by sec­tion with results in

Bodega Phylogenetics Workshop: Continuous Characters R session planning

Prepar­ing for the Bodega Phy­lo­ge­net­ics work­shop.  I’ll be cov­er­ing the R tuto­r­ial fol­low­ing Justen Whittall’s intro­duc­tion to con­tin­u­ous char­ac­ters: In my intro lec­ture i will dis­cuss Felsen­stein 1985 (includ­ing a lit­tle phylo sig­nal), then fol­low with some alter­na­tives (includ­ing the OU model). I can also dis­cuss the tree trans­for­ma­tions ala Pagel’s kappa, delta, etc. and

To podcast or not to podcast university lectures

Today in grad­u­ate teach­ing com­mu­nity we’re dis­cussing the value of pod­casts which rapidly becom­ing the stan­dard expec­ta­tion of in uni­ver­sity lec­tures.  There weren’t pod­casts when I was a stu­dent, at least never in the classes I’d taken –though I’ve often wished I had access to com­plete record­ings of my uni­ver­sity lec­tures.  Most wouldn’t be valu­able,

Intro Ecology Lecture at University of the Pacific

I was invited to give a guest lec­ture on intro­duc­tory ecol­ogy for an intro­duc­tory envi­ron­men­tal sci­ence course at Uni­ver­sity of the Pacific in Stock­ton today.  This pro­vided both a nice out­reach oppor­tu­nity and a chance to speak to a full intro­duc­tory class for 1:45hr, which I haven’t done before. I ran the class some­thing as

Tweets from an Ecology Field class

I just spoke with Pro­fes­sor Mau Stan­ton, a lead­ing researcher in our field and an award-winning teacher, about the poten­tial for using twit­ter in her field ecol­ogy course.  Though never hav­ing used any social media before, Mau has both clear and clever idea of how she wants to apply it in this 15-student field class. The