Comments for Highly Allochthonous

Comment on Does plate tectonics control magnetic reversals? by Alayna Wesson

Alayna Wesson — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:06:51 +0000

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Comment on How I (mostly) slept through the one of the largest earthquakes to hit NW Europe in 200 years by ben

ben — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:01:47 +0000

I had a similar thing happen to me in 2008 when I was a sophomore in college. I lived with three other guys and we all kind of slept through it. The next morning we all shared our strange “dream” and were amazed to find out it was an actual earthquake. Of course, we should not have been so surprised since St. Louis is not far away from the New Madrid Fault Zone. The 5.4 earthquake was actually linked to different fault zone a little further east. To this day it remains my only brush with a seismic event (aside from Universal Studios in Orlando, anyway).

Comment on How useful are lectures, really? by ferrousalloy

ferrousalloy — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 22:05:50 +0000

My adviser has always lectured but he has decided to switch things up this semester and change to a more discussion oriented class. I’m excited to see how it turns out, and it will be nice to compare different teaching styles with the same professor.

Comment on How I (mostly) slept through the one of the largest earthquakes to hit NW Europe in 200 years by Passerby

Passerby — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 00:25:59 +0000

Nice synopsis with map of the Roer R graben, sedimentation, subsidence and paleoseismicity: The Rhine Graben system

http://www.topo-europe.eu/3-the-natural-laboratory-concept/3-2-in-front-of-the-orogen/3-2-2-the-rhine-graben-system

Comment on How useful are lectures, really? by Astrid Arts

Astrid Arts — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 20:03:56 +0000

In grad school, I had one class where we were each given a topic one week and had to give a lecture on it the following week. We’d go research the topic, figure out what was important and then we would have to teach it to everyone else and provide a 1 page summary sheet. We covered a lot of material (I am still shocked at how much information is out there on cave pearls) and rather than being told what we needed to learn we had the opportunity to figure out what was important ourselves (this is definitely an important switchfor a grad student). I still have that binder of summary sheets and I refer to it regularly.

I have always believed – the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else (until they understand it). When you really understand something you can explain it from so many different directions so that everyone can understand it. There is nothing worse than a teacher who can only explain something one way.

My sisters both teach elementary school and they use the VARK Models that ParClair mentioned to help kids understand how they can best learn. People are usually a combination of 2 or 3 (visual, auditory & kinetic) – my nephew was an auditory kinetic learner and the only way he could study was through having someone talk with him while he threw a ball against a wall.

I think when “teaching” you need to appeal to all 3 learning styles so combinations of lecture, textbook, labs/fieldtrips. Not all will work for each student but by appealing to all styles you have your best chance at engaging the most students

Comment on How I (mostly) slept through the one of the largest earthquakes to hit NW Europe in 200 years by BDoyle

BDoyle — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 22:40:13 +0000

My little brother has you beat. He managed to sleep through a magnitude 6.5, which was pretty impressive considering that his bed had rotated by 90 degrees. It no more inspired me than your earthquake did, though. I grew up in the middle of the desert, and my main entertainment was collecting minerals, re-articulating skeletons and such, but somehow I never realized that geology was a science until after I had already started college. I signed up for an introductory geology course without even making the connection in my mind. To me, science was physics and math. It turned out that the professor was director of JPL, and very busy at the time, so the course ended up being a sack lunch meeting twice a week to look at the latest pictures from Mars. Talk about an Epiphany!

Comment on How I (mostly) slept through the one of the largest earthquakes to hit NW Europe in 200 years by Chris Rowan

Chris Rowan — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 22:09:33 +0000

Probably. Or I was just wrong.

Comment on How I (mostly) slept through the one of the largest earthquakes to hit NW Europe in 200 years by Lab Lemming

Lab Lemming — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 22:50:10 +0000

If that’s the biggest Earthquake in Europe for 200 years, you must have an odd definition of the continent.

Comment on Geological mayhem and destruction in 2012: not the end of the world, just business as usual by Liath

Liath — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 01:52:00 +0000

But…but… Chris, surely, you must know that anthropogenic climate change will receive a terribly unhealthy boost in 2012. The US is having elections this year and it’s well known that politicians lecturing on and on about their virtues are commonly known as windbags. Worse, these windbags exhale CO2 in vast quantities and to compound the problem those exhalations are primarily hot air. Most of these windbags are closely aligned with coal and oil companies which leads me to the conclusion that there is a vast conspiracy afoot to convert Gaia to a second Venus.

Comment on How useful are lectures, really? by SiccarPoint

SiccarPoint — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 17:20:00 +0000

To me, it’s not the distinction between lectures and no lectures that actually matters, it’s the tailoring of teaching to each student. Everyone learns different ways, so the only way to actually teach truly effectively is to find that out for each individual student. That means 1-on-1 contact, even if just for a few minutes, which means labs, fieldwork, and supervisions.

That’s clearly not viable logistically as a mechanism for transfer of large amounts of knowledge, but I think when I teach 1-on-1, I subconsciously focus on showing a student how to place what they’re learning into the framework of what they already know. In other words, getting the benefit out of lectures is a skill that most people (including me!) need or needed to be taught *as well*. And we in general, I think, are pretty crap at this. Which gives an enormous advantage to auditory and visual learners in universities, when actually those aren’t particularly useful “science skills”, as such. Which seems ultimately counterproductive to me.