As mentioned a few times previously, the class I’m teaching this term is a “Scholars Research Seminar” on time and timekeeping. As this is an entirely new course, and will be consuming a lot of my mental energy, I plan to post occasional reports on what I’m doing to the blog.<\/p>\n
Today was the first day of class, so a good chunk of the time was spent on introducing the basics of the course (my PowerPoint slides<\/a>, for those who care), and going through one slightly silly example.<\/p>\n The stated learning goals for SRS courses<\/a> (students should learn how to formulate a research question, find and evaluate evidence, present results, etc.) mean that they’re really basically “How to make an academic argument” courses, so I’m taking that as a general theme. It’s hard to assign reading for the first day of a course, though, so I went with an illustrative example that didn’t require pre-class reading: the physics of Goodnight Moon<\/cite><\/a>. It’s admittedly silly, but serves as an illustration of the basic process: you read it a zillion times, and you start asking “How long does this take?” After puzzling over it for a while, you realize you can use size of the Moon as a reference for its own motion, and then a little Googling gets you the size. Put that together with a little reasoning from common knowledge, and you can get an answer to the question.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I think it went over reasonably well; they were kind of quiet, but it’s the first day. It took quite a while to get them to see that the Moon can serve as its own scale reference, but they got the angular speed (360 degrees in 24 hours) pretty quickly.<\/p>\n I also gave them their first major assignment, which is to make a measurement of the performance of some timekeeping device. I gave them three timing resources: a digital timer like the one I tested last year<\/a>, one of the plastic sand timers I tested last week<\/a>, and the link to NIST’s official US time widget<\/a>. I left the exact thing to be measured up to them (the due date’s the 25th, so they have time), and that gives them a reasonable number of options. We’ll see how that goes.<\/p>\n Friday’s class is the first of a few that will deal with kookery of various sorts, with Stick-in-the-Mud Astronomy<\/a> assigned as reading, and a clip from this Ancient Aliens<\/cite> episode<\/a> planned as a starting point for in-class discussion (the bits about Newgrange<\/a>, which is also in the reading assigned from Dan Falk’s In Search of Time<\/cite><\/a>). These introduce the idea of solstices and equinoxes, and also provides an easy example of a slick but deeply, deeply flawed argument that we can easily take apart. Sadly, it does not feature my favorite of the kooky Ancient Alien theorists, but you can’t have everything.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As mentioned a few times previously, the class I’m teaching this term is a “Scholars Research Seminar” on time and timekeeping. As this is an entirely new course, and will be consuming a lot of my mental energy, I plan to post occasional reports on what I’m doing to the blog. Today was the first… Continue reading Course Report: A Brief History of Timekeeping 01<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,10,134,13,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5976","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-astronomy","category-course_reports","category-education","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5976","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5976"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5976\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5976"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5976"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5976"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}