Coastal Ecosystem Science: Alien Invasion!

This lesson introduces students to the broad concept of invasive species. Students prepare a written case study on an invasive aquatic species, followed by an oral presentation. They will define, compare, and contrast invasive species, alien species, and native species, describe at least three problems that may be associated with invasive species, and describe at least three invasive species, explain how they came to be invasive, and discuss what can be done about them. The lesson plan provides a list of possible species to choose from, and information about their introduction, impact, and control. Suggestions for extensions are also provided. Educational levels: High school, Middle school, Undergraduate lower division

Demographic shocks: the view from history: discussion

Massimo Livi-Bacci has taken us on a fascinating tour of demographic history. What lessons for developments in the world today can we draw from the story he tells? I will distinguish between three types of lessons, which I call "economic lessons," "demographic lessons," and "cultural/political lessons."Demography ; Economic conditions

A lesson learned in time: Advice shared by experienced sport psychologists

Through experience, sport psychologists will learn countless valuable lessons. Some lessons, however, are likely to stand out vividly to a psychologist because they made a valuable difference to how they practise. The present project focuses on these outstanding lessons. In essence, sport psychologists who had been practising for between 11 and 28 years (mean ± SD = 19 ± 5) were asked to share their most valuable advice about any aspect of sport psychology client work with other sport psychologists. This publication presents participants' full responses

When is an exploration exploratory? A comparative analysis of geometry lessons

This paper presents a comparative analysis of two textbook lessons on the same topic from U.S. textbooks to learn how differently - designed “exploratory” lessons may structure content to enable or constrain student inquiry. One lesson, representative of a “reform - based” textbook, contains investigations of conditions of triangle congruence. The second is a “technology lab” on triangle congruence fro m a "traditional" textbook, the design of which is atypical for that textbook. Framing a lesson as a mathematical story, this analysis exposes three distinct ways that these lessons are different: (a) the proportion of the lesson in which mathematical questions remain unanswered, (b) the manner in which content unfolds to address each question, and (c) the way in which open mathematical questions overlap to increase the dynamically - changing number of questions that are pursued. This contrast of the two lessons illuminates how a lesson structure can prevent an "exploration" from being exploratory

Relationships in drama education : a pedagogical model

The pedagogical model proposed in this chapter has been developed as a result of the analysis of a wide range of data, gathered over a series of educational drama lessons with pupils aged 10-12 years in three Scottish Primary schools. The data comprised: interviews; observers' commentaries; pupils' evaluations; teachers' reflective journal entries and video recordings of the lessons. Close analysis of the data uncovered an overarching theme: that the nature of the relationships betweenthe participants in drama lessons, and between the participants and the learning contexts, afforded a climate in which learning (in its widest sense) can take place

Lessons from resurgent cities

In 2008, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston began a project to help reinvigorate the city of Springfield, Massachusetts. This cross-departmental initiative uses the Boston Fed's research and convening capabilities to complement the efforts of other organizations dedicated to improving economic and social conditions in New England's fourth-largest city. As noted in an earlier joint Federal Reserve-Brookings Institution study, Springfield has one of the highest rates of concentrated poverty in the country: one-third of the city's poor live in neighborhoods where poverty rates exceed 40 percent. Thus, a particular focus of the Boston Fed project has been to support revitalization strategies that would enable more city residents, particularly those located in poor areas, to prosper. While the Boston Fed project focuses on the city of Springfield, we hope to devise approaches that can be replicated in other struggling mid-sized cites around New England and the nation. To this end, this essay reports on lessons learned from our research on older industrial cities that have adapted relatively well to economic challenges, and are recognized as vital communities today. We believe these "resurgent cities" provide relevant, inspiring insights on development strategies for urban America.Cities and towns ; Cities and towns - Massachusetts ; Economic conditions ; Economic conditions - Massachusetts ; Economic policy ; Economic policy - Massachusetts

The Cloud's Cloudy Moment: A Systematic Survey of Public Cloud Service Outage

Inadequate service availability is the top concern when employing Cloud computing. It has been recognized that zero downtime is impossible for large-scale Internet services. By learning from the previous and others' mistakes, nevertheless, it is possible for Cloud vendors to minimize the risk of future downtime or at least keep the downtime short. To facilitate summarizing lessons for Cloud providers, we performed a systematic survey of public Cloud service outage events. This paper reports the result of this survey. In addition to a set of findings, our work generated a lessons framework by classifying the outage root causes. The framework can in turn be used to arrange outage lessons for reference by Cloud providers. By including potentially new root causes, this lessons framework will be smoothly expanded in our future work.Comment: 11 page

Coral Reef Conservation: A Reef of Your Own

This web-based lesson focuses on the physiological, ecological, and behavioral strategies that contribute to the success of reef-building corals. Students will learn to describe and explain the importance of asexual and sexual reproductive strategies to reef-building corals, why it is important that the corals have a nutritional strategy that includes both photosynthesis and carnivory, two behaviors that they use to compete for living space with other species, and how coral reefs can produce high levels of biological material when the waters surround­ing them contain relatively small amounts of the nutri­ents normally needed to support biological production. Links to the required online resources are provided. Educational levels: High school, Middle school, Undergraduate lower division