1 - INTRODUCTION - CSUN



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|(1) Evaluating Internet Resources: Most of what is posted on the Internet has never been subjected to the rigors of peer review |

|common with many traditional publications. Students must learn to evaluate the reliability of information of the websites they |

|visit. |

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|Select two websites that provide information about a topic related to your curriculum. Cite the URLs and names of both sites and |

|explain which is more reliable using evaluation criteria. |

For my A.P. Environmental Science class, there is much confusion and debate over global warming and the causes of it. I evaluated the following two websites for authority, accuracy, fairness, and recency according to the evaluation criteria 14 criteria on our class website:

• IPCC Fourth Assessment Summary Report for Policy Makers, ()

• Wall Street Journal Article “My Nobel Moment” By John R. Christy, November 1, 2007 ()

Authority

1. What institution, agency, organization, company, or individual is responsible for the page? The IPCC majority versus one particular member of the IPCC, Dr. John Christy, who is a respected, published peer-reviewed author.

2. Is this a reputable publisher? Yes, the conclusions of the IPCC are peer-reviewed, and yes, the Wall Street Journal is reviewed by editors (and many of the papers submitted by Dr. Christy are peer-reviewed.)

3. What is the purpose, goals, or nature of the sponsoring organization? IPCC is charged with looking at the climate. Its existence and purpose depend on climate changing. The Wall Street Journal is responsible for disseminating credible viewpoints for American business professionals.

4. How can you verify the legitimacy of the page's sponsor or author? Easy! The IPCC is composed of scientists, many of whose work and conclusions I know and respect. Contrary to Senator James Inhofe’s claims, climate science is not some “hoax” perpetuated on the American people, but rather has a real, physical basis, backed up by hundreds of independent studies, also conducted by honest, hard-working scientists some of whom I know personally and trust implicitly. On the other hand, I also, read and respect the Wall Street Journal, although I do not personally know the editorial staff or Dr. Christy.

5. Is there a statement giving the organization's name as the copyright holder? Yes. It is not on the particular URLs I cite, but it is within the larger websites of each.

6. Has this been subject to peer review? Yes. But here is a major difference. The conclusions of the IPCC, and the papers on which their conclusions are based, have been reviewed by tens of thousands of independent scientists. The opinion of Dr. Christy is based on far fewer peer reviews. However, science is not a popularity contest. One scientist can be right while all the others are wrong (e.g., Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity in 1915.)

Accuracy

7. Are the sources for factual information clearly listed so they can be verified elsewhere? Yes. Crystal clear to the highest standards on both sides. I like sources like that and often don’t waste my time on other “gossipy” sites.

8. Is the information free of grammatical, spelling, and typographical errors? Yes.

Fairness

9. What is the motivation for publishing the Website? Promulgation of facts and opinions for both websites. Scientists have been accused of pandering to global warming for funding, but I didn’t see that at Desert Research Institute in the 1990s and early 2000s. In fact, some scientists I knew were disappointed that continued global warming research was taking dollars away from the basic research needed to implement solutions to global warming. Unfortunately, some loosely related agents of the oil industry has been able to paint scientists, once trusted implicitly by Americans, as “funding hounds” who would deliberately put a “hoax” over on the American people. This is simply not true.

10. Is there a bias to the information? I actually don’t see it from these two opposing sites. Science can usually come to a clear consensus in a few decades; seldom does it take a century. (Darwin as an example on the long side, although scientific consensus that natural selection and evolution are, in principle, correct has now been reached.) If you dig a little deeper though, however, you see that Dr. Christy admits that the world has indeed warmed by the IPCC claimed (and documented) amount of over 1o F, and that he wants to be on the front-lines of documenting such observed warming (NPR interview, 2007). On the other hand, the IPCC isn’t as humble as I would like in emphatically stating that “we still don’t understand natural climatic variability. The Milankovitch cycle only goes so far, and why was the world much warmer 3 million years ago going back to 100 million years ago during the Jurassic and Crustaceous periods? What caused the switch to the ice age cycle? Nobody really knows . . . still! It’s only the correlation between CO2 and temperature and the unprecedented high global CO2 levels (never higher than 280 ppm in the last 200000 years, despite the false claims of many biased websites), that scares scientists, plus the fact that any freshman chemistry student can watch CO2 absorb long infrared. It’s like lung cancer and smoking in the 1950s. Doctors were frightened of the correlation between amount of smoking and occurrence of lung cancer, but it was just a correlation. There was no definite mechanism of causality. Anthropogenic global warming is like that today. When do you take out an insurance policy? When do you stop smoking, or re-invest in a such “pleasurable” activity? We’re about there now, and decades (centuries?) will have to pass before we’ll have the statistical basis to “prove” convince at a 95%+ confidence level) that global warming is anthropogenic.

11. Is there a profit motive for a product related to this website? Indirectly, yes, for both websites. The IPCC needs funding to exist, and most bureaucracies do not voluntarily disband. It’s product is the bi-annual Climate Report. The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, caters to the American business person, and business

12. Who is the intended audience? Policy makers (politicians, bureaucrats, and, hopefully, CEOs) are the intended audience for the IPCC and for the Wall Street Journal.

Recency

13. When was this article written? Both were written in 2007, although the IPCC report wasn’t released until April 2008.

14. When was it last updated? The websites was both updated in 2008, April for IPCC, and virtually daily for the WSJ, although the reference to the Christy piece was November 7, 2007 when the article first appeared.

|(2) Research with Electronic References: Since we live in the Information Age, it is particularly important that teachers are able |

|to access and evaluate information to prepare accurate, up-to-date lessons, and to teach their students the principles of |

|electronic research. In this activity you will examine a variety of electronic references in your quest to acquire information for |

|lessons or other professional activities. |

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|Identify two topics to research using electronic references (broadcast news, almanacs, quotations, etc.). Research the first topic |

|using at least one resource from each of five categories of electronic resources. Repeat the process with the second topic, using |

|references from five additional categories. Include the URL, name of the resource, key information acquired, and a screen capture |

|from each resource. (See examples of research ideas). |

|Identify the special features (e.g. hypertext linking of terms, Boolean search capabilities, archival search, knowledge tree, |

|downloadable movies, online audio transcripts, animations, translations, reference lists, printer-friendly output, multimedia |

|links, PDA or bookreader download, visible directory structure, etc.) of each of the reference tools you have used. |

|List criteria for determining the authenticity of information on a website. |

|Compare and contrast electronic references with their traditional paper counterparts. Discuss at least ten tasks or features that |

|are possible with electronic resources that are not possible with traditional paper resources. |

|Develop a lesson plan that incorporates electronic references. Your lesson plan should require students to use two or more |

|electronic references to address a specific curricular objective. |

|(3) Educational Research: Teachers should be familiar with research related to the teaching of their discipline. The Educational |

|Research Database (ERIC) provides access to abstracts from numerous educational publications, and is the best place to start when |

|conducting educational research. |

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|Find two or more abstracts of recent, relevant articles related to the use of technology in the teaching of your subject. Summarize|

|implications for the teaching of your subject. Cite the articles using APA format, and include the text of the abstracts. |

R. Hake, "Interactive-engagement vs. traditional methods: A six-thousand-student survey of mechanics test data for introductory physics courses," Am. J. Phys. 66, 64-74 (1998).

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Easterling, W. and R. Dalling, “Physics Teaching Videos and Collections of Links,” Phys. Teach. 46, 319 (2008)

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|(4) Online Academic Journals: A growing number of academic journals are available online, some of which are free, and others of |

|which require a subscription. |

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|Find an electronic journal related to your subject and include a screen capture of a relevant article. Briefly summarize the |

|article. |

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|Administrators should be familiar with the legal code as it pertains to education. Research a legal case relevant to education in |

|secondary schools and include a screen capture from this case. Briefly summarize the case. *PTP-tip The PTP requires that |

|"Candidates for a Teaching Credential understand and honor legal and professional obligations to protect the privacy, health, and |

|safety of students, families, and other school professionals. They are aware of and act in accordance with ethical considerations |

|and they model ethical behaviors for students. Candidates understand and honor all laws relating to professional misconduct and |

|moral fitness." You may wish to cite relevant laws or cases as an aspect of an artifact for TPE 12. |

In keeping with the scientific theme of climate change for this assignment so far, I chose the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate and the prestigious publication Science. One article is a 1997 AMS publication from Dr John Christy and the other is a 2000 Science article that I didn’t read until 2003) that convinced me the correlation argument between CO2 and global temperatures had substance, despite is correlative rather than causal nature.

The AMS article describes Christy’s work with the microwave recoverable temperatures from satellite data. He gives the methodology of the composite measurement from the different satellites and admits that the observed decadal warming is 0.03 K higher than previously reported.

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The Crowley article from 2000 shows a 95% confidence level between CO2 forcing (from a tested and verified radiation model) and observed warming. Of course, correlation does not prove causality, and all modeling has been flagged as a weak. But specific radiation models differ significantly from large-scale global circulation models.

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|(5) Locating multimedia teaching resources: At many libraries, teachers can obtain cards which give them special privileges as |

|educators, including the ability to check our more resources and keep them longer. Teachers can check out books, CDs, DVDs and and |

|videos. |

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|Find a video related to the teaching of your course in the Los Angeles Public Library System (or other public library system), CSUN|

|main library, or the CSUN Teacher Curriculum Center. Describe the video resource and its call number, and if possible, find a |

|teacher study guide for the video by performing an Internet search. |

I obtained the interactive DVD “The Standard Deviants: Physics” from the Sherman Oaks branch of the Los Angeles public library. It was in the video section and has call number “DVD 530 P5785”. I searched for a teacher guide.

My internet search could not turn up a teacher guide for the video. After watching the video, it basically is its own guide. That is, it is a humorous topic summary really for the college level. But several of the vignettes can be used in high school classes AFTER the teacher has covered the material. It is a good summary, and may make the content accessible to some students who may not have fully grasped it the first time around.

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