Life in optical

Universe Awareness at the International SKA Forum 2010 from carolune on Vimeo.

This event was organised to celebrate children and what Astronomy can do to broaden their minds.
The documentary was produced to describe and summarise the event. It was made by Rolf Muggen > www.rolfmuggen.nl
… This is what I do :)

I am at the ‘Communicating Astronomy with the Public’ conference in Cape Town, South Africa. Actually, the conference starts next week but this week we’ve had a great Astronomy Communication school with professional astronomers, journalists, communicators, educators, students etc. and it’s been great.

One of the topics that has come up, that we have just touched upon is: ‘What tough questions the public poses us?’

This propped up once with one of the participants mentioning that the most difficult questions they have ever been asked was by a young child, and we (as in scientists), have no idea about the answer.

So we went around the audience and collected a few questions. Here is what we got:

• Why are there so many stars? (Girl, 6 years old)
• How can you take a picture of the Milky Way if you’re in it?
• Where is heaven?
• Why are the stars so different from each other?
• What is the Universe? A good answer is to quote Carl Sagan: “The Universe is all there is, everything there ever was and everything there ever will be.” (Cosmos Chapter 1)

Good questions! Now I’m asking everyone to throw in their ‘toughest question’ into the conversation. When has a member of the public, a child, an adult, anyone – caught you off guard and asked you a question you couldn’t answer straight away?

And how would you answer the questions above?

Update: Some of my fave tweeps have already contributed great input:

• 11 year old “My mum says God made the universe and anything else is heresay [sic]‘. More of a statement I suppose.
• 14 year old asking me to explain why black holes decay, another one was 6 year old asking my why the Universe is full of gravity

Sharing a lunar eclipse: School children in Bermuda talking to friends in South Africa. © UNAWE.

I’ve been looking into this issue for a long time. At first – and being a total computer geek – I thought ICT was the ultimate panacea for education. I am little more balanced now, but no less geeky :)

What was the promise of ICT in education? New methods, a miracle. Somehow a two-dimensional window into a pale imitation of the real world would turn the brains of our children into something that would solve the world’s problems. With hindsight, it’s easy to be cynical. In fact, it’s not all wrong.

So what is it about ICT that is revolutionary, and what is it that will end up in the ‘seemed like a good idea at the time’ box?

Bad:

• Computers are often not used for anything more than doing old stuff with new technology.
• Searching is replacing thinking. Therefore a culture of plagiarism and mix-n-match is replacing original critical thought and creativity.
• The wealth of available information is an inhibitor of original thinking in two ways: (a) it fills our mindspace and (b) knowing that someone, somewhere has most likely done it before or had an idea before is off putting
• Computers are designed for one person at a time. It is very difficult to have a productive group activity on a computer as opposed to, e.g. a workshop or a lab.
• People are scared of computers and it shows.

Good:

• Computers and associated tools can facilitate the process of creation tremendously. Look at how common the phenomena of crowdsourcing or almost-still-teenage entrepreneurs have become.
• The internet brings people closer. I have seen children engage in conversations with other children in completely different countries, cultures, lives, and connect with them without being part of the privileged fringe that travels as children.
• Computers are everywhere and that’s not about to change. Therefore we might as well learn to use them as early as possible. When they become transparent, they become useful life tools.
• A computer is logical. There is nothing that cannot be explained in the “behaviour” of a computer. Making sure you get what you want out of a computer strengthens logic and reasoning. Unfortunately most people settle for less (I couldn’t get the word processor to align it properly so I put it on the next page), even I do sometimes. Ah well :)

In conclusion, what is bad about computers has to do with attitudes and what is good has to do with seizing their potential as über-multimedia-community-swissknifes.

So I’m all for computers in education, but not as something scary that one must learn, but as a facilitator of learning, a tool with a real-life purpose.

I have written a best-practice memo about this for teachers, that can be read or downloaded on the UNAWE Resources website.

The only way to make ‘development’* sustainable, is to make sure there are people to keep it up and keep developing.

This means making sure that there are people in developing countries who can initiate new developments from scratch, thereby ensuring that the society is flexible and creative in the face of the “only constant in life: change” and consequently who can also take over whatever developments that have been brought there by the outside world, maintain them, improve them, etc.

So what’s the best way to reach that? It’s to have a good education. I’m not talking Ivy league for the few. I mean a good educational grounding given to all.

What this entails is learning to think. Not learning things by heart. In my book learning ridiculous amounts by heart is equivalent to brain washing, unless you are a law student or a medical student and you really need to have an encyclopedia in your head to perform your job.

Learning to think.

What is it that teaches us to think like nothing else? Science.

Science is inquisitive, it is deductive, it is rational, it has a language that makes reasoning something that can be done by groups of people (maths). And if you think about it for a minute, that’s the sort of learning we need to survive.

Toddlers need to acquire the skills to be independent. How do they do that? They prod and push, and touch and pull, and taste, and ‘gaah’ at, in an attempt to see how things in their environment react, how they work. Based on this they learn how the world works:

If I let go of my spoon, the food falls on the ground and I go hungry. Every time. I’ve learnt that and I don’t have a word for it but in adult-speak, I’ve just learnt gravity.

That’s science for you. Science is the first thing we do as babies to learn to be independent. The more science we know, the more resourceful we are. That’s not because we have a better brain than others, it’s simply because we have learnt to use that brain. We have learnt to think.

William Kamkwamba is one of those people who logically put A + B together and generated electricity for his house, and now he has become a worldwide celebrity**.

So if applying the scientific method in life is so helpful, then that is what we should teach in our schools, right? We should have good science education.

Now there we have a problem. Science education, that’s scary! No primary school teacher became a primary school teacher because they liked science. Primary school teachers became primary school teachers because they liked children; anyone liking science is supposed to become a scientist or an engineer or something like that. So we need to change the image of science, especially science education!

Imagine this. You are in a classroom and you are supposed to teach something that you feel extremely insecure about, and that you don’t really like, and that you always found boring when you were a school pupil yourself. What do you do? You rely on the text book. You regurgitate what’s in the book and don’t allow anyone to stray from the path given by the book because you don’t know what’s there. And fair enough, I would do the same. But science cannot possibly be confined to a book! Moreover, that’s not going to teach anyone science, that’s the same as the brain-washing as above, and it’s only going to perpetuate the feeling you had when you were in that classroom and your teacher tried to make you learn what you think is science. Not cool.

By the way, I know of schools that are dedicated to sticking to exactly what’s written in a book and where straying from the narrow path set out by the book is reprimanded. Does it remind you of something?…

Let’s get back to why science is this cool thing that equips us for life. Science is inquisitive. It is reliable – you can reproduce things that work endless times. It is experimental, it is speculative and it evolves! If something doesn’t work, then you have to change our understanding of it. It teaches you flexibility.

And that’s where hands-on science education comes in. It’s not in a book. It’s not a demonstration that kids witness passively. It’s doing it. Kids doing what they’ve been doing since they were babies. The only difference is, they are given specific setups to do it with, which are chosen so that new subjects and new properties about the world around them can be discovered. It’s guided discovery, but it remains discovery. And it’s fun.

Back to the teacher. Something like this can’t be improvised. Teachers can’t just go ahead and set up experiments. And lab gear is expensive! Well, let’s break another misconception here. If science is what babies do in everyday life, it means that science is everywhere. Not only in expensive, specifically tailored equipment that can only be bought form commercial companies… And some people have dedicated their lives to showing precisely that, and to making such resources available to teachers and to kids.

One of those is Arvind Gupta an all his resources are available for free on his website. And remember – Free does not mean of low quality! In fact, these are great for children’s curiosity, unlike most formal education curricula.

So if that’s what science is, that’s what we need to put in schools. And yes, it is possible to ‘just do it’. Everything is out there. Now what we need is for society to value thinking and teachers – and for teachers to value science. There is a long way to go but it can be done. Anyone who trusts that thinking is the way forward, please help. Say it. Do it. Be an example. Value teachers for what they bring (children’s education!), value science for what it brings (thinking!), do it demonstratively and the rest will come…

The bottom line is – make sure kids keep exploring the world! Science is not confined, science is the real world, and science equips for thinking.
Science fertilizes the mind.

Teachers – give them guidance but don’t be afraid of not knowing! Let them go, and follow them yourself. You are not a preacher; you are a guide, an igniter and a safety net.

The goal is not to bring children up to where you know they can be and stop there. The goals is to take our imperfect tools to equip kids to discover new worlds of knowledge so that what they teach their own kids brings them even further.

(*): I put quotes around the word development because it is often seen as: Let us put a bridge between two towns separated by a river, then there will be trade between those towns and the economy will grow and [insert all the other expectations that 'development' carries with it]. I personally think this is an antiquated view of development, which is why I use quotes. What I mean with development is stuff for another blog post. Let’s just say for the sake of this post that I’m aiming for a skilled, flexible and creative society, able to tackle challenges and minimise the impact that world problems (disease, environment, economy, resources) has on it.

(**): What William Kamkwamba has done is brilliant, and should be lauded – but isn’t it terribly patronising of a society that just buys and consumes and generally doesn’t display much resourcefulness on average – to be so surprised that he is so clever … because he doesn’t have much? I would like to see those who have the opportunity of good education actually use it sometimes instead of remaining idle and then congratulating someone like William with misplaced superiority… But that’s a whole other debate.

That’s Presiden’t Obama’s message to the students. Go and be passionate about science. I like it!