Dudes, like I didn’t already know.

Seriously, I respect the John D. and Catherine T. MacArtur Foundation. It funds a whole slew of wonderful pursuits, like National Public Radio, a really nice oceanside nature reserve in Florida, and many others.

Spending three years to conclude what seems to be patently obvious may seem to be time and effort misplaced, but the conclusions of the report should give us educators something to think about.

Led by Mizuko Ito of the University of California-Irvine, a team of researchers interviewed 800 teens and young adults and spent more than 5,000 hours online to investigate youth media use.

They refute the oft-cited scourge of Internet predators out to abscond with our children’s virtue. In fact, the overwhelming majority of young people use electronic media to talk with one another, or with people they know.

Despite adult fears that all this time spent texting, chatting, and such is a waste of time, the researchers concluded that young people are actually developing extant and new social connections, learning on their own, and fostering their own independence. All good stuff.

Teens with specific interests soon find each other online, and build close-knit electronic communities. These communities sometimes include adults, who become equal participants rather than authority figures, since in cyber space, “No one knows you’re a dog.”

Some young people use the Internet for self-expression in ways that would have been impossible several years ago. Facebook, MySpace and similar social-networking sites allow users (and up-and-coming garage bands) to customize their pages, peppering them with images, music and video. Other sites, like LiveJournal, WordPress.com and other blogging sites, give users a chance to write entries covering the mundane to the intensely personal, free of editorial review.

YouTube is the latest hotspot. One 19-year-old woman from California, Laci Green, became somewhat of a YouTube celebrity recently after Christian complaints about her vehement defense of atheism resulted in YouTube suspending her account for a while.

Green eventually regained her YouTube access, perhaps because noted Scienceblogger PZ Myers publicized the entire fiasco on his popular blog, Pharyngula. To be on the safe side, Green also created a public MySpace page as a fallback.

Her incisive video (and written) commentaries about atheism, religion, self-image, civil rights, and other more personal issues each draw hundreds of comments from all ages from all over the world.

In their executive summary, the researchers list some implications for this surfeit of electronic expression, presenting some challenges for educators and parents.

• Adults should facilitate young people’s engagement with digital media. Rather than proscribing and banning online activities, adults should give youngsters every opportunity to delve into the Internet’s resources, to develop the social and technical skills they will need later in life. Self-directed learning activities provide the kind of openness not available in most educational settings. The whole meme about Internet predation is overblown, so schools and parents need to loosen up restrictions. In my experience, most preteens and teens are more savvy than adults realize. They can pick out the online creeps pretty quickly.
• In interest-driven participation, adults have an important role to play. Instead of being the authority figure, adults can instead guide or shape young people’s goals and learning curves. And in my experience, they can also learn from younger people, reversing the teacher-student role. That kind of role reversal rarely happens in the traditional classroom.
• To stay relevant in the 21st century, education institutions need to keep pace with the rapid changes introduced by digital media. Colleges and universities generally seem to do a better job in keeping up than primary and secondary institutions, in my opinion, but they all fall short of using the Internet to its full potential. The WWW removes all physical barriers to learning, so educators should enable students to exploit resources worldwide. Primary sources are usually better than secondary or tertiary sources, after all.

Educators are way behind the times. Even in settings where they have the computer resources, teachers (many of whom can barely send an email) largely ignore the computers and the Internet. Unfortunately, it may take another generation of teachers — the current group of college students — before schools really begin to exploit the Internet to its fullest potential. Most present teachers are, alas, too stuck in their ways.

The MacArthur Foundation should now fund a study of teacher avoidance of technology. I suspect the findings would be embarrassing.

So far, 12 local boards (including Polk, Taylor and Holmes Counties) have passed resolutions that state education authorities revise the standards to include evolution as only one explanation of how life began and developed on Earth. Taylor County’s board actually resolved, “the district is opposed to teaching evolution as a fact.”

All of these challenges are doomed to fail, given the clear results from the Kitzmiller v. Dover court case, which basically sank the Intelligent Design ship in the Dover, Penn., schools. After weeks of expert testimony, the judge hearing the case definitively found that ID was a religion and not science, and thus it had no place in the Dover schools’ science classes.

Clearly, none of the Florida school board members voting for these anti-evolution standards have any clue about the significance of Kitzmiller v. Dover, much less what the words “scientific theory” mean. Science standards by definition cannot include creationism or ID instruction, since neither is scientific by any stretch of the imagination. Who knows what the school boards there expect to happen — the entire state challenging legal precedent and common sense?

Meanwhile, the Answers in Genesis folks, the people who brought the Creation Museum to the Commonwealth of Kentucky, have started a new on-line, peer-reviewed journal of creation “science,” Answers Research Journal. Apparently, they are trying to fool the public into thinking creationism is scientific by putting a coat of academic shellac on it.

Can creationists get any dumber?

Juvenile behavior all around.

McComb, who is now a freshman at a Christian school, Biola University in California, became the darling of conservative Christians looking for more examples of the “war on Christianity” and the pernicious influence of the American Civil Liberties Union. The conservative legal group, the Rutherford Institute, agreed to take her case to the U.S. District Court in Nevada, alleging her free speech rights were violated.

The text of the suit is here — Adobe Reader required.

The case has been stalled in the courts since. The defendants in McComb’s suit filed two motions to dismiss, which the district court judge denied. They have since appealed to the Ninth District Court of Appeals in California, and filed opening briefs earlier this month. Rutherford Institute attorney Doug McKusick says McComb’s lawyers will file their replies in January.

The case raises several issues. Was McComb badgered into deleting the overtly Christian references from her valedictory? Were school officials acting legally when they first told her to delete the references, and then pulled the plug on her speech? Was McComb herself at all culpable, agreeing to tone down the speech then proceeding with the original text? Given that schools cannot favor one religion over any other constitutionally, was McComb a representative of the school and bound by those restrictions, or was she merely speaking her own mind?

Time will tell whether the courts will answer those questions. Appeals take months to proceed, and if the defendants lose their appeal, the case will end up back in District Court to drag on some more. McComb may be a senior before it’s all settled.

Last spring the media were aflurry with the shocking revelation that a well-liked science teacher in western Kentucky had, for a brief time in her younger days, performed in porno movies. Tericka Dye, a teacher at Reidland High School in McCracken County, Ky., was dismissed, despite parental support and an excellent reputation as teacher and volleyball coach.

She appealed the decision administratively, but was not reinstated. She then filed a lawsuit against the McCracken County schools, which a local judge dismissed, then appealed that decision to the Kentucky Court of Appeals.

In February Dye withdrew the appeal, ending the legal battle, preferring to set the whole episode behind her. She has found work as a teacher elsewhere, according to the Paducah Sun. Her lawyer advised the “don’t ask, don’t tell” strategy when dealing with new employers; don’t volunteer her past life if they don’t ask. She may also be working under a different name, since googling “Tericka Dye” would spill the beans.

Dye admitted to performing as Rikki Andersin in a handful of porno movies 13 years ago when she was young and foolish. As she told it, she was psychologically a mess and dead broke, and was desperate for money. She left the porn industry quickly, enlisted in the Army, and after her discharge, pursued a career in science teaching.

No one at Reidland High was the wiser, until a video store worker noticed a remarkable resemblance between the bespectacled Dye and the photo of Rikki on a video. After students and parents apparently watched the movies, Dye’s cover was blown (if you forgive the pun). Despite parental support and an excellent reputation as a teacher and volleyball coach, school officials refused to renew her contract for the following year. Her later appearance on the Dr. Phil TV show did nothing to further her cause.

Dye had hoped that folks in the Bible Belt would be more forgiving and recognize she had turned her life around, but she was wrong. Apparently, teachers if they have sex at all are not supposed to be too public about it. Having an ex-porn actress teaching high students was too much for rural Kentucky.

[In a related story, Dye's former principal lost his job, too. Glen Ringstaff was reassigned to a district office job for failing to meet expectations. It seems Dye was only part of his problems.]

Dye never had sex with a student, never encouraged them to enter the adult entertainment industry, and never told her students to watch her videos. She broke no laws (at least in California — Kentucky still has sodomy laws). She was not proud at all of her porn appearances, so clearly did not want to advertise them. She gave up the porno industry. She would rather be a teacher.

Some people would rather Dye never teach high school students again, like she was some kind of soiled goods. I disagree. She isn’t a porn actor now, and even then I’m not sure it would automatically disqualify her as a teacher. [There would be some ethical dilemmas, to be sure.] Instead she’s a great example of how someone can hit bottom and turn his or her life around.

So, I’m glad Dye has found work elsewhere. Hopefully her past will not follow her and she can once again be a well-respected science teacher.

Five of our 13 submissions made it to the semifinals, and one proceeded to the final round of judging. On that basis, we were invited to join an hour-long video conference with the Cassini scientists on Dec. 5. In the end, none of our submissions were winners, that honor going to two high school students in Palo Alto, California, and Wilmington, Delaware, but the success we did have is a measure of the hard work and talent of the students involved.

The Cassini-Huygens probe has been exploring Saturn and its moons since 2004. Huygens successfully landed on the moon Titan, while Cassini careens through the Saturnian system. The Cassini team has to decide which targets to image well in advance of the probe’s arrival, since there is a limited window of opportunity to take the pictures. There is no turning around to take a second look!

For the contest, the Cassini scientists narrowed the possible targets to four. Students had to pick one and write an essay of no more than 500 words explaining why the team should use the 91 minutes of available imaging time to obtain the most useful scientific results.

Target 1 included the moon Mimas emerging from the limb of Saturn and a section of the rings.

Target 2 was a wide-angle view of half of the planet, its ring system and an assortment of its 60 moons.

Target 3 showed the moon Prometheus near the edge of the planet and a section of the rings.

Target 4 focused exclusively on the moon Tethys.

The “winning” target was number 2, although Cassini was also able to image Mimas and Tethys during the imaging run.

This essay was one of the national finalists. It was written by a team of four ninth graders, whose names I have removed for their pirvacy.

Target 1
The Cassini spacecraft will be flying past Saturn on Nov. 30, 2007, approximately 1,468,000 kilometers away from Saturn’s cloud tops. We have chosen one of four targets that the space camera can aim its lens at to examine and analyze. We decided target one would be the most valuable and informative for several reasons.

Target one is an image of Mimas, coming out from behind Saturn. Because Mimas is shown next to Saturn and its rings, we can estimate how Mimas may interact with its rings while it is orbiting. When we saw the crater, Herschel, we figured that if Mimas had collided with a rock in one of Saturn’s rings during its orbit, it may have created the large crater. On the probe, there are radar imagers that could examine the terrain of Mimas. The infrared, ultraviolet, and visual cameras could help determine the composition of Mimas and Saturn’s ring particles. By looking at the terrain on Mimas, we may be able to discover how the rock that caused the crater may have hit Mimas. We could determine what kind of ice Mimas is made of and what features its terrain may have that may have made Mimas more vulnerable to having large craters. Because Mimas is mostly made of ice, when it comes in contact with objects with great impact such as rocks, the impact energy may make Mimas heat up and melt the ice creating a crater. From this target, we may also be able to determine why the South Pole region has fewer craters greater than 20 km, but other areas have craters greater than 40 km, even though Mimas does not rotate while it is orbiting. We calculated that Mimas would be roughly 5,000 km in ring E, which means at some point, Mimas will collide with the rocks in ring E. Target one also shows a portion of Saturn’s rings, Mimas, and a portion of Saturn, which allows us to get a close look at three different objects all at once, so there is more to see and analyze in the photograph. The picture is also more visually appealing. The objects in the picture are well balanced out and vary in many shapes. This target would be a successful picture in items such as calendars and books, to grab the onlooker’s eye, and draw their attention to the beauty of Saturn, Saturn’s rings, and Mimas, and perhaps interest them into researching more on the subject.

We figured that from this photograph you can learn a lot more about Mimas’s interaction with Saturn and Saturn’s rings. While there was another image that had many moons, we did not choose it as our target because we figured that the information we could acquire in this target would not be as detailed as the information in target one. This photo will help determine the many things we talked about in this essay and much more about Mimas and how it interacts with Saturn and the rings around it.

We were using iChat on an eMac, with a webcam I brought from home. The video quality was pretty bad, largely because of the equipment on our end. I suspect NASA/JPL has somewhat more sophisticated video equipment. Still, you could tell there were people on the screen, despite the pixellation and slow response time.

Audio was a different issue. The audio through the network was garbled, like those early webcasts using RealPlayer. I gave up on the iChat video finally, and just connected my desk phone to their teleconference line and put it on speakerphone. Then at least we could understand what they were saying.

So, we had blocky video from iChat and somewhat clear audio from the telephone. Not ideal, but it worked.

The format was straightforward. We introduced ourselves (not individually, by schools) and the four Cassini scientists introduced themselves. Then they opened the floor to questions from the students. Each school took a turn, until the hour was up.

From what I could gather, at least two of the conferees entered the contest individually. The rest of us participated as science classes. The individual students had fairly sophisticated questions about the moons of Saturn and the planet itself; the classrooms had less technical questions. One can assume the individual students were more interested in space exploration than the typical student, and had spent more time delving into the Cassini mission.

One of our students asked the scientists which planet was their favorite. The answer was Jupiter, which was greeted with whoops and hollers. Who knew?

Another student wanted to know if you could see all of Saturn’s moons from the planet itself. That gave the Cassini guys pause to reflect, since no one had ever asked the question before. It turns out some moons are really small and hidden in the rings, so finding them would be hard.

What’s the temperature of Saturn? another asked. Not an easy answer to give, since the cloud tops are at 80 K and the core is at 1,000,000 K. There are places in the atmosphere of the gas giant that are at room temperature (293 K), but of course there’s no breathable air. It would not be a fun field trip.

I would have liked to asked about the complex hydrocarbons detected in Titan’s atmosphere, since I’m writing a post about it. But we ran out of time.

Many of my students listened intently, despite the poor audio and video quality. They included students who I did not expect to be so interested. A few seemed incapable of being absolutely quiet, but I suppose in a small room packed with 34 classmates, it would be hard to refrain from chatting. Still, I was not entirely pleased, and I told them so after the conference ended. Quiet means quiet. What’s hard to understand about that?

Whether the outcome of the conference is as successful as I had hoped remains to be seen. It was hard to hear the conferees sometimes, until I made the phone call, so you had to concentrate to understand the questions and responses. I am hoping the NASA folks recorded the session somehow so I can share it with my students. At the very least, the Cassini people looked and acted like regular folks, and not like the stereotypic scientist portrayed in the media. Two were women, which I hope will encourage my girls to consider science as a career.

All in all, it was fun, but I’m glad it’s over. Herding cats is hard work.

[The essay winners were announced in a press release while I wrote this post. None of our entries were winners, but I hope to find out which (if any) made it to the finals.]

The Cassini imaging team at the Jet Propulsion Lab sponsors a contest each year, which challenges students to write short essays relevant to the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan. This year, the challenge was to argue why the team should choose one of four possible targets for a 91-minute imaging sequence. The essays could be no longer than 500 words, and students could work in teams of not more than four members.

Among the 188 essays accepted for judging were our 13 submissions. On Friday, I received two identical emails telling me that one of our essays had made to the final judging round, and inviting our students to an hour-long teleconference/video conference with the Cassini scientists this week.

I was excited enough to photocopy the message and hand it to my 34 students as they took a scheduled chapter test. Some admitted to being excited; others were outwardly more blasé, but apparently intrigued at least.

Having never organized a video conference before, I had to take a crash course by surfing the Internet. After frantically reading all kinds of information, asking an alumni parent for some corporate-America help and downloading a copy of CuSeeMe, I emailed the Cassini team for advice.

Turns out we can do the whole thing with iChat. Thank you, Apple Computers!

So, this afternoon, I am bringing down one of the eMAcs from the 4th-floor digital photo/video lab, hooking up a USB webcam and assembling the kids in my classroom for our conference with real scientists, some of whom are not that much older than my high school students. [We may actually instead use a student's Mac laptop, since it has a built-in iSight camera and video-out port. I'd like to project the conference on the wall instead of forcing the kids to squint at the eMAC's 15-inch screen.]

I have no clear idea what to expect from the conference, since there is no agenda apparently. Other schools will be participating at the same time by telephone, so we will only be part of a larger contingent of students, but the virtual contact with real people in space science will still be educational, and I hope influential on the students’ mental images of what scientists are like.

Sometime today, we are supposed to hear who made to the finals, and on Friday, the team will announce the two overall winners of the contest. I have no idea what the prize, if any, is. But I for one don’t really care. The important part of the whole project is that the kids can see an immediate reward for their hard work, and that others outside our littel insular community can see how top-notch our students are.

By the way, did I mention most of the essays were written by ninth-grade physics students? Take that, Manual High School nerds!