Project Bugscope!

I have found with any learning activity, I am more drawn in to it and more likely to follow it through, if it holds an interest for me...so when reading through (the very well written) 'Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0' by John Seely Brown and Richard P. Adler, whilst wondering which innovation to pursue, I saw 'Project bugscope'. As a child and to a certain extent now, insects and animals in general have held a fascination for me, so this project instantly caught my eye.

From the age of nine to when I was eighteen I lived in Brunei, and spent many many hours with my brother off in the jungle finding insects and animals. I remember my parents buying me a small microscope, and spending hours collecting 'samples' to look at. So the idea of the bugscope project is one I can see that I would have loved as a child.

Project bugscope began in 1999 and allowed KS12 students to send small creatures to the University of Illinois, and then via their computers control the electron microscope and have a look at the samples they had sent in. In terms of engagement and interest, and using technology, this seems a perfect idea and method for getting people interested, and involved in learning. In a write up of this project in 2011 by Scott Robinson et al they stated that 'During tours of the laboratory, we often describe Bugscope as “using insects and electron microscopy as a Trojan Horse to get kids interested in the possibility of science as a viable career choice.”' Link . I think this highlights the way technology can be used to great effect in getting people interested in ideas, techniques and in this area science, that they would normally have no, or limited access to.

This project ran several hundred sessions and while it allowed only one student at a time to 'drive' the microscope, must have allowed thousands of children to experience this technology that they possibly would have never had a chance to see otherwise.

Sadly in August 2015 this project ended, with the intention of using a new electron microscope when it went live again in 2016, however, as far as the website (and I can find) this project has not re-awoken.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Open education and me

Open education is a philosophy built around the idea of making educational resources freely and openly available to all. This requires everyone to be able to access, share, create and challenge high quality educational resources. Technology has been a critical enabler in doing this - especially in terms of making knowledge shareable and accessible. If knowledge is a key part of this initiative then the Internet is by a a large margin the single largest resource of information that has every existed on earth, a large proportion of the information held within the Internet is open and accessible, therefore in many ways the Internet is the largest source for open education that has ever existed. However, in many definitions open education is seen as knowledge or resources that reside in an explicitly educational context - for example the OU question that has prompted this post asks us to describe ' your experience with open education. Is it just with the OU, or have you studied a MOOC
Read more

Second post and a poem

So my initial feelings about blogging were mainly based around "what do I have to add" and "what do I have to say". Sarah helpfully suggested; " Why don't you write a post about the feeling of "loosing the conversation", or "running late" in the tutor group forum? You mentioned in an earlier post, that this happened to you last week. I'd be interested how you experienced this."   So I have taken her advice/suggestion, and while this course doesn't really have room for another poet, I thought I would respond to her in her preferred medium. Forgive me my poetic sins. Last week I had a holiday, To Wales I did go. I took my IPad with me, They have Wi-Fi there you know. Some reading I had planned to do, Catching up on Seely-Brown. Or boffing up on Anna Sfard, While watching the sun go down. Now Cymru is a lovely place, The hills are green and lush. The speed of life is slower, There is no need
Read more

OER...defining, using and (dis)engagement

I want to explore three potential issues with OER from the reading I have done on it, these issues are not necessarily critical barriers to the success of OER, but could be contributory factors to the lack of a revolution that its initial proponents foresaw. Firstly and possibly most importantly it seems that there is still no clear definition or understanding of what OER actually is comprised of. In terms of individual words the concept is easy enough - 'Open Educational Resources', the content being created needs to be accessible, device agnostic, reusable and transferable. However, when one digs deeper to define what this content would look like it becomes more complex - "No one seems to know what a learning object is in the first place. One of the absurd definitions I heard was, 'as small as a drop, as wide as the ocean.' In other words, if everything is a learning object, then nothing is a learning object" (Merrill, as cited in Welsch, 2002). This make
Read more