Yes, it’s that time of year again when I beseech you, dear readers, to donate to the DonorsChoose Science Bloggers For Students online charity challenge that helps high-poverty science and mathematics classrooms in need. There is a lot less fanfare and competition between us science bloggers this year, but classrooms are more underfunded than ever. The challenge runs from October 2nd to 22nd this year.

Last year, this blog raised around $500 with a dollar-for-dollar match by HP. At the conclusion of the last challenge, I said, “A simple $1.50 per child living in poverty can make the difference towards a better and slightly more equipped science education.” This is still true. Also read some of the thank-you letters from teachers whose classrooms benefited from your donations through this very page last year. One from a teacher in Illinois puts it all in perspective:

… In addition to increasing the modes of instruction in my classroom, the projector has been an invaluable resource due to the limited budget and high poverty experienced at my school. Several students at my school cannot afford necessary eyeglasses and struggle seeing writing on whiteboards when sitting in the front row. With the new projector, I can zoom in on text to allow all students to read important information. Additionally, my school is struggling to afford paper and toner for the copy machine. We have gone weeks at a time without being able to make copies. The projector allows me to display the required instructions, problems, graphs, and tables so the students can learn and practice new skills.

Please peruse the projects on my 2011 GIVING PAGE and please, please, PLEASE consider giving even $5 to a project of your choice. Let’s support American science education even if (and especially because) the government and private sector couldn’t care less!

“To understand is to invent.” – Jean Piaget

The latest Accretionary Wedge topic is Back To School. Anne Jefferson, professor of hydrogeology and one of the blogging pair at Highly Allochthonous, has a set of questions for students, professors, those outside academia and science fans. The following are specific questions addressed in this post:

If you are a current or future student … What sort of experiences do you want to get out of school and how do you think school can or should help you prepare for a career?

If you are a professor … What do you wish your students would ask? What do you think they should know, regardless of whether it is formally taught and assessed?

If you are outside academia … What needs do you see for the rising generation of geoscientists? What skills and concepts are essential? Are there skillsets that we aren’t doing a good job of imparting on students? If you could go to a group of undergraduate geosciences majors and give them advice, what would you tell them? What would you tell their professors?

If you are a geology enthusiast but not professional … What do you wish you could get in additional formal and informal education?

For anyone … If you could go back to any point in your education and do it over, what would you do differently? Why?

At various points in my life, I have been all of the above – student, teacher, worker and geology/science fanatic – and like to think I still am. Whether you are a researcher or an applied scientist, you can never stop learning and that includes studying various things about your science, teaching it in different ways, working on it and loving the hell out of it. All of this comes from and gives back to one simple but crucial tool – not just learning but learning how to learn.

What does this mean? In my opinion, the meaning of a university has been corrupted to the point where the majority of students learn to a certain extent the works of others who did the research and, having achieved a very expensive pass from the gatekeepers, go off into the world to make it. This is unacceptable and look at where it’s landed us on education rankings and economically. I believe that every single university student should leave college not just with information but with the abilities to, over the course of their lifetimes, teach themselves a million times as much information in the absence of a teacher and to find a teacher again should the need arise. Learning how to learn is getting and growing the toolset with which to take any concept, old or new, apart and to put it back together the same or as something completely new and/or different. In other words, knowing scientific results is important, but how to arrive at those and new states of knowledge is most critical.

Geoscientists will nod and smile at this quote, “The person who feels smug in an orderly world has never looked down a volcano.” The world, life, what we know about it, everything we take as givens change and will change (look at the economy and what we have been taught to value, for instance). Anyone can regurgitate, few can rebuild or build anew. Be the latter.

How does one learn how to learn? These are a few tips that still work for me.

1) Find a good mentor. In most universities, this is a professor or research scientist looking for a lab or research assistant. Talk to them, tail them, observe them in the field, lab and classroom, have them give you reading assignments, discuss this literature with them and ask them how they do their work. How do they question the existing knowledge to build upon it? What steps do they take to test their new, groundbreaking ideas? You will find that these mentors love the attention, are positively heartened to share their passion with you and will lead you to other mentors when it is time for you to move on. And when I say “move on,” I mean it. Just because your mentor was an invertebrate paleontologist doesn’t mean poking at crinoids is what you have to do for the rest of your life. This brings me to the next tip.

2) Study and work at different things. This goes for students as well as those years into academia and industry. Not only does it keep you from a career rut / dead end but trains your brain to address different kinds of problems with different modes of thought or any given problem using a different approach. My graduate studies included structural geology, high-performance computing, 3D visualization and borehole geophysics. In my career so far, I have worked at seismic data interpretation, operating a virtual reality center, hydrocarbon reservoir characterization, blast analysis, 3D web services and, lately, seismic inversion. All through school, we’re taught “Find one thing and get really good at it.” I’ve also been asked in the past if I hadn’t yet found my groove. Well, consider today’s unemployment rate and our inability to get people back into the workforce, and then ask where most of those people are who found one thing and got really good at it. And, in my industry today, niches are starting to kill careers. Everything I have studied and worked at, including history and selling diodes at Radio Shack, has come through for me.

This doesn’t mean you should not be good at something. In fact, my response to Agile’s Wherefore art thou, Expert? was “I think the answer is to be excellent at one or two things, good at many and generally scientifically adept, not mediocre, at lots.” This will open doors for you and help you create them where they do not yet exist.

3) Just pick it up and learn it if you have to. I know this is easier said than done, but I force myself to do this on an almost daily basis, because it makes me think about how. Give yourself assignments that make you question your sanity (like me with seismic velocity modeling soon *shiver*). Even outside science: automotive engines are scarier to me than emergency rooms, snakes and cemeteries are to most others. Yet, if I have to, I will pick up that Chilton auto repair manual and try to fix my car.

Ultimately, learning how to learn is about picking up the thing, breaking it a couple of times, asking those more knowledgeable than you to give you ideas, working at it and figuring it out. It’s also about teachers, mentors and society in general giving you the room in which to do that, and I really wish this is what universities will return to.

Innovation is not just creating new concepts, but also expanding your brain just a little everyday to use existing and new ideas to your and others’ advantage. To understand is to make progress and life just a little less scary. Learn how to learn.

CBS News | Oil refineries seek huge tax refunds

Some of the nation’s largest oil refineries are seeking huge tax refunds that could force school districts and local governments across Texas to give back tens of millions of dollars they were counting on to pay teachers and provide other services. The refineries want the tax breaks in exchange for buying pollution-controlling equipment. But the cost to public schools would be dear, coming only months after lawmakers slashed education spending by more than $4 billion.

… Refinery towns would be hurt the most. “The dollars that are lost by these school districts directly affect the children of the employees that help make these companies what they are,” said David Hodgins, consultant and attorney for the Texas Association of School Administrators.

This is only one of the reasons folks like Melinda Gates and Stephen Colbert have to team up to raise money for teachers across America. Because the government-“free market” complex sure isn’t going to feel obligated to. Who wants educated workers?

For every mugshot photograph uploaded to the Stephen & Melinda Gates Foundation website, the foundation will donate $5 up to $100,000 to DonorsChoose.org. You will recall from a recent donation drive on this blog that DonorsChoose is the website that helps teachers and classrooms in hard-hit communities, not schools, buy the most basic things like textbooks, school supplies and teaching kits. It’s small, it’s silly, it’s $5 more than the government is willing to kick in and, most critically, it’s not your money. So what are you waiting for?

Besides, if you don’t put your face up there (and if you thought I look bizarre), you’re also stuck with D.

Today’s xkcd:

I’ve lost grey matter beating my head on the walls of this blog and elsewhere on the internet that the advent of eBooks does not signal or signify the death of paper books, nor should it. Anyone who wants paper books to go away is in the business of reading for the sake of technology and not access. With that in mind, it is sad that there are many in this nation, especially librarians, who consider a potential decline in the number of paper books or “the death of print” as a widening of the digital divide. They are right and wrong.

Let’s look at how they are wrong first: Think beyond America (few do) and the number of people across the world we cannot ship physical books to or books that are not printed in their language. With cheap cellphones and pricing plans everywhere in the world except this country, eBooks are made more accessible anywhere you can get a cellphone signal. Now that is access. The digital divide closes. Now, look back at America. We are a nation that takes expensive technology as a given and works for change from that premise. I think we need to take a step back and look at how we consume and address (read: fight) our own patterns of consumption before we cry about how others cannot consume the same way. For instance, I will never buy a Kindle (single function) and truly question the purchase of eBooks for an iPad or similar device. More about this in a little bit.

How they are so, so right: Access to paper and electronic books in the US is a hot, confusing, expensive mess. Most libraries are woefully underfunded and understocked and the stacks of most university libraries are off-limits to the uninitiated, in many cases taxpayers who paid for them in the first place. And why in the name of everything right and sweet are new paperbacks almost $10 a piece, forget larger paperbacks for $14.99 and hardbacks upwards of $40? So, if getting to paper books is this hard, think how much more of a barrier there is is for the average American to get to electronic books. American internet and cellphone plans are the epitome of price-gouging and, in this economy, the first things to be cancelled when drawing up a budget. Following that, unless you plan to read only free, public-domain eBooks for the rest of your life, the pricing structure for for-sale eBooks is completely bogus. Up to $15 for a new eBook – they have to replant more electrons, you see – and don’t give me all that about having to pay the authors and editors because y’all know how much you were paid for paper copies of your books back when. The big honking cherry on top is the question of ownership and sharing. This brings me back to the point earlier in this post when I questioned the purchase of eBooks for any reader.

Is my purchased eBook really mine? In other words, can I do whatever I want with it, including giving it to a friend after I’ve finished reading it without giving away my reader with it? I recently stumbled across librarian Bobbi Newman’s really cool blog and am absolutely intrigued by the notion of checking out your local library’s electronic copy of a book on your reader. How many libraries do this? But, more importantly, when can we do this between my iPad and your Kindle? When can I give you my eBook that I bought for $14? And will a SWAT team come crashing into my house Brazil-style and cart me away to Penguin-Knopf Prison Cell Block C because, somewhere in the fine print of all the legalese surrounding the purchase of an eBook, it says I cannot give you my eBook as I would have my paper copy? Again, if the process is this difficult for me to understand, a technologist who works with Project Gutenberg, to fathom, how much harder is it someone who simply wants to read a book, not pay a fortune for it, actually own it and maybe give it away when done with it? Note that I did not even get into how you have to purchase an expensive eReader first (and its attendant DRM agreements with the providers of every chunk of content you put into it) before you go about borrowing library eBooks.

Yes, I can see how the digital librarians worry. But, I wish they, especially the more high-profile ones, would speak out more and louder against the dictates of the publishing and telecommunications industries instead of taking them as a given. We need less gatekeepers and more gatecrashers.

At the time of this writing, I am considering attending Books In Browsers 2011 as a PG representative, where I hope to learn a lot more about the current state of eBooks and generate ideas to increase access to electronic and paper books. Literacy creates opportunity.

Related Reading: Library Pirates Unlock Rented Digital Textbooks, Take Aim at Publishers