Physics and Environmental Science Greg Bothun Physics and Environmental Science Dabble in: Astrophysics, Regional Climate Change, Hurricanes, Renewable Energy Generation, Scaled Sustainability, Large Scale Data Visualization, Global Consumerism, anything Big Data, Institutional Mayhem Publish in: The Journal of Incremental Knowledge

The World is Changing Traditional fields of study are morphing to more cross- disciplinary areas. This means new skill sets and new curricular programs are needed. (Knight campus?) Informatics and data base mining is becoming particularly important. Indeed, skills over content should be our new mantra – it won’t be. Computational Techniques are evolving rapidly due to Open Source development. (credit vs contribution) The science/public policy interface offers new opportunities. This is where real impact can occur. This is where students need to be better educated. Data visualization is rapidly accelerating with all kinds of careers just waiting. Represent information in new ways that achieve better understanding fast.

Is Higher Ed Changing in Response? Most teaching and “learning” is based on biased lenses and opinions about what defines the Truth. In general, students do not accommodate ambiguity well and really only want one source of information. In general students have been programmed by our assessment system to behave like this. A sign of change would be classes that are learning communities and programs that are learning communities (from Harvard) Learning communities provide a space and a structure for people to align around a shared goal. Effective communities are both aspirational and practical. They connect people, organizations, and systems that are eager to learn and work across boundaries, all the while holding members accountable to a common agenda, metrics, and outcomes. These communities enable participants to share results and learn from each other, thereby improving their ability to achieve rapid yet significant progress.

Most importantly Students should be consistently and constantly engaged in collaborative learning. Indeed this is the way that most of science operates and is a general principle for problem solving an learning new knowledge. Why does higher ed , particularly the UO, insist on treating students as learners in isolation? This is where the “scientific method” as a regular part of the “teaching method” could really serve to evolve Higher ed forward.

How to do Science Be as unbiased as possible – or least recognize your own biases Go where good data leads Understand your instruments – where might systematics lie? Don’t worry about being correct – big problem for most humans Collaborate with people smarter than yourself Learn and implement a variety of data analysis techniques

Guess what this map represents in its 7 colors

What does this Represent?

Green countries have what in Common?

If all the countries with coastlines sank

Discovery in Science: Deep Tropical Convection/Atmospheric Rivers

LIGO Discovery

Building the VizWall – UO

My Data Science “Textbook”