Think of One Thing that you Googled in the Past Three Months or the Past Three Days?
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October 27, 2011 By: Cheryl Steele Oakes
Oct
26
Written by:
10/26/2011 4:53 PM
Can
you think of one thing that you googled in the past three months or the
past three days? As I sat with a friend at the Harbor we were talking
and looking at low tide and discussing what happens to the sand during
the tidal pull. She said, “that can be explained by fractal geometry
-those little ripples, as she pointed to the sculptured sand. The tides
pull the water, the ripples in the sand are evidence of the water
ripples which are evidence of fractal geometry.” I thought about that
for a bit. I really didn’t know what fractal geometry was, but I did
know it sounded like the Fibonacci in nature where everything is
systematic using the 1,3,5,8,13,21,..... Now when I look at sand
ripples I will think of fractals. “Approximate
fractals are easily found in nature. These objects display self-similar
structure over an extended, but finite, scale range. Examples include
clouds, river networks, fault lines, mountain ranges, craters,[8] snow
flakes,[9] crystals,[10] lightning, cauliflower or broccoli, and systems
of blood vessels and pulmonary vessels, and ocean waves.[11] DNA and
heartbeat[12] can be analyzed as fractals. Even coastlines may be
loosely considered fractal in nature.” Wikipedia This is an example where STEM really needs to be part of education for all of us.There
are some conversations that naturally lend themselves to what we call
reciprocal conversations where I say one thing, you make a comment, it
reminds me of something which I say, and you make a comment about that
and then it goes back and forth. The reciprocal manner is where people
have a conversation that you can predict the conversation is full of ebb
and flow. However, with my friend at the Harbor looking at low tide
there was absolutely no way I could predict where the conversation was
going to end up, nor could I predict how those subjects were going to
be woven into those conversations. That's really amazing to me because
we’re in an exciting time and we're having conversations where making
connections that normally wouldn't have been made BI, before internet.So,
I'll ask again, when was the last time you looked up something totally
unfamiliar to you? When was the last time you had a conversation with
someone that was not scripted? But rather, it was really reciprocal
with give-and-take and you were sharing in the teaching and learning.
How can we make this happen more often?Let’s think about that! Let’s
think about ways to provide an avenue for that to happen in our classes!
Let your students be teachers and let your teachers be the learners! coakes photo