A couple weeks ago at a meeting of my local astronomy club I heard a talk about the upcoming International Year of Astronomy 2009. This reminds me of the famous International Geophysical Year when the U.S. and Russia first launched satellites into orbit back in 1957-1958 and brought about the Space Age and the amazing explosion of knowledge about our universe.
If the IGY was about new discoveries, it seems the purpose of IYA2009 is to celebrate the 400 years since Galileo started using his telescope and to enlighten the worlds billions to the great discoveries of the science of astronomy. We are currently living through a renaissance of astronomical exploration and I think most of the world’s citizens are missing out on the excitement. This is a great time to throw a year long party for astronomers.
At my astronomy club meeting and at the IYA2009 web site there is a great push to find ways to get people to an eyepiece of a telescope so they can experience observation first hand. I think this is a grand goal, but we should push people further than just showing them the rings of Saturn. There’s a lot more to astronomy than pretty stellar tourist sites – astronomy is a long succession of conceptual breakthroughs that have changed the course of history and philosophy many times and is the foundation for the scientific age.
I think one project for the IYA2009 is to define the essential lessons needed to understand the science of astronomy. Since we have eight months before IYA2009 begins this would be a good time for amateur astronomers around the world to tally what those lessons should be and campaign with the IYA2009 to find scientists and educators to develop those lessons to distribute all next year.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could find 52 essential lessons of astronomy that could be taught across the web each week. Using web pages, podcasts, videos, computer programs and any other instructional tool to let as many people as possible try than hand at teaching these 52 concepts. Use astronomy as the subject to show off the potential of the web to teach millions.
Lessons is astronomy are all around us. PBS, Discovery and History channels have astronomy related shows almost every week. Bookstores have shelves of new astronomy books and sell several great astronomy magazines. The Internet is loaded with diverse astronomy sites. The question is how many people know about the essentials of the science? It’s the 21st century but I think most of the worlds billions think of the heavens only in terms of the speculations taught by ancient religions or from misinformation brought about from science fiction movies.
How many of the nearly seven billion inhabitants of Earth really understand that our planet orbits the sun? And how many of those know how to theoretically prove it? And even still, how many from the last group could actually prove it? Astronomy is the history of those people who could figure out ways to test and prove observations about our universe. What I’d like to see the IYA2009 do is teach people the most important 52 scientific techniques used in understanding what we know about the Universe today.
Week 1 – The Stick
I’ll start off with an example of what I’m talking about. Recently, while reading Neil deGrasse Tyson’s book Death by Black Hole, I was enchanted by his chapter about how much astronomy can be taught with a stick. Most people have heard of stories about ancient cultures building monuments like Stonehenge or the Pyramids that scientists have reported were used in observational astronomy, but do you know how they worked?
Astronomy began long ago by people watching the sky. I’m not sure modern kids understand that thousands of years ago they didn’t have television or even electricity, so the night sky was a lot more captivating then now. You also have to understand these ancient dudes didn’t have clocks or even concepts like years, months, hours, minutes, and seconds. They did have seasons and days, which I hope you can understand why.
It doesn’t take much observations skill to notice that day and night repeat, but it takes a little more brain power to notice the seasons coming and going and how to reliably predict them. If you plant a stick in the ground and make notes about its shadow you’ll eventually start learning some cool stuff. The National Science Teachers Association even offers lesson plans for elementary school kids and you might even like to take a look at what they do. Sadly, these simple astronomy lesson plans seems to be singular, with most other web sites referring back to them. A search of “Teaching astronomy with a stick” should bring up hundreds of unique individual pages, but it doesn’t.
Modern classroom teaching is mostly cramming kids full of words and numbers with the expectation they can puke them out later in the same order they were shoved in. Instead we should be teaching kids how to learn on their own. The tests should ask – 1. Prove how you know the seasons change, 2. Prove how you know the Earth is round, 3. Prove how you know the Earth orbits the Sun, and so on. Then expect the kids to explain how they learned these truths from their own various experiments, including planting a stick in the ground and watching it, taking notes and making observations for years. Make them work at learning, force them to develop discipline, expect more from them than memorization.
Great Expectations
Of course I know I’m asking a lot of IYA2009 – but hey, they brought up the idea. Is IYA2009 going to be some PR fluff for telescope sales, or should it do something profound? Maybe 52 lessons in science are too many – we could lower our sights to 12 monthly lessons. I’m fond of the The Teaching Company that offer college level lectures for fun learning. They build their courses around collections of 30 minute talks that come on audio and video and can include supplemental books. 52 thirty minute lectures would be 26 hours of teaching for the whole year. About one college course taught in a semester spread out over a whole year. I don’t think that’s too much.
It would be great if IYA2009 or its supporters could offer podcast subscriptions so people would automatically receive a 30 minute lesson each week of next year. The audio lessons could point to a web page with supporting material, and if we’re lucky, maybe even downloadable videos that expand on the teaching. And to make things perfect, I think each lecture should have lesson plans for teachers in K-12 classrooms. Finally, a complete DVD course from the year, like those sold at The Teaching Company, could be given away as .iso downloads.
For this idea to work I think it would take something like the open source software paradigm to get people started. Build it from the ground up with contributions. There are countless astronomy clubs around the world that want to participate in IYA2009 and each could promote and campaign for particular weekly lesson and how to support them. There are also countless academic professionals that teach astronomy and physics that could join in. And there are countless instructional design professionals that could aid in the development of the lessons for the web. Teaching astronomy would be a very good way to marry the potential of computer based instruction with a specific learning goal. The emerging RIA (Rich Internet Applications) programming tools could be used to demonstrate their power.
I like this idea of an international year to learn something new. It’s like when a city starts a community wide book club. I think 2008 is unofficially the year of climate studies, or maybe 2010 should be the official year. The idea of the world getting together to studying something globally sounds like lots of fun and I hope they pick a new topic every year.
Jim
Auxiliary Memory 