Teaching link: Wellcome Images

One of the problems of developing an online course (or an in-person course, for that matter) is finding good artwork. Sure, there are lots of images available on the web, but relatively few of these are completely legal to use (i.e., most are copyrighted works with no clear license to allow educators to use them). However, works licensed under Creative Commons licenses are freely usable by educators¹, and thus I now attempt to use only Creative Commons licensed works when I develop teaching materials.

There are many places where you can find Creative Commons licensed materials (e.g., Flickr's advanced search lets you filter by license, and all PLOS journal articles are Creative Commons licensed), but BoingBoing just linked to an amazing resource: Wellcome Images. This website, run by the Wellcome Trust, contains images depicting "two thousand years of human culture," and everything on it has been released under a Creative Commons license².

Wellcome Images is one of the world's richest and most unique collections, with themes ranging from medical and social history to contemporary healthcare and biomedical science.

All our images are available on demand in digital form. Search online or use the expertise of our professional scientific and historical researchers.

Whether it's medicine or magic, the sacred or the profane, science or satire - you'll find more than you expect.

This unrivalled collection contains historical images from the Wellcome Library collections, Tibetan Buddhist paintings, ancient Sanskrit manuscripts written on palm leaves, beautifully illuminated Persian books and much more.

The Biomedical Collection holds over 40 000 high-quality images from the clinical and biomedical sciences. Selected from the UK's leading teaching hospitals and research institutions, it covers disease, surgery, general healthcare, sciences from genetics to neuroscience including the full range of imaging techniques. (quote from here)

I've only been browsing for a short while, but have already found a ton of images I think I'll use in my course. Who wouldn't want pictures of a malaria parasite in a mosquito's gut, an opium poppy, a human embryo implanting at 6 days, a picture of male bodybuilders pre-testosterone-injections, or drawings of morels? Go find some for yourself!

¹ As long as the educators are creating non-commercial works, and even then some Creative Commons licenses allow commercial works.
² All images are either under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-commercial Licence 2.0 or a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivatives 2.0 license.

Teaching link: James Randi videos

James Randi is a debunker extraordinaire and host to the million-dollar challenge, a challenge where any psychic who can convincingly demonstrate that they have supernatural powers will win a million dollars. BoingBoing just linked to an 18-minute video wherein James Randi embarasses James Hydrick, a psychic who claimed to be able to move objects with his mind.



Of course I couldn't stop at just one James Randi video, so I ended up pestering my SO with an hour or two of James Randi videos from YouTube. The videos had excellent footage of psychics in action, and while most of the psychics simply gave up or refused to be tested when confronted, I got to thinking that these would still be a good vehicle for starting discussions of skepticism and pseudoscience in the classroom. Thus, I thought I'd post a few of the videos here as the most recent installment of my teaching link series.

James Randi's classic experiment in horoscopes:



James Randi discussing Uri Geller and Peter Popoff:



James Randi performing psychic surgery (caution: filled with fake blood):



James Randi demonstrating spoon bending and discussing the preliminary test a psychic healer will undergo to earn the million-dollar prize:



James Randi discussing Doris Collins, a cold reader:



James Randi explaining homeopathy (contains no footage of psychics, but is a great lecture on the ridiculosity of homeopathy):

Teaching link - baby mouse development

I'm insanely busy this week coordinating a visit by multiple out-of-state advisers for one of our programs¹, but my SO found something that made me smile amidst the mountains of work: a series of daily pictures of mouse development. If you want to talk about mouse development post-birth, or need illustrations for what mice look like at various ages (from 1 - 28 days), this would be a great resource.

And, if you absolutely must see more pictures of mice, go take a look at my pictures of baby mice and adult mice.

¹ Yet again I'm swamped with work, and yet again it's unrelated to my classroom teaching. One of these semesters I've got to learn to say no to anything unrelated to the classroom so I can actually have time to work on improving my teaching ...

Teaching link - flowchart of the scientific method

BoingBoing recently linked to a flowchart comparing how the scientific method and religious faith build knowledge. The contrast between science and religion is great, but could be somewhat offensive to religiously inclined students¹. However, the scientific method flowchart is clear and informative by itself; I think it would be a great aid for explaining the scientific method to introductory students.

The image is by Wellington Grey, and is Creative Commons licensed.

[Update just before posting: PZ Myers has posted the images as separate figures; his versions should be easier to use in class.]

¹ I'm torn about using the faith portion of this in my classes; on the one hand it is a decently accurate representation of how faith-based systems build knowledge, but on the other hand religion is such a taboo topic that it seems easier to leave that part of the figure out.

Teaching links - reading a meniscus

Every now and then I come across a website that has some tidbit of information, or an image, that is just right for a lecture or lab I'm working on. Often this information isn't anything earth-shattering, and thus I don't post it. However, since the information is useful, I think I'm going to change my policies and start posting links to this type of information. The posts won't be long, and probably won't be exciting, but hopefully will be useful to others 'in the trenches.'

Today I'll start the series with a link to Wikipedia's meniscus page; it's got a great (GNU FDL licensed) figure that shows how to read menisci. It's useful for those first-day-of-lab lectures on how to use graduated cylinders¹.

¹ Hey, I told you it wouldn't be exciting.