One of the main goals is to learn new information about Marine invertebrates, and to educate the people those involved. One part of the project that is now wrapping up is an extended series of classroom based observational experiments and research efforts. These efforts were co-oridinated by Brian Plankis of Project DIBS with the participation of a local high school. In this podcast, i get the change to talk to Brian, the classroom teacher, Eric Borneman, and 4 of the students from the participating class to share there candid thoughts about the project, its impact on them as well as summarize what they did.

Project DIBS Web Site (http://www.projectdibs.com)
Project DIBS Mission Statement (http://www.projectdibs.com/forums/showthread.php?t=3)

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YES! I have been looking forward to this show for a long time. I was wondering how the project was going.

Congratulations Brian! This sounds like it was a huge success. Zander had a point about the senioritis thing, but that is typical. Comparatively, it sounded like they enjoyed this project far more than their other classes.

It sounded like you all got some excellent educational data as well in terms of using these types of "authentic learning experiences" in classrooms. Constructivism at its most practical! I do hope you plan on publishing this Brian, in our field i mean. Write something up and shoot it to Educational Technology Research and Development (might as well start at the top) and see what they think. TechTrends might be a good bet too (both peer-reviewed). I know there are some good journals for teaching sciences too, and i will post the names when i remember.

Props to the students too. You guys really contributed a great deal to the reefkeeping community, marine biology, and education techniques. Just an FYI for high schoolers: people like Brian are working to make high school more interactive and engaging (doing "real things" not just reading books and watching movies) and participating in the study and podcast goes a long way to helping encourage these efforts. Who knows you may be the frontrunners in a high school curriculum change where these types of projects are commonplace!

Samuel,

Thanks for all the kind words and I am definitely planning on at least a couple of educational publications out of this first experiment run. I could probably squeeze out 5-10 :) I really do hope that we can expand this program to more schools and continue to streamline it to reduce confusion and frustration and increase motivation and results.

But the podcast team did a really good job overall, they wrote the outline, prepared well and understood the experiment enough to answer questions on the fly. I was very proud of them.

Brian

PS. Rob, the school is now blocking your website (stupid filters), is there any way I can download this podcast to my hard drive? I can then copy it to CD and let the students listen to it.

Brian, feel free.
you should be able to download it at home them take it in on a CD.
you can take it in as MP3 or on an Audio CD and just pop it into any CD player

Brian, feel free.
you should be able to download it at home them take it in on a CD.
you can take it in as MP3 or on an Audio CD and just pop it into any CD player

OK, Rob, you would think I would know how to do this by now, but I've tried every option I can think of to save this to my hard drive. For example, I click on the Pod button and choose Save link as.... it keeps trying to save redirect.mp3, which is not the correct file.

Any tips?

Brian

i will send you a PM with a direct link