by Ursula Goodenough

Tens of thousands of you visit this site each week, and hence presumably thousands of you are trained in, and/or interested in, science-based understandings and perspectives.

As spelled out in an earlier blog, I’m involved in a fledgling movement to integrate the history of nature into our educational framework. In a recent conversation with a cohort, we got to wondering how persons no-longer-in-school go about educating themselves along science lines. We realized we had no idea.

 

So – I’d be very interested to learn, and I suspect many of us would be interested to learn, how those amongst us learn new science. For someone like me with a day job in a particular science field, I keep up with that field but it’s still the case that I have to figure out other ways to learn about astronomy or physics or paleontology. For those of you with other kinds of day jobs, there’s more to figure out but the project is the same. Some of you have had more formal science schooling than others, but the playing field levels out pretty quickly given that much of what we learn in school needs refreshing pretty quickly.

Do you read? What? Learn things on the Internet? Where and by what means? Take classes or subscribe to something like the Teaching Company? Talk with others? Science cafes? Pick things up here and there? Do you feel like the resources you’ve found are fine, or adequate, or sometimes/often frustratingly uninformative? Any thoughts on what works well or how things could be made better?

It would be great if you could drop a comment (and by the way, signing up to comment on this site takes 15 seconds and you get NO dunning for NPR donations etc.).

Should you be motivated, I’d also be specifically interested to learn what you think about two internet sites in this genre that have come to my attention. The first, called Kahn Academy, has a deep list of short entries on numerous topics. The second, called Scitable, is geared to be a “personal learning tool” and has all sorts of features.  My question: Might sites like these work for you as learning platforms? If so, why; if not, why not?