We heard from Arlene Knowles, who works as the Career and Diversity Programs Administrator for APS. Arlene shared some disturbing statistics about the small number of minority students who are graduating from US Physics programs, and the many efforts the APS is undertaking to increase the number of women and minority physics graduates.

Here’s the recording.

Last night's Global Physics Department meeting was devoted to a wrap up discussion of the Summer AAPT meeting in Philadelphia that just took place.  We shared highlights from the meeting, talked about ideas that AAPT might be improved, and the overall value face to face conferences in the day of social media. links from the discussion:

• U-stream recordings from the meeting (Phillip Sadler's Millikan Medal acceptance speech (slides) is highly recommended.

• Minds of their own: The original video series created by Sadler to explore featuring students who have graduated from Harvard and MIT struggling to light a light bulb with a battery and a wire.

• RIT's Livephoto project: Interactive video vignettes— awesome HTML5 based video analysis activities that work on tablet computers, developed by Prisilla Laws and Robert Teese.

• Peter Bohacek's awesome direct measurement video analysis problems, featured on Carleton's Science Education Research Center.

• Chris D'amato's presentation on Mastery Learning at AAPT.

Elluminate recording of Wednesday August 1 discussion.

Next Week's session: Advice for New High School Physics Teachers

Next week, we'll be giving advice to new high school physics teachers. To help make this session awesome, we need you to do two things:

1. Fill our this 5 minute survey with advice for new teachers.

2. Recruit any new teachers you know to come to our meeting next Wednesday at 9:30 PM EST.

In two weeks, we'll be giving advice to New College/University Physics teachers.

We talked with Eugenia about her program for preparing physics teachers. She talked about four courses that she teachers that focus on content, pedagogy, and curriculum preparation.

We also continued our discussion of the Physics Problem Database (now at version 0.2!)

Here’s the recording.

Next week we’ll talk with Ted Hodapp from the APS, continuing our conversations about teacher preparation.

Last night we talked with Jeremy Morton from The Expert TA. He talked with us about how he’s expanded his PhD research on how to reliably code student work into his current company that competes with WebAssign and others. It also led naturally into a further discussion of our Physics Problem Database (that’s now in Alpha release).

Here’s the link to the recording.

Our next meeting will be in two weeks (we’re taking the US holiday off next week). We don’t yet have a confirmed speaker, so please send Andy (andy.rundquist@gmail.com) some suggestions if you have any.

Last Wednesday we talked with Joshua about his research in particle physics, and a lot about how to teach it and how to talk about it generally.

Here’s the recording.

This week we’ll be talking with Expert TA electronic homework software.

We talked with Rachel about the efforts she was involved in at the University of Colorado. They made numerous, research-based changes to the advanced E&M course and saw good learning gains.

Here’s her handout:

Pepper UpperDiv Handout GlobalPhysDept

And here’s the recording.

Don’t forget to sign up for our mailing list (on the right side of the home page).

Next week we’ll be talking with Joshua Whitney about particle physics

This week we talked with Greg about demonstrations to do on your first day of class. One in particular that got some praise is seen here:

Normal force demo

We also continued our conversation about the physics problem database (that conversation began at the one hour mark).

Here’s the recording

Next week we’ll talk with Rachel Pepper about research she’s done on upper division physics teaching, please join us!