You may have noticed that I’ve been pretty light on my blog posts the last nine months or so. That’s because I’ve been consumed with our Web project, Ice Stories. Just about a year ago, we got funding from the National Science Foundation to do this International Polar Year education project and it’s been non-stop polar research and education since then. We did a full slate of Webcasts last winter from Antarctica and trained some young Arctic researchers in media production and story-telling this past March. We gave them cameras and asked them to post dispatches, video and pictures from their research camps in Alaska and Greenland. We also sent an Exploratorium media crew to Barrow in May and June to produce Webcasts and stories from this science outpost on the northern-most spit of land in the U.S.

Now it’s my turn for a polar expedition and we’re going to Greenland starting July 7. Summer is an intense time for science in Greenland. With 24 hours of daylight and a melting ice cap to study, researchers spread along the edges of glaciers and on camps atop the summit of the ice cap to learn all they can about the dynamic nature of ice, wildlife, climate, and geology in an era of rapid climate change at the poles. I’ll be up there with video production Lisa Strong to document all the science we can stuff into three weeks. We’ll be camping and hiking with glaciologists, biologists, and climate researchers, recording interviews, writing dispatches, and capturing moving and still image scenes of this gorgeous icy island.

Our first stop will be the town of Kangerlussuaq, nestled along a 160-km (100-mile) long fjord with the looming ice cap behind. We’ll reach Kanger, as it’s often called, via an Air National Guard military transport from Scotia, New York and we’ll be staying at the Kangerlussuaq International Science Support facility, aka “KISS.” We hope to catch up with Billy D’Andrea, our Ice Stories correspondent from Brown University, who is studying lake sediments for clues of our recent climate past. We also plan to hitch a ride and hike out to Tom Neumann’s camp along the glacier edge. Tom is a glaciologist from the University of Vermont (http://www.uvm.edu/~greenlnd/) who is interested in the history of the Greenland Ice Sheet, in particular the last time Greenland was free from its mantle of ice. His team does this by patrolling the edge of the glacier and collecting debris spit out from the base of the ice sheet. These rocks contain clues about the last time they were directly exposed to cosmic rays from the sun (i.e. the last time they weren’t covered by ice). Near Kanger, we also hope to capture some musk oxen with our cameras and will almost certainly encounter unwelcome wildlife in the form of marauding Arctic mosquitoes (Billy says we’ll be eaten alive, which is why we’ve packed mosquito nets and plenty of deet).

From Kanger, we fly to the lovely town of Ilulissat, a major tourist and science destination on the island. Ilulissat means iceberg in Greenlandic and the town is aptly named situated as it is near the outlet of the world’s fastest-moving glacier, the Jakobshavn. Jakobshavn is Greenland’s largest glacier and it regularly calves huge icebergs in the summer season, some as large as a cubic kilometer is size. We hope to capture one of these gigantic calving events at Mark Fahnestock’s camp along the rocky shoreline of Disko Bay at the base of the glacier. Mark is a glaciologist from the University of New Hampshire, and studies the flow rate of the Jakobshavn glacier. This one glacier, a fraction of the 630,000-cubic-mile ice sheet that covers most of Greenland, produces 35 billion tons of icebergs every year, nearly all the bergs that threaten ship traffic in the Northern Atlantic and almost certainly the origin of the monster that sunk the Titanic. As a final destination of our Greenland science tour, Lisa Strong will fly with the Air National Guard up to Summit Camp to get a perspective of the ice from on top the two-mile-thick sheet.

I love cracking open the morning newspaper and reading about somebody I’ve met (except, of course, if they’ve died or been arrested). Yesterday’s nerdy pleasure was a story in the New York Times about improving undergraduate teaching at Harvard that quoted physicist Eric Mazur. Professor Mazur was on a task force at Harvard that called for a new focus on learning and teaching, recommending that innovation and success in instruction be valued as highly as research and publication. It’s important, the task force report notes, that renowned scholars engage with students rather than just lecture to them.

This was the subject of a lunchtime brown bag talk that Professor Mazur gave to staff at the Exploratorium a few months ago. (Stephanie Chasteen, a postdoc at the Exploratorium recorded his talk which you can download from her website, along with Eric’s power point presentation). Eric Mazur is an advisor to the Exploratorium’s Nano project, part of a network of museums and science institutions funded by the National Science Foundation to improve the public’s understanding about nanoscience and technology. In his talk, Eric described how he gave up lectures in his introductory physics courses when he realized they weren’t working and that his students had failed to assimilate basic knowledge. Then he tried something radical: instead of providing answers, he started asking his students questions and giving them problems to solve in class. The students input answers in hand-held devices, consulting each other on possible solutions and then, as a class, they discuss the problem and its solution. In this model of inquiry learning, the students’ role is to think and discuss problems; the teacher’s role is to guide a deeper understanding of the underlying principles. This fosters critical thinking and problem-solving skills rather than rote memorization. As Professor Mazur is quoted in the Times, “You have to be able to tackle the new and unfamiliar, not just the familiar, in everything.”

Just for fun, here’s one of Eric Mazur’s typical class exercises—can you solve this simple circuit problem more accurately than Harvard physics students?

As a museum, the Exploratorium has been on the Web since 1994 and we’ve developed online exhibits, artworks, live Webcasts, and other experiments. Before blogging was recognized as such we wrote expedition journals in Antarctica and dispatches from science conferences, like the AAAS meetings in 2001 and a couple of NCAR “usable science workshops” on La Nina and El Nino in the Galapagos.

But these early experiments in proto-blogging have been eclipsed by a robust community of folks who write about science and society, about the museum’s role in the public understanding of science, and who share tips about developing exhibits, communicating research, and getting in touch with our diverse audiences. So, some of us at the Exploratorium have been mulling it over and we decided to launch our own blogging experiment. (I should mention that much of what we do here can be described as experimental, we like to think of ourselves as a learning and research institution which thankfully means that we can chalk up failed experiments as learning experiences and move on.)

I’m the first out of the blocks and I hope you’ll bear with me as I figure out how I fit into this interesting online ecosystem. My goal is to contribute something interesting and unique that reflects the richness of what happens at the Exploratorium. I want to share some behind the scenes glimpses as we develop new projects for the museum floor and the web—in part because I’m often asked by scientists and others at conferences about what we’re working on and whether they can get involved in or partner with us on museum programs. I also want to reflect some of the compelling conversations and the fascinating people who walk through the door and interact with our staff and the public audience. In my job as director of the Osher Fellowship program, I’ve had the great privilege of hosting visits by some incredible scientists, artists, and scholars including E.O. Wilson, Elizabeth Blackburn, Christian deDuve, Cynthia Kenyon, Fred Wilson, and Lewis Hyde. I want to introduce these folks to you and share some of the interesting discussions we have with them. I’m also compelled in this effort by our director, Dennis Bartels, who wants the Exploratorium to be both an outside in and an inside out organization. So some of the blog will be devoted to giving you a peek behind the curtain at what we’re doing but we also want to invite our audience to contribute ideas and feedback that will help us to be more responsive to your interests, needs and ideas. As we think about our local, national and international audiences, we want to continue developing programs and projects that help make science accessible and relevant to everyday life. And we’ll invite you to get involved as we figure out ways to make sense of some of the most socially important, controversial, and complex science issues of the day, such as stem cell research, global warming, and the evolution wars. At the same time, we won’t lose sight of the fun parts of science, the everyday cool stuff that the Exploratorium is known for. So, please I want to hear from you and hope this opens a fun and fruitful dialog.

I had a fascinating breakfast meeting with Rocky Kolb while he was in Berkeley recently giving a talk. Rocky formerly led the particle astrophysics group at Fermilab and is now chair of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago. He’s also a great public speaker and a bit of a celebrity: Rocky was Dr. December in the Stud Muffins of Science Calendar, circa 1996. One of the things we talked about over eggs and pancakes was the dual personality of physics. More than any other scientific discipline, physics depends on two varieties of scientist: the theorist and the experimentalist. Rocky is a theorist, but probably the most famous theoretical physicist was Einstein. His relativity theories, written early in the last century, kept the experimentalists who build observatories and particle accelerators busy for decades trying to confirm his theoretical predictions. But experimentalists like nothing better than coming up with observations about the universe, matter, or the inner workings of particles that catch theorists with their mathematical pants down. A sign about the doorway of condensed matter physicist Sid Nagel reads: Here is where theories come to die. Rocky’s take: “We’re smarter, better looking and generally taller.” But the shorter ones do occasionally exact their revenge. It happened in 1999 when Saul Perlmutter from the Lawrence Berkeley Lab announced that, billions of years after the big bang, the universe was actually accelerating rather than slowing down and collapsing under the weight of gravity. No theorist had predicted this finding and collectively they’ve been scratching their heads ever since trying to explain it. “This is the first time in 3000 years of cosmology that theorists are playing catch-up to the experimentalists. In the past there were more theories than observations could confirm or refute, but now there are more observations that the theories can not explain, ” Rocky told me. It’s certainly an interesting time to be a cosmologist and a sideline observer.