I’m starting to really love Web 2.0 although I have much to learn about how to really become part of the community. And admittedly, I haven’t gotten much feedback from folks who are on the nastier side, maybe I wouldn’t like it so much if I did.

But I love the positive, decidedly unnasty vibes from the many science bloggers out there. There was a wonderfully rich post on the Cocktail Party Physics blog about the Exploratorium and our Iron Science Teacher Webcasts that we hold during the Summer Institute for middle and high school science teachers. We’ve been holding these competitions since 1999 and they’ve gotten quite popular on the Web (with lots of hits from Japan where its inspiration “Iron Chef” originated). I met the energetic and passionate blog author, Jennifer Oullette at a recent science communication conference in Lincoln Nebraska of all places. She gave an inspiring talk about how to get young women interested in physics by leveraging from popular culture. She wrote the book “Physics of the Buffyverse,” and has done talks using karate masters demonstrating the laws of motion. That’s the kind of creative educational approach we need more of to expand the appetite for science to new young audiences.

My three-year-old knows something about gravity but that’s not what makes him special. Even babies grasp the fact that unsupported objects tend to fall downward. Endless experimentation launching sippy cups off high chairs and dropping balls to the floor teaches youngsters how gravity works. But it’s just this experience that makes it hard for them to believe that the earth is a sphere, according to a recent article in Science Magazine (May 18, 2007) about the childhood origins of adult resistance to science. Until about age nine, children have difficulty comprehending a spherical earth because they can’t understand why people on the other side don’t fall off.

Eventually kids accept earth’s shape, in large part because trusted information sources, such as teachers and parents, confidently tell them so. They might also see space photographs of the “blue marble” earth, evidence that helps reinforce the concept. Eventually most students develop a more sophisticated understanding about the gravitational attraction of large objects that reconciles experience with learned knowledge.

Other scientific concepts that are complex or that go against common sense are more difficult to dislodge, especially in a society where debate about these topics create uncertainty. Young children are especially susceptible to believing that things have a purpose and a design, a belief system that is clearly not based on evidence or scientific understanding. The Science article, written by Yale psychologists Paul Bloom and Deena Weisberg, describes children’s propensity for “promiscuous teleology” as the belief, for example, that clouds are for raining and lions are for going to the zoo.

We run into problems as a society when these misconceptions about science persist into adulthood. For children, the simplest explanation for the origins of plants and animals is a creationist belief. Good science education should supplant this belief with an understanding of how natural selection and evolution works, but the Science authors make the point that the current debate over teaching evolution gives the public, and students, an easy out. Rather than go through the hard work of evaluating the strong, deep and complex evidence of how mutations over time lead to new species, they can rely on non-science information sources, such as clergy, politicians, media personalities, or other authority figures, to come to a simpler concept that God (i.e. an intelligent designer) created all species on earth.

We hope to give folks a different way of answering the question: how do we know what we know? I’m on an NSF-funded project team at the Exploratorium that is digging into the ways that scientists use evidence, data and observations to understand the natural world. We’ve spent some time with scientists in Kamchatka investigating organisms that live in extreme environments, which might eventually provide clues about the early history, if not the origin, of life on earth. Later this year, we’ll launch an interactive Evidence Website that highlights the work of scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. Max Planck geneticists, anthropologists, linguists, cognitive psychologists, and primatologists use multiple lines of evidence, from DNA, to research on Great Apes, to fossilized skulls, bones and teeth, to investigate what makes us human and different from our primate relatives.

We’ll show the experiments, data and video interviews with scientists and will also include an interactive section that will allow online visitors to investigate the ways that they as individuals arrive at their knowledge and compare their belief systems to others. Rather than just rely on authority figures, including scientists, visitors can investigate the evidence and the methods that scientists use to understand nature, including human nature. If we are going to “believe” in anything, maybe it should be in the cumulative and self-correcting process of evidence-based science.

Last Sunday’s New York Times had a book review of Al Gore’s version of Inconvenient Truth for kids. The review was written by Robert Coontz, Deputy News Editor for Science Magazine (full disclosure, Robert is an old grad school classmate and good friend of mine).

Robert praised the book for its concise language and organization, an improvement over Gore’s original book for adults. He chides Gore a bit about painting too much certainty about global warming as the culprit behind Hurricane Katrina, a claim that most scientists are uncomfortable making. But Robert also says that in many ways the book does not go far enough. Because the main message is already out there that humans are impacting climate, now we need to fill in the gaps and explain the uncertainties and complexities of climate science. We should be introducing the scientists and how they use and make sense of data, especially as new findings come out and refine our understanding (and sometimes overturn previous scientific interpretations).

This gap is where formal and informal educational institutions can step in to provide context by helping our audiences make sense of the basics of climate science and the new information coming out. The Exploratorium developed the Global Climate Change Research Explorer that shows real observational data and how scientists interpret these observations to understand the mechanisms of climate change. We also produced a series of Polar Science Webcasts that introduced basic concepts about climate systems and some of the scientists, many of them working in the earth’s polar regions, who are piecing together climate history to help us understand what is happening now and may happen in the future.

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?