04 October 2000
Dr. Michael Balick, New York Botanical Garden
Dr. Roberta Lee, Beth Israel Medical Center, The Continuum Center for Health and Healing
Dr.'s Balick and Lee met with the SC 250 Botany students for six hours during two laboratory periods. The students were taught botanical collection procedures and learned about the field of ethnobotany. The students also learned about their own plants and their own cultural uses of plants.
Duane Nelson, Institute of Pacific Island Forestry, USDA Forest Service
Dr. Nelson came and gave a lecture to the SC 250 Botany students on invasive plants and on work on the eradication of false sakau on Pohnpei.
None
The department welcomed on board Ms. Relinda Abellera, our new physical science instructor.
Education Summit: The department participated in the National Education Summit. Transcripts of the distance education session are available from this author.
Work on continuing agreements between Land Grant and the Natural Sciences subdivision of the department is ongoing. New agreements include an oral commitment to provide space for a muffle oven and associated water quality equipment in the preparatory room. This agreement was reached after a meeting of the department and a departmental vote on the issue.
Brian Lynch is working on setting up salt water aquariums. His students will be working on this project.
Throughout the month computer support, maintenance, and one-on-one just-in-time training has been undertaken in the department.
The science and math computer laboratory is open Tuesdays and Thursdays for student use. The team of work-study students assisting in the laboratory this year are being led by Carmen Chon and Dalihlu Waltu. Ms. Chon is responsible for opening and closing the laboratory for dormitory student use on week nights and weekends. Ms. Waltu handles weekday opening and closing tasks on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Each has their own key for opening and closing the laboratory.
The small learning community experiment is off to a shaky start. The program is having some of the same difficulties faced by Patrick Perry's tutoring experiment of 1993 and, more recently, Mary Snaden's tutoring center experiment. The problem is obtaining attendance. Currently only four of the student's in the program are in regular contact with their advisor. The others may not at this point even understand that they are in a program! The learning experience here is that the program must meet prior to the start of classes during orientation week in order to help ensure that it gets off the ground properly.
The Botany course is off to an active start with the students working on their first web pages. This work and other course information can be accessed from:
http://www.comfsm.fm/~dleeling/botany.html
Work on upgrading the images of lycopodium and ferns in the virtual herbarium has occurred. Some images now sport digital microscopy images that were obtained with the Title III purchased digital microscope. A mix of scanned images, digital photographs, a sketch, and digital microscopy images can be seen at:
http://www.comfsm.fm/~dleeling/proj98/ariel.html
andhttp://www.comfsm.fm/~dleeling/proj98/gob.html
The herbarium itself can be accessed from:
http://www.comfsm.fm/~dleeling/plantspohnpei.html
At present the students have been assigned to continue working on fern and lycopodium names in the Micronesian language cross-reference at:
http://www.comfsm.fm/~dleeling/microlang.html
For the second year in a row, the Kosraen students did not know the specific epithets for A. nidus and P. scolopendria in their own language. This is, for this author, solid evidence that the language is dying. Languages do not die from their core words out, they die at their edges, losing their specialized vocabulary first.
How to jump start mathematical tutoring on the national campus:
Patricia Jack, who has her BA degree, had indicated a willingness to tutor students in mathematics. This might be realizable by having Patricia released from OAR for some number of hours each week so that she can work in the tutoring center during those hours.
I apologize for the brevity of this report. I tend to communicate heavily by email, it is my hope that people are already somewhat aware of my activities based on this prior traffic.
If you have material that should be included in these reports, news from the state campuses, news of what you are doing in your classes, please email me the information and I will put it in these monthly reports.
Currently Gary Robertson and I are soliciting input on textbook policies, please send me any input you have on this matter.