Mats Selen will be visiting CPERL on Friday April 21st. He will be leading a breakfast discussion with graduate students and postdocs through the Center for Teaching Excellence, a pizza lunch with Department of Physics graduate students, and an afternoon presentation in the physics department. Contact Professor Holmes (ngholmes@cornell.edu) if you would like to meet with him. His bio, talk title, and abstract are below.
Breakfast discussion
8:30am - 9:45am, 401 PSB
Join Mats Selen, Professor and Associate Head for Undergraduate Programs, University of Illinois, as he shares his story of gaining understanding of student learning and teaching accordingly. From the physics van and smart physics to i-clickers, explore active learning with the award-winning 2015 Outstanding Doctoral and Research Universities Professor of the Year.
To RSVP visit: https://events.cornell.edu/event/mats_selen
Graduate student lunch
12pm, 301 or 308 PSB
Graduate students are invited to a pizza lunch with Prof. Selen. Contact Natasha at ngholmes@cornell.edu if you're planning to attend.
Reviving Creativity in Our Introductory Physics Labs
LEPP Journal Club, 3pm in 301 PSB
Approaching a question without fear; coming up with an idea; designing an experiment; understanding assumptions; interpreting data and revising the idea (or the question) accordingly. Many physicists would claim they do this for a living, and most would be delighted to observe this behavior in their students, yet for a variety of reasons this is often not what we encourage in our introductory physics labs. We have developed a portable wireless lab system with the goal of putting simple yet powerful tools in the hands of every student, and we are currently piloting a new design-based approach to our introductory physics labs based on this tool. Our students invent experiments and acquire data, both in and out of the classroom, and share their data with each other and with instructors using an integrated cloud based repository. This new approach is allowing us to shift the focus of our introductory labs toward creativity, design, sense-making, and communication. I will describe this project and present some encouraging first results.
Bio: Mats Selen earned B.Sc.('82) and M.Sc.('83) degrees in physics at the University of Guelph, and M.A.('85) and Ph.D.('89) degrees in particle physics at Princeton University. He worked as a research associated here at the Cornell Electron Storage Ring from 1989-1993. He joined the faculty at the University of Illinois Department of Physics in 1993, where he is now a full professor and the Associate Head of Undergraduate Programs. After 25 years of studying elementary particles he shifted his research focus to understanding and improving the way students learn physics. He has developed interactive teaching tools, most notably the i>clicker student response system now used in thousands of classrooms in the United States and Canada. He also developed the IOLab student lab kits and co-wrote the smartPhysics multimedia curriculum, both of which help students explore physics principles in interactive, accessible ways. He has been recognized with a number of campus awards for teaching and advising, as well as the American Physical Society Excellence in Education Award and was named US professor of the Year 2015. Awarded by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education and sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the awards recognize professors for their influence on teaching and commitment to undergraduate students.
