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About my “Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching“

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Welcome to my blog, where I mostly write about

  • Interesting ideas on learning and teaching: I write about my own ideas and experiences, but also about literature, conversations, conferences, … that touched me in some way and that I am currently thinking about
  • #KitchenOceanography are experiments that can be done with household items, and how to use them in teaching and science communication, and just for my own enjoyment (and most recently: in freediving!)
  • #WaveWatching is about hyper-local expeditions to connect theoretical concepts with the real world (here I show you lots of pictures from where I encounter water in my daily life, and I promise you’ll never look at water the same way as before!)

I started my blog in 2013 when I was a postdoctoral researcher in physical oceanography at the Geophysical Institute, University of Bergen, to have a place to document my #KitchenOceanography. But I kept blogging when I then went to Hamburg University of Technology as educational developer, to the Leibniz Institute for Science and Mathematics Education (IPN) for a stint in educational and science communication research, to GEO as a science communicator. Right now, I am an academic developer both at the Center for Engineering Education, Lund University, and at the Geophysical Institute, University of Bergen. Through all the changes in my career and life, my blog stayed, and grew with me, documenting my “Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching”.

Recently published: “Supporting sensemaking by introducing a connecting thread throughout a course” (Daae, Semper, Glessmer; 2004)

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Rotating fluid dynamics are super cool on the one hand (just look at my collection of DIYnamics rotating experiments, or our time on the 13m-diameter-tank-on-a-merry-go-round in Grenoble), but also super difficult to teach. I’ve tried different things with Pierre (with a super easy introduction to rotation in labs that we taught) and Kjersti and Elin (using student guides to help students in their first exposure to the topic, but also to give the guides a chance to repeat and deepen their understanding). And I think on the lab front of things, we’ve made progress. But what about introductory courses where there are no labs involved, and rotation is still happening on spacial scales that are hard to imagine and even harder to directly observe, where the maths is still too difficult to make sense of for most, and yet where the influence of rotation needs to be understood anyway? Recently, Kjersti, Steffi, and I came up with a plan for how to connect all the topics in an introductory course to each other and to rotation, using a weather map as the connecting thread. Our article on this has just been published, check it out!

Daae, K., S. Semper, and M.S. Glessmer. 2024. Supporting sensemaking by introducing a connecting thread throughout a course. Oceanography, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2024.604.

Recently published: “Adapting a Teaching Method to Fit Purpose and Context” (Glessmer, Bovill & Daae; 2024)

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New article published! “Adapting a Teaching Method to Fit Purpose and Context” (Glessmer, Bovill & Daae; 2024), based on this blogpost, but a little more thought through and polished with Cathy and Kjersti in beautiful Voss! Check it out here, and enjoy!

M. S. Glessmer, C. Bovill, and K. Daae (2024). Adapting a teaching method to fit purpose and context. Oceanography, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2024.603.

Currently reading about “botshit”, and how to avoid it (Hannigan, McCarthy, Spicer; 2024)

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When I recently summarized an article that claimed that Large Language Models (LLM) are “bullshit”, I got a lot of strong reactions offline and online about that term, and a comment recommending the article “Beware of botshit: how to manage the epistemic risks of generative chatbots” (Thanks, Ian!). In that article, Hannigan, McCarthy and Spicer (2024) suggest using the term “botshit” to describe what can happen when users uncritically use the output of LLMs, and I spent the better part of a Baltic Sea crossing today enjoying that article.

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According to Hicks et al. (2004), “ChatGPT is bullshit”. And they make good arguments for it, too!

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I have written about playing with GAI for certain purposes, most recently to “discuss” the development of a workshop when I had no person to discuss it with. But this article has given me new language (not just the “bullshit” word*, just keep reading) to talk about a highly problematic aspect of GAI.

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Summary part 1 of “Competences in Education for Sustainable Development. Critical Perspectives” (Vare, Lausselet, Rieckmann, 2022)

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Continuing my mission of “I am reading it so you don’t have to” on a new book: Competences in Education for Sustainable Development. Critical Perspectives by Vare, Lausselet, & Rieckmann (2022). This is my summary of their Part I, and I was really positively surprised by how much I enjoyed reading the book so far, especially the critical perspectives! And very much worth reading in the original, not just my super brief and very biassed summary!

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Currently reading “Academic identities and teaching wicked problems: how to ‘shoot a fog’ in a complex landscape” (McCune et al., 2024)

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Teaching about sustainability is teaching about a (or many) wicked problem(s), and that is a challenge for teachers for many reasons. We need to, for example, teach how to work with wicked problems in general (although there is some helpful literature out there that we can start from). But when doing this, we need to drastically reconsider the traditional idea of the teacher being “the expert” (also one aspect in the “spiral of silence“). In a topic where there is no one right answer, being the expert is not possible in the traditional sense, so we need to figure out how to deal with that. How do we integrate it with who we think we are as academics, and how do we negotiate who we are with academic colleagues and all the other people in different contexts, with different agendas and values and ways of knowing etc?

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In a nutshell: “Sustainable Development Teaching – Ethical and Political Challenges”, edited by Van Poeck, Östman, Öhman (2019)

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I really really really recommend that you read this book, but if you are short on time, check out my summary posts (part I, IIA, IIB, IIIA, IIIB) or the blogpost below for a super boiled-down summary of my takeaways from the whole book. I really enjoyed reading this book, especially because of its focus on “ethical and political challenges”, which I felt completely unprepared to address before, and now feel I have a much better idea of how to tackle; and also understanding what the authors mean by it makes it all a lot less daunting. So here are the main points for me:

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