Sitting on the ferry back to Sweden after two weeks in Germany, I listened to a great podcast episode on the podcast Update Hochschule (in German) on the topic of social media. @frauforschung Lisa Niendorf, whose content on Instagram I’ve enjoyed A LOT lately (and other notable German Insta in the same niche, Prof. Dr. […]
When LLMs were new, a participant in the Inclusive LU course I was teaching did a project where they explored using AI to generate podcasts about scientific articles to make them more accessible to the students. They generated a couple of podcasts on different articles and discussed the quality in terms of correctness but also […]
I loved the book “Designing and Facilitating Workshops with Intentionality” by Tolu Noah (2025) so much when I read it last summer! I have very fond memories of sitting in my parents’ garden with the book, working through it by applying everything to a course I was preparing, so when I saw the invitation to […]
I am thinking about this for students in year 4/5 in the context of a sustainability course where we challenge them to question a lot of assumptions that they have met throughout most of their studies. We want a course-wide code of conduct, and then group contracts within each project group.
For a course I am currently planning, I had pitched using the “inner team” (“Inneres Team” von Schulz von Thun) as a method to reflect on personal and professional values and which ones come into play in different situations. I was thinking about using them on paper in a session where everybody works on their […]
Related to whether we teach in a fact-based, normative or pluralistic way, there is also the issue with teaching about topics that might be controversial (hello again, sustainability, and my post earlier on conflicts and resistance), and how to deal with that. After recently having heard his work on “teaching controversial issues” summarized as “don’t […]
I am currently playing with FeedbackFruits as a plugin in our LMS, Canvas, mainly because they offer social annotation features to documents and videos and I am super curious about those, and then I am generally very interested in asynchronous online teaching and learning and how to make it a joyful experience. So the FeedbackFruits-hosted […]
In March, Rachel Forsyth and I were invited to give the keynote at Stockholm University’s teacher conference 2026. The conference theme was “teaching for democracy and sustainability”, and about a year before the conference, we ambitiously announced we would be talking about “Teaching for tomorrow — trust, agency and sustainability in higher education”. Now the […]
We want new engaging web content for the Inclusive LU project, and I wanted to try how easy it really is to use AI for coding (turns out: very!), so I have built a page that — at first glance — looks exactly like this post, but when you hover different sections, things start happening. […]
This morning, I ran a workshop for university teachers called “Teaching for Sustainability: Practicing for a sustainable future through sustainable pedagogies“. You can look at all the slides here, or see some of them below together with a quick summary of what I said about them. Most of what I am writing below I have written […]
Initially, we were very excited to have the opportunity to produce a MOOC to be run on one of the biggest course platforms in the world — to gain visibility and status through being hosted there, to be able to use a platform that handles participant accounts and automated certification through quizzes and rubric-based peer-assessment, […]
Several of the advantages of asynchronous learning really came through for me while watching a recording of the Centre for Online and Distance Education’s webinar on “the power of asynchronous learning” (watch on youtube). First — that I even had access to a recording of this seminar and had not just missed it because I […]
When the picture in the featured image (a screenshot from the presentation of Alasdair Skelton’s presentation of his book “Our time: Finding Hope in a Climate Crisis“, watch the recording on youtube!) came up yesterday at the beginning of my lunch break, I felt it in my stomach. I don’t know anything about the coastline […]
I quite regularly share my favourite podcasts on learning and teaching, but now it seems it’s time to share some of my favorite blogs! Despite me blogging myself, I don’t read blogs as regularly as I used to (mostly because I don’t want to spend even more time in front of a screen, and podcasts […]
A couple of years ago, I decided that I would only initiate new projects that, in one way or another, contribute to making the world a better place. That has lead to my focus on Teaching for Sustainability. My understanding of Teaching for Sustainability is very wide — it includes both my research interest around […]
On Wednesday, Robert Kordts (awesome colleague and my co-teacher on the last Teaching for Sustainability academic development course) and myself tried a new-to-us format: A “Learning and Teaching in Higher Education” chat on Bluesky! The format is simple: We wrote a blog post (see here on their website, or read on below) and prepared six questions […]
The other day I got to go on one of the coolest study trips ever (well, at least on the coolest that I have been on after I stopped going to sea… :-D) — my colleague Ivar and his bridge building course visited the Öresund Bridge, and the artificial island Pepparholm, where the bridge connects […]
I recently watched a really interesting seminar by Kari Steen-Johnsen (UiO), who is working on the impact of digitalization on democracy. She gave an AI Lund online seminar on “Concern and Enthusiasm for AI Across the Globe. The Role of Trust” (recording here).
This is quite an intriguing article! Feeling more related (more belonging?) might make us feel less autonomous (except with people we are super close with)? If, motivated by self-determination theory, we try to give students opportunities to experience both autonomy and relatedness, and for feelings of relatedness/belonging, we force/encourage students to work with people they […]
I just listened to episode 500 of “Squiggly Careers” on “Why Bringing Your Authentic Self to Work Is Bad Advice“. They explore the concept of “effective authenticity […] where you project a version of yourself that resonates with others whilst maintaining a semblance of genuineness“. This sounds a bit off-putting at first (“a semblance of […]
Yesterday, we had the third meeting of our “Teaching for Sustainability” course, where participants present their early work on the projects they will develop throughout the rest of the course, and give feedback to each other. Since we had so many presentations and I didn’t want to take time away from discussions with peers, I […]
Today, we tried a new format of our “Transformation Thursdays” (come-as-you-are informal lunch meetings where colleagues who are interested in Teaching for Sustainability can join me and Terese to chat about Teaching for Sustainability. No preparation required, but you are welcome to bring questions and topics if you like!) — first of all, it was […]
This is a really interesting article, both because of the recommendations they give and because of the “asynchronous, anonymous, and discussion-focused” method they use, “tailored to best fit the needs of autistic individuals“!
I’m always scanning the horizon on teaching for sustainability courses online to make sure I a) keep myself up-to-date with the state of the art, and b) don’t re-invent the wheel with our upcoming MOOC. I had been waiting for this one to come online for a couple of weeks and when I checked today, […]
Talking Learning and Teaching is quickly becoming one of my favourite podcasts! This morning, I really enjoyed the episode with Erik Brogt on “Pedagogical Content Knowledge in the Third Space”. Actually, I was really surprised how much I enjoyed listening to it; I usually get bored pretty quickly by academic developers trying to figure out […]
When I first put together my Teaching Consultations Menu (see below; inspired by Noah (2025)’s awesome book), I discussed how I really liked the menu because of how easily it conveyed how different offers related to each other (starting out with reflections that can stand for themselves or lead into “main” consultations or projects, dessert […]
In Hamburg, there is a “ship greeting station” called Willkomm-Höft (“welcome point”), where every ship is greeted going in and out of the port. I have always loved that place because in addition to a “welcome to Hamburg!” or “hope to see you again soon!” announcement and the Hamburg song, for each ship they tell […]
I recently watched the TED talk “Dare to disagree” by Margaret Heffernan. It is brilliant in itself and the message to “dare to disagree” is super important, but what especially spiked my interest was her mentioning a practice in PhD defenses in the Netherlands that I had witnessed myself a long time ago, but since […]
My most faithful guest blogger Kirsty writes about why things that are far outside of our direct experience are so hard to imagine and thus so hard to understand (and teach).
I was super excited to get the notification that a recording of the presentation “Accessibility and inclusion in digital learning” by Marie Leijon had been uploaded to our Learning Management System! When Marie presented in the LU “Accessibility Tuesday” series last year, she provoked a lot of thoughts in me — many about the room, […]
I recently wrote about the framework of Teaching about, with, in, through, for Sustainability (which I had found in a bluesky post by Kyle Bartlett and then adapted to my own context and purpose). I have since used it in a lot of conversations and found it extremely useful to address different aspects of what […]
On Thursday, I was lucky enough to be invited to attend the workshop “How to deal with climate anxiety as teachers and researchers?” co-organised by the Environmental Politics Research Group (EPRG) at Lund University and the Research Group on Green Politics (REGROUP) at the University of Copenhagen, that brought together very interesting presentations, first on research […]
Last night, I watched Gert Biesta on the Talking Teaching podcast (youtube video embedded below, above some wave watching pics! ;-)) and it is giving me language and images to use when talking about the purpose of education.
27 curious teachers joined Ola Leifler‘s demonstration of large-scale social simulations (“Megagames”) yesterday. Can you imagine playing a game with 180 people in individual roles for a full day? Me not really, but at least a little bit more after yesterday’s demonstration. On the image above you see part of the setup: There were three […]
As I am writing the summary of the second part of “becoming an everyday changemaker” (summary of Part I here), I am trying to apply what I am reading, and intellectually agreeing with, to my life. Habits are so hard to break… Anyway, I have known for a long time that cold dipping and swimming […]
Some time at the end of last year, I came across something on Marcus Luther’s BlueSky that stuck with me. It was something related to his slow reading of “Becoming an Everyday Changemaker“, and reflections on that and how he applies it to his own teaching. I then ordered the book and followed his podcast […]
When my friend Robert sent me the link to a MOOC on “Paths of Transformation: Sustainability in Higher Education” (in German only, sorry!) yesterday, I jumped at the opportunity to take it. Here are some reflections.
I’ve been feeling inspired by Karolinska Institutet’s “Principles for Quality Education“, and I would like to develop something similar for my own work, and the group I work in. I think it is important for me and us to articulate what we believe is good education, mainly so we figure that out for ourselves, but […]
Yesterday, I attended the Grand Seminar on “Exploring the complexities and potentials of environmental communication” organised by LU Sustainability Forum, BECC and MERGE at Lund University that my friend Terese had invited me to, and I am glad I did!
Today, I spent my lunch break in an online presentation on “the importance of the room” given by Marie Leijon from Malmö University as part of the “Accessibility Tuesday” series at LU, and I am very glad I did! So many things to think about!
This afternoon, we had the second seminar in the “Inclusive Classroom” course, this time on “learning support for students with disabilities at LU”. Emma Carlsson and Philip Johansson visited us and told us about their work at the Disability Support Services (which are a unit at the Study Support and Learning group within Lund University […]
New academic year, new courses starting! Today, the “Inclusive Classroom (UDL)” course, that I am involved with together with Lotta Åbjörnsson and Håkan Eftring. My role is mostly to give guidance and advice for projects and reports towards the end of the course, but I’m attending the other meetings, too, just because it is always […]
Mark Carrigan recently asked quesions for a reflective teaching practice on his blog, and one really resonated with me: “How do I cultivate a sense of joy, passion, and purpose in my teaching, and how do I share that with my students?” This question seemed extremely relevant and here is my attempt at figuring out […]
This morning, I participated in an online seminar on “Introducing Sustainability Competencies”, run by my awesome colleagues Steven Curtis and Terese Thoni. Here are my reflections (and if you are looking for a summary: sorry, not finished writing that yet, stay tuned!).
Today, I tried two new “liberating structures” in my “teaching for sustainability” course: First the “Wicked Questions“, where we surfaced some “opposing-yet-complimentary” strategies that we need to pursue simultaneously to succeed, and then we worked towards “15% solutions“, with a focus on small changes that we have the freedom and resources to implement now. And […]
Yesterday evening I joined a group of 14 teachers who met up to learn from, and support, our colleague, Ester Barinaga, who wanted to try a new game for teaching purposes and needed guinea-pigs to test it on. The topic was money: contrary to popular belief, money is not at all neutral, and what currency […]
How about giving books about waves or the ocean to your loved ones? We have an illustrated book about waves specifically for kids, or a photo guide to wave watching for anyone — both available in English or German! Or if you don’t have access to puddles, rivers, lakes, or the sea, or would like a […]
In last week’s seminar on inclusive teaching, Louise Morreau, psychologist at the student health services at Lund University, gave an inspiring presentation and used such a great image to talk about how we can think of the brain’s functions, that I have to adapt it for myself right away (because that is how MY brain […]
I recently watched “the myth of average” by Todd Rose, and he makes the most convincing argument for not designing teaching for “the average student” in hopes of that making it work optimally for all students, but instead looking at the extremes and making it work for everybody (you see where we are going here […]
Today marks the 10 year anniversary of my blog, “Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching”! This blog is a pretty detailed documentation of my development as a teacher over the last 10 years. Now that my job is “to teach teachers how to teach”, is there any value in keeping the historical record of how I […]
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 […]
For all of you who don’t fancy wading though wave watching and kitchen oceanography blog posts in search of those posts on teaching and learning in higher education (I usually summarise articles, podcast episodes or conversations I found useful, sometimes post new slides I create, or share methods that I saw, heard about, or tried […]
For all of you who prefer reading a short-ish blogpost over listening to a nervous Mirjam on a recorded video call on “Career pathways combining education with oceanography“: Read the post below to learn my personal story on the prompt “Many oceanographers find educational activities a rewarding part of their career, where education can range […]
![[photo] Picture of Mirjam smiling in the camera to show how happy it would make me if this showed up on Twitter](https://mirjamglessmer.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/IMG_0168-scaled.jpg)
It’s been in the making for a while, but I am super excited to announce that I will be joining the Geophysical Institute at the University of Bergen as an adjunct associate professor! Here is a video I filmed to introduce myself at the institute’s meeting today that I sadly couldn’t attend. I am very […]
Strong west winds aren’t the best for traditional wave watching on the east coast, but we got beaches in places where we usually don’t have them! Pretty exciting, especially since I’m on a home office day (luckily the trains to work don’t run regularly because of the storm, so I got to squeeze in some […]
We’ve had a busy couple of weeks at #DryTheory2JuicyReality with our new rotating table, our seminar presentation last week, attending BOOT in Düsseldorf, and more, all in the name of science communication. Super nice to see our efforts recognized in print: Our project was featured in the university newspaper! Read about us here in German and […]
For #CTDAppreciationDay, I am re-sharing a video that Sindre Skrede (find him on twitter or vimeo for many more exciting pictures and movies!) and I made in 2011 (!!). I am still super proud of this work because I first narrated it in Norwegian (after only having lived in Norway for a couple of months and having started classes only […]
The other day I was thinking about fun experiments to do on a Birthday party for kids (won’t spoiler here whose kid that might be, and also, coincidentally, it was on Jenny’s Birthday! Happy Birthday, Jenny! :-)) and I realized I never posted the “burning soap bubbles”. Probably because I still can’t think of a […]
Anticipation is rising, just one more sleep and then it’s finally here! The networking event for online science communicators that Alice (see her blog, twitter, Instagram — see, we are serious about online science communication!) and I are organizing here in Kiel! Check it out here and make sure to register if you want to join […]
When I take pictures of drops, they look like the picture below (which I showed in a blogpost yesterday), but I see tons of physics everywhere. Ring-shaped waves! Drops jumping up due to surface tension! Interference pattern of overlapping waves! And much more. When Wlodek Brühl takes pictures of drops, they look like below. As an […]
I am so lazy (or so efficient?) that even my doodles are multi purpose. Like this one, which is one of my three favourite ocean-related quotes I promised to illustrate to celebrate my blog’s 6th Birthday, and it’s also my submission to September’s #scicommchall on drawing the inspiration to your work. Kim suggested I should draw […]
As part of my blog’s 6th Birthday celebration, I asked you to submit your favourite ocean quotes so I could illustrate them for you. This is what Benjamin suggested (and I love it!). P.S.: The quote might be by Rumi, but in total, my internet research was inconclusive as to the original source. Since I […]
Celebrate with me by sending me your favourite ocean-themed quote and I will illustrate my three favourites and mail them to you as postcards! To motivate myself to start sketching regularly, I bought myself this new pen with a soft tip. Which I am still getting used to, as you can see. But I’m having […]
Usually when we talk about waves on this blog, we talk about surface- or sometimes internal waves, but my waves almost always oscillate vertically. Today, we’ll mix things up a little: Rossby waves are waves in the horizontal plane. They exist for example as oscillations on the atmosphere’s jet stream. In order to understand what […]
When I meet new people and am asked the compulsory “and what do you do?” question, I sometimes struggle to answer. I am wearing so many different hats! Depending on the context, I might be in the role of programme manager of GEO-Tag der Natur, a consultant in Higher Education and/or Science Communication, a science […]
I don’t want to do the actual statistics, but it feels like most of what I post is completely dependent on people being able to see the images I post. Of course, that’s kind of the idea of the wave watching that I do: To show you waves the way you might encounter them, too, […]
For me, participating in the Science in Public conference was so inspiring! Not only because of the conference itself, but also because of the people I met there. In a conversation about wave watching and how it can be done with kids, Felipe suggested to ask the kids to make wave models for them to […]
Remember how Joke, Torge and I were working on building an affordable, home-made rotating tank to use in ocean dynamics teaching only last weekend? That session was inspired by a proposal that Torge submitted a while back, and which now got funded by PerLe, Kiel University’s project for successful teaching and learning (German abstract here). This is really exciting, it […]
Do you remember how I started experimenting with an app that made sketches from photos to see if reading waves might be easier from sketches than from photos? (Btw, approximately half of the answers on whether or not sketches are easier to read than pictures were along the lines of “YES!!!! DEFINITELY!!!” and the other […]
On living the dream — and getting there, through the nightmare (ok, not quite as dramatic, but you get the idea) I’ve been a fan of Marie Forleo‘s for many years now, watching all the youtube videos she puts out, re-listening many of the episodes on her podcast, forever sending links to friends who absolutely […]
5 years of “Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching”! Today I am celebrating my blog’s 5th Birthday! 5 years of documenting my “Adventures in Oceanography and Teaching”. That feels both like an enormous amount of time, while at the same time it feels like only yesterday that I started one evening on the spur of the […]
We are excited and grateful for a great opportunity for continued collaboration that has recently presented itself: Elin won a Bjerknes Visiting Fellowship 2018 for me to visit her and the rest of her team in Bergen for a month in 2018! We have several goals for that visit, but the main one is to […]
Remember we did an expedition learning course in Kiel bight a while ago? I wish I had known about Google Earth Engine then already. Even without signing up (which I will do as soon as time permits) you have access to their timelapse: a global composite of satellite images, which results in a cloud-free 32-year video of the Earth’s surface. […]
Absolutely fascinating to watch: The German Maritime Search and Rescue Service’s tug driving up on one of their larger vessels. Good thing I volunteered to watch all our equipment at the Port of Maasholm when we were driving back from the teacher training at Lotseninsel and everybody else was on a later boat… ;-) I only […]
You may or may not have noticed that my usually very regular blogging has been sporadic at best for a while, and that currently I am blogging a lot more again. Do you want to know why? You might know that I am currently working in science communication research. And one of my current research […]
On a recent flight to Copenhagen (actually, to Bergen, but that’s another story) I happened to sit with a great view of one of the plane’s propellers. And it struck me how asymmetrical the dark areas caused by the moving propeller above and below the axis looked! I guessed the explanation would have to be […]
Wow, three years ago on this day I started this blog, and this blog post is post no 477. Can you believe that! And even though I had planned to take the summer off blogging, you see how that worked out — I just had so many pictures that I wanted to share that I didn’t blog for […]
I recently went on a trip to Heligoland, Germany’s only island that is far away from the mainland (70 km in this case). It was a great trip, and I know you’ll be reading about it for some weeks to come :-) Today, we’ll just do the touristy parts, though, and get into the oceanography […]
Today I am excited to share with you a guest post about a super cool tool for geoscience teaching and outreach that I will definitely be using in the future (if only to decorate my office until I get the chance to teach again): Home-Made Geophysical “Globes” By Barry A. Klinger The Earth is a sphere which […]
Why is moist air lighter than dry air? This seems pretty counter-intuitive at first, but then really isn’t. I promised to do a post on why moist air is lighter than dry air a long time ago, and wrote it about a year and a half ago (!), but never published it. So here we go […]
If waves spread equally in each direction along the water’s surface, then how come ships (or ducks) have wakes that are just those long lines of waves and not circular at all? So. Kids are typically familiar with what it looks like when you throw stuff in the water (for proof see below: my godchild on a […]
Some time ago, I wrote two blog posts on the importance of playing in outreach activities for the EGU’s blog’s “educational corner” GeoEd. Both have now been published, check them out! Here is the link on EGU’s website (here) and in case that ever stops working, it is also available on my own website (here […]
Last week my colleague Uta and I had the pleasure to act as a judges in the largest German youth science competition, “Jugend forscht“. Jugend forscht has been around for a long time, and I’ve been familiar with it for quite some time, too: My sister participated a couple of times when she was a […]
I’ve recently been lucky enough to be involved in the production of the MOOC “One Planet — One Ocean: From Science to Solutions” by the excellence cluster “Future Ocean” in Kiel. Well, only in one chapter, and also there only in the after-production, but it was still interesting enough (I learned so much, and it […]
A vision for open door classrooms. Or maybe a reality in some places already? At the very least something to aspire to! While browsing the materials connected to the #MOOCMOOC, I got a bit side-tracked and came across a slide show by Jesse Stommel on Open Door Classrooms. That slide show brought up a lot of points that […]
For the best hands-on outreach experiences, just provide opportunities for playing! Have you seen my blog post over at GeoEd on four steps to designing and implementing hands-on outreach activities? Go check it out! And at the end of this month I’ll walk you through those four steps using one of my favourite experiments as an […]
Combining the adventures of an Antarctic research cruise with exercises and experiments for school pupils. Are you still reading Elin’s blog? You definitely should! Many new experiments and exercises up there every Monday, plus great stories about life on board a Korean research ship!
Are you interested in learning how to design instruction? Then there is a MOOC that might be really interesting for you! The “MOOC MOOC: Instructional Design” started yesterday, and for three weeks presents readings to different topics which are then to be discussed on twitter as well as on participants’ personal blogs, facebooks, or other […]
A slightly different post today to mark the 400th blog post on “adventures in oceanography and teaching” (can you believe it? In words: FOUR HUNDRED!). Since this blog has become such an important part of my life — let’s talk about career choices :-) I’ve gone through a lot of phases in what I am […]
As you might know, I never planned on starting a blog. I just started it on a whim one day, and have been hooked ever since. When I re-read the article “How to make any behavior addictive” by Marelisa Fabrega recently, it resonated with me on several levels: It is a neat framework and I am […]
Sorry guys, I don’t have the time to come up with great hands-on experiments right now. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot to discover (and a lot of haikus to write! Are you getting annoyed yet? ;-)) It’s probably all inspired by the awesome poster Joke gave me of the Climate Change Science […]
I find it really hard to believe that I have written about my adventures in oceanography and teaching for two years already. And what a journey it has been! It all started out when I wanted a place to document my ideas for cool experiments, teaching methods, or just pictures of oceanographic phenomena, all of […]
Have you ever wondered how to best explain Hovmöller diagrams? You know, those diagrams that have time on one axis and then longitude or latitude on the other, and that show the property we are interested in in color? Often used when people want to look at wave propagation? I recently did wonder about how to […]
I really want to recommend a blog post by Paul T. Corrigan that I recently read on “Teaching and Learning in Higher Ed”: When students don’t answer a question, what does the awkward silence mean? We’ve all been there: We’ve asked a question and nobody replied. Worse, even, they avoid our eyes. What can we […]
Because I have a blog! Can you believe that this is post no. 300 on “adventures in oceanography and teaching“? That means more than 25.000 views, consistently more than 50 views per day over the last weeks (most coming from the US, followed by Germany, the UK and Norway; I had no idea so many people […]
This is a skill we need to learn a lot more systematically than we currently do! I have recently started working on a small teaching unit on the design of experiments. And I realized that the training that I received on that matter was really not sufficient and I am pretty sure that’s the same for […]
Folks, before we are all off to our well-deserved breaks (and I am starting my blogging break early because, you know, life and work and that kind of stuff): Take a moment to head over to this post and leave a comment to set me a challenge: What kind of ocean/climate phenomenon would you like […]
Why you need a good storm in order to perform with a group. We’ve all made the experience of having to work in groups. Sometimes it is fun, sometimes it is less fun. But you can actually influence how well group work is going to work out, and a first step is understanding that there […]
Really! Let me know what demo you would like to see! It’s officially almost Christmas and I am sure you are looking forward to a bit of a break over Christmas and New Year’s as much as I am. But do you know what I am most looking forward to? Having the time to play […]
Where do I even start??? A very helpful concept, which is completely contrary to how most people approach course planning, is “backward design”. Instead of looking at all the cool experiments, the awesome, fun materials, the best case studies, we first look at the learning outcomes we want to achieve with our course. From those […]
