Good presentation

I got up early this morning and was on the road by 6:30 to go to Worcester. I stopped for gas, which used up all my money, so I stopped along the masspike to get money in case I needed to buy lunch or pay for parking. As it turned out, no unanticpated expenditures were required.

I checked in, found my room, and set up with plenty of time. A representative of MEES introduced himself and said that he would introduce the session for me. I had enough time to create a quick automatic slideshow of the images from the class for while people came in. I picked "Habitat, habitat" by Roger Tincnell to have some music. The song runs two minutes and I must have heard it 5 or 10 times while waiting for time to start -- I don't think I'll need to listen to it again any time soon.

My talk started just a few minutes late. The audience was enthusiastic and asked good questions. I spoke for a few minutes, did the activity with the Eristalis larvae, ran through the rest of the talk, and did the Google Earth activity. I ended up 5 minutes over. The last 10 minutes were just a bit rushed, but I felt like things wrapped up nicely.

For the Google Earth activity, I had selected 10 places around the world and printed out a screen capture -- all at the same scale. I gave each pair of people one place to look at with rules and a transparent overlay to measure area. I tried to pick areas that were relatively comparable: some housing and some surrounding land -- most with some agricultural land. It really amazing how striking the differences are between the giant agribusinesses in the Midwest and the tiny fields in China and Haiti. In Quebec, there are very long fields that reach way back away from rivers -- so that every land-owner had their own frontage once upon a time, I suppose. In some places you can see the radial design of early cities, with paths or small roads between villages, in some the old design with a newer grid superimposed, in others nothing but grid itself. The little slice of Japan was particularly interesting with intensive bands of agricultural land interrupted with satoyamas. I let each group report out and then highlighted any patterns I had observed that they hadn't mentioned and talked a bit about how I would use the activity if we had computers or had more time to actually collect measurements.

After the Google Earth activity, I presented my acknowledgments and then had a black slide. I put that up and then said, "So. Do you want to know where those places are?" There was an enthusiastic roar of approval. But I pointed out that from a teaching perspective, its really something to consider. Once you tell people "the answer", they often quit trying and my goal as an instructor is to keep them motivated to figure things out for themselves. But I had prepared an extra "secret" slide at the end with where each of the places was from. It worked well as a rhetorical trick and if I hadn't told people, I might not have made it out of the room alive.

After my presentation, I visited the exhibits and hung out for a while to decompress. After lunch, I decided to just head home. There was a presentation about invasive species that had sounded interesting, but it had been canceled. And I was feeling tired and a bit out of sorts.