Cross-posted as a UMW Blogs feature as well.
Professor Michael Killian’s “The Bio Blog” is a pretty impressive endeavor that collects and categorizes the posts of over 70 students in his Introduction to Biological Concepts course (Biol 121). Every student maintained his or her own blog and their posts were tagged according to the section they were part of, which allowed for re-publication, aggregation and categorization of posts in the main blog by section number, student, as well as most recent posts. But, more importantly, the experiment provided a space where students could actually work through the biological concepts they were learning about using the innumerable resources all over the web.
An excellent example is the “Bio Tech Rap” song titled “Transformation” performed by the Notorious GFP (available below) which was linked to by a student in order to illustrate the process of transforming DNA. The ways in which students are re-framing and performing these complex biological concepts within a pop culture context is truly fascinating. Also, don’t miss the myriad bio jokes, here is my favorite.
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