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January 4–7, 2014
Monday afternoon
2014 Winter Meeting Plenary
Location: Grand Ballroom B
Date: Monday, January 6
Time: 2–3 p.m.
Philip Metzger
Preparing physicists for the industrial revolution of space
by
Philip Metzger,
NASA’s Kennedy Space Center
Advances in robotics during the coming decades will revolutionize the human experience in
many ways. I believe this will include explosive economic growth through space mining and
industry, producing at least a thousand-fold increase in economic productivity per capita. The
result will begin to approach what the Russian physicist Nikolai Kardashev has called a Type
II civilization, one that has gone far beyond a single planet but is still centered on a single star.
Physicists are already playing a central role in this nascent revolution and will continue to do so
as it progresses. This economic expansion in the solar system should also provide unprecedented
opportunities for doing physics on a grand scale. Teaching physics is therefore more important
than ever.
Session DA: Panel – What Can
MOOCs Do for Us?
Location: Salon 5
Sponsor: Committee on Educational Technologies
Co-Sponsor: Committee on Research in Physics Education
Date: Monday, January 6
Time: 3:30–5:30 p.m.
Presider: Danny Caballero
Massively open online courses (MOOCs) are quickly becom-
ing a standard offering by many colleges and universities
seeking to expand their brand and reach more potential stu-
dents. But, what can MOOCs do for us—physics educators?
In this panel, several MOOC authors will share their experi-
ences with their own courses and discuss how they think
MOOCs as well as other open online resources fit with our
educational goals. That is, what can we learn from MOOCs
to help us in our own teaching?
Invited panelists:
Louis Bloomfield
(Virginia, How Things Work)
George Djorgovski
(Caltech, Galaxies and Cosmology)
Terry Matilsky
(Rutgers, Analyzing the Universe)
Daniel Seaton
(MITx, 8.MReV)
John Stewart
(Arkansas)
Session DB: Innovations in
Research and Teaching Astronomy
Location: Salon 3
Sponsor: Committee on Space Science and Astronomy
Date: Monday, January 6
Time: 3:30–5:20 p.m.
Presider: Julia Olsen
DB01:
3:30-4 p.m. State of the Art Astronomy: An
Experiment in Online Learning
Invited – Matthew Wenger, Steward Observatory, University of Arizona,
Tucson, AZ 85721;
Chris Impey, Steward Observatory, University of Arizona
Astronomy: State of the Art is a seven-week online astronomy course
initially offered during spring semester 2011. This course was the first
astronomy class offered through Udemy, an online learning platform.
The target audience of Astronomy: State of the Art includes high
school science teachers, college astronomy instructors, science center
and planetarium educators, amateur astronomers, and members of
the public. Over 5000 students are enrolled and it continues to grow
weekly. This presentation will detail how the course is structured, how
we use social media and live discussions to interact with students,
and plans for a second version of the course that will be conducted
concurrently with an on-campus “flipped” course for registered
undergraduate students.
DB02:
4-4:30 p.m. A New Model of Misconceptions for
Learning Challenges in Cognition*
Invited – Stephanie J. Slater, CAPER Ctr. for Physics & Astronomy Edu-
cation Research, Laramie, WY 82070;
Despite the substantial body of “misconceptions” literature, the
development of an actionable theory of conceptual change to mitigate
misconceptions continues to be less than satisfying. We offer a new,
action-oriented cognitive model that allows us to operate on students’
learning difficulties in a more fruitful manner. Instead of binning
erroneous student thinking into a single construct, which leads to
prescribing only a single instructional strategy, this new model sug-
Presider: Mary Mogge
