Introductions, Syallabus, and Logistics+Logistics+Logistics
Our first day was a very busy one! Marshall introduced the course and our guiding light: to perform a great project in ecology. After that we signed up for Blogger and MC roles, learned names, built impressively tall paper structures and then dove into our electronic course infrastructure: R, Google Drive, Slack, and Zotero.
Here are our meeting minutes:
| Time | Activity |
| 9:00 | Welcome + Goals |
| 9:15 | Where do we start + Schedule |
| 9:30 | Class Organization +Blog + Constraints |
| 9:45 | Blogger + MC signup |
| 10:00 | Name Chain |
| 10:15 | paper tower |
| 10:30 | paper tower |
| 10:45 | break - 15 min |
| 11:00 | Software (Slack, RStudio) |
| 11:15 | Software (google drive, Zotero) |
| 11:30 | Introduction to R |
| 11:45 | Introduction to R + homeworks + genAI |
| 12:00 | Citations and ref managers |
| 12:15 | Citations and ref managers |
| 12:30 | Meeting place next
week + agenda coordination |
Quite a whirlwind!
The Course - ABI 198 - Animal Ecology in the Field
Our main goal, first and foremost, is to do a research project. You (the students) are in the drivers seat, and will make the big decisions. In 10 (!) weeks time as a group we hope to perform an entire project from conception to completion as a publishable paper.
The thing that sets this class apart is it’s participatory nature. By trying to do good research, we will assume that we will learn the fundamentals of research along the way. Every aspect of the class is collaborative including conception, decision-making, and even literature searches.
The Question: Identifying a question can be one of the hardest parts of a research project, and often requires a stroke of inspiration.
The 4 elements of a great project:
- Question
- Field Site
- Organism
- Method
A successful project will require all 4, but researchers often develop projects around one of these approaches they have identified as interesting, where they have a relevant skill set, or a depth of experience.
ABI 198 Field Notes:
We will rely on this course blog to both remember what we have done, and plan what we will do. Each meeting, two class members will sign up for roles 1) The MC – runs the meeting, keeps the class on task 2) The Blogger – write down what has been done during a meeting, and write the agenda for the next meeting. The blogger will implement their agenda as the MC in the next meeting.
On notebooks: almost all scientists have one, and keep them on their person. Most importantly the notebooks serve as a repository for ideas. They don’t need to be neat, but knowing where you wrote down an idea can be invaluable weeks or months later.
Expectations for class:
Be thoughtful, present, prepared, and volunteer often and cheerfully!
The only way this class can work is through effective collaboration
among all course participants.
What make for a really great project?
- Innovative: we want to contribute new knowledge to the world. Something fundamentally new to science. Before we know something is not known, we need to be familiar with the literature and what is known
- Importance: While the realm of unknowns is virtually infinite, we will aim to do a project from which the new knowledge is in some sense generalizable. We will aim to create knowledge that is important to the broader scope of ecology.
- Feasible: What can we do with our time and resources? We are particularly limited in geography (a small slice of the central valley), time (January-early June), and financial (small budget with large ambitions)
- Communication: If the project has the first 3 attributes, then we will want share it. This involves using a standardized format of scientific paper, as well as this blog!
The (messy and surprising) process of science
The process of science is all at once, variable, social, continuous, and creative. These features do not easily fit into a 5 step process. Rather, a working group generated a more realistic and complex figure explaining how science is done:
credit: http://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/scienceflowchart
Science is rarely linear, and hopefully not entirely predictable.
Controls, replication, technology, experiments, statistics, peer review, publication. All are desirable, but not essential. Only imagination and creativity are truly essential to the scientific process. The first steps to designing an entire experiment is asking a question, and then slowly modifying it.
- asking questions
- asking testable questions
- asking creative testable questions
Three pieces of advice on science creativity
Creating science that inspires wonder, surprises, and amazes.
- find and create moments of reflection
- think and read outside your comfort zone (but only just! Working outside your comfort zone will help you learn new skills and expand your abilities.)
- Dare to be naive. (R. Buckminster Fuller)
Names and Paper Towers
We made a first pass at learning everyone's names in the course, there are 19 of us but we had impressive memory recall on our first try!
After that we spent 30 minutes team building by building paper towers out of newspaper and scotch tape. Two of our five groups tied for first place by spanning the entire 3m between the floor and the ceiling with a freestanding structure. Nice work:
A few logistics:
We invested time into digital course infrastructure by signing up for several free services (quite a list! Google Drive, MC/Blogger signup, Slack, Blogger, and Zotero). Phew! We will try our best to use smartphones and computers as tools to do better ecology this quarter.
If you are lost or have a question, ask the slack channel and we can help each other out.
Finally, we introduced RStudio and how to interact with it and complete our first homework (due Friday at the beginning of class) and used Zotero to add our first paper to our shared reference library. Everyone will be reading Ch 1 of How to Do Ecology and also be ready to describe their paper that they contributed to the group library and why they chose it.
Our next meeting is Friday at 9am and we have two agendas (good weather and bad weather). Watch the Slack channel on Thursday for our decision on starting location:
Good Weather (dress warm)
9:10 meet by the triumphant pig sculpture in front scrubs cafe: https://maps.app.goo.gl/pFAwDy5y8ZYx32RGA
9:20-9:40 solo walking tours + structured observations and questions
9:40-10:00 small group walking tours + structured observations and
10:00-10:30 whole class discussion of observations + questions, recording highlights into notebooks
10:30-10:45 walk to Shields Oak Grove
10:45-11:30 solo and/or small group walking tours + structured observations
11:30-11:45 break, individual reflection, write down ideas
11:45-12:00 small group paper discussion
12:00-12:15 large group discussion, recording highlights and emerging threads into notebooks.
12:15-12:30 set agenda for next meeting
12:30 class end - allowing time to get elsewhere from Shields Oak Grove
Bad Weather (dress warm)
9:00 - meet in classroom, but dress warm in case we get a chance to visit a local (within 10 minute walk) field site during a break in weather
9:00-9:15 small group paper discussion
9:15-9:30 large group discussion, recording highlights and emerging threads into notebooks.
9:30-11:00 reverse engineer EVE 180 papers and share key takeaways
11:00-11:15 break (be back by 11:15...)
11:15-12:00 mind mapping and sharing ideas
12:00-12:30 brainstorm ways to structure our observations - photos, behaviors, interactions, counts, etc.
12:30-12:50 set agenda for next meeting
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