Abby's E1 Reflection for the 2011 EPSRI Congress (Thermal Energy)

I really enjoyed both presenting and hearing other presentations this week. I was struck by the huge variety of observations and the impressive amount of information gleaned in just two weeks. I began my presentation with a couple of ideas that I had been mulling over during my two weeks of observation. I first talked about Teacher Analysis vs. Research Analysis. I learned that when doing research, there is a tendency for me to look at the teaching itself and analyze its effectiveness. I found out from Rachel that this seems to be a tendency that is common among teachers, and that it is not all bad. However, I noticed that here, the research tries to refrain from judging and opinion. It is encouraged to take the teacher out of the system and take judgments out. I have to retrain my brain a bit to not judge immediately and make claims about how I would do things differently if I was in control of all classrooms everywhere. Here is the slide that I used:

Next I talked about Research for Teaching and Learning vs. Research for Understanding. While I recognize that there IS value to doing research just for the sake of understanding and learning, my motivation at the moment lies with doing research to find understanding that WILL help students and teachers in their classrooms in a more immediate fashion. I want to help make a change in the education system as well as learn how students learn physics. I am still working on this idea and I really appreciate the help I have had from Amy (and others) in understanding the differences and similarities between these two motivators. It was also interesting to hear that many of those in the room have shifted back and forth between them.

Finally - I got to the "meat" of my talk - looking at the value the teachers place on thermal energy. I interpreted the word value in two ways. First, that some of the teachers tended to reject the idea that thermal energy could account for an equivalent loss in kinetic or potential energy. Their impression was that 5.0 Joules of kinetic energy seemed to be much more energy than 5.0 Joules of thermal energy. Second, they saw that thermal energy was worth less to humans than other forms of energy and at times deemed it a "useless" form of energy.
I think that the above statement is far clearer than my slide I used in my talk - and I realized during the talk that I could have been clearer than the below:

From here, I showed two videos about the discomfort surrounding the first kind of value of thermal energy. I previously blogged about the first video here, but then I showed a shorter clip of this video where Tim talks about using thermal energy as a Hail Mary Pass. (A Hail Mary Pass being used here as a long shot, last ditch effort when there are no other options left!) I find it intriguing that Tim and others don't like the idea of so much GPE going away into heat. Thermal energy (or “heat” as it is used in our class) seems to be this energy that is worth less to people. Below I think it is important to see that Ingrid, and the group in general, find the body heating up as acceptable rather than before when the energy was suggested to just go away as heat. It seems to be easier to accept when the body (something we can relate to and sense more easily) is suggested.

Then, when talking about Thermal Energy being a lesser energy, not worth as much in terms of its usefulness, I used the video from my blog about Shrinking People here, and Amy's example from E2 about thermal energy being a dead end here.

Finally I ended the talk (over my time) with this slide:
I feel like it was an incredibly good thing for me to put together a presentation for this Congress. It really helped me to organize my thoughts and see how much had happened in two short weeks for me. My learning curve was steep and I felt like this was a great experience for me to understand how video can enhance research.

In hindsight, I believe I definitely should have used more transcriptions in my videos and I should have done an introduction about my background (Where I Have Come From) - I completely left that out! I wasn't sure what to put into the talk or how official to make it and knowing what I know now, I would have put more pictures into the talk as well. I also worry that I repeated too many things from the blog that had already been stated, but I felt like for me, it was the first time I worked to tie together more than one video into one coherent idea...or two!