Art Gallery Visit

- Wendy Leave a comment

Yesterday morning, we took the Science 120 students to this year’s BFA Exhibition in the university art gallery – a collection of works by students getting ready to graduate from the Bachelor of Fine Arts program. The motivation for this visit was to allow our students – who have spent the past semester designing, performing, and presenting scientific experiments – to get a feeling for the ways in which carrying out an art project may be different, or similar, to the process of science.

Our visit was graciously hosted by Art Department Chair Greg Roberts, along with three of the artists featured in the exhibition: Carley Herrera, Shannon Edwards, and Mindy Kral. The artists had agreed to speak with our students, to give them an overview of the creative process, from each of their individual perspectives.

Read more

Field Trip!

- Wendy Leave a comment
Lovely

Today, I took my Conservation Biology students on a spontaneous field trip, and it was wonderful!

We were talking about invasive species, fish in particular, and when a picture of a carp popped up in my powerpoint, I remembered that a few weeks ago, Director of Landscaping Sam Youney had mentioned to me that there are some huge koi living in the campus lakes. When I told the class that there are huge fish (2 – 3 feet long, at least) in the Art and Commencement Lakes, they were skeptical . . . so I decided that we’d go on an impromptu field trip, to see if we could find them. (We were hitting the point during lecture where I usually stop to give the class a stretch break anyway, so we just took a somewhat extended stretch break). 🙂

Read more

2017 Science Symposium

- Wendy Leave a comment
Jessi, Caroline, Jana, and Wendy
Science Symposium 2017
Science Symposium 2017

One of my favorite annual events happened today: the annual Science Symposium on campus, part of the campus-wide Symposium of Research and Creativity. I love it for so many reasons, but mostly to see my students – dressed up in their good clothes – standing with their posters and talking about the research they performed during the past year. There’s a great energy and excitement about the event . . . to be honest, I don’t even mind the last minute flurry of crises that inevitably appear as we’re all trying to get our posters ready to be printed in time for the symposium.

I’ve been involved with this event in some way from its very first year, in 2013, when it was created as a way for students in the Science 120 course (a freshman year experience for students interested in STEM fields) to showcase the independent projects they’d completed during the Spring semester. Back then, they all gave oral presentations, and the poster session was relatively small. Since then, however, the event has shifted away from being focused on Science 120, and opened up to the entire campus. Today, one of the ballrooms was opened up as large as possible, and the room was FILLED with student posters. (My Science 120 students no longer do oral presentations at the event . . . they presented posters in the main hall. We’ll be hosting a separate presentation event for them on the last day of the semester).

Read more

Investiture of Dr. Judy Sakaki, Part 2

- Wendy Leave a comment

So many things have happened this week, and I have several blog posts to write (mostly about Earth Week events). I thought I’d post this one first, since I already posted Part 1, here.

I’d never attended an investiture before, and wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, other than the fact that included a ceremony to confer the “authority and symbols of high office” to the new president, in this case a medallion presented by CSU Chancellor Timothy White. It’s a tradition that’s been carried down from the middle ages, meant to signal the beginning of a new era for the university and campus community. I was certainly happy to see this taking place, as I’m really optimistic and excited about having Dr. Sakaki as our new president, especially after meeting her face-to-face, briefly, last semester. That’s a story that’s probably worth telling, especially today . . .

Read more

Investiture of Dr. Judy Sakaki, Part 1 – Morning Workshops

- Wendy Leave a comment

Today was a special day on campus, a truly historic day, when Sonoma State University held the investiture ceremony for our 7th president, Dr. Judy Sakaki. In the morning, a wide variety of mini-workshops were held, along with a poster session, to showcase the work and research of SSU students and faculty. in the afternoon, the investiture ceremony took place in the Green Music Center. It was pretty magnificent, all the way around.

Read more

Sampling For Benthic Macroinvertebrates

- Wendy Leave a comment
Michael and Jana

I had a great morning out on the creek yesterday, taking some Entomology students out to sample benthic macroinvertebrates in Copeland Creek. This project is a true win/win: I’m getting data for a long-term monitoring study of the creek, and the students are fulfilling a service learning requirement for their biology course.

Read more

Copeland Creek Work Day

- Wendy St. John Leave a comment

After months of planning, on Saturday, March 25, a group of volunteers gathered on the Sonoma State University campus to start the “muddy boots” part of our project to restore the riparian habitat along Copeland Creek. Over the past couple of weeks, our SSU project team identified native plants that we want to keep, and today our work team pulled up invasive species around these natives, to give them the best possible chance to thrive, and to make certain they’re not accidentally pulled up during a future phase of restoration work.  (All photos © the author, except where noted).

Read more

Evernote

- Wendy St. John 1 Comment

One of the things I struggle with periodically (or perhaps I should say I “refine” periodically) is my organizational strategy for keeping track of things on my computer, particularly teaching materials. I’ve been using Evernote for several years (I adopted the system in November, 2010, and have been using it consistently ever since), and as soon as I started teaching, I set up a system for those materials. I thought I’d share a little bit about the ways it’s working for me, and not working.

Here’s an overview of the system:

Screen Shot 2017-03-27 at 9.01.31 PM
Read more

Wildlife on Copeland Creek

- Wendy St. John Leave a comment

On Saturday, March 25th, SSU collaborated with the California Conservation Corps’ Watership Stewardship Program to start work on our riparian restoration project (more details about the work we did on Saturday coming soon). One of the side benefits of working alongside the creek is encountering some of the wildlife that shares the campus with us. Here are a few of the highlights of our day . . .

Read more