Cool Toys Pic of the day - About Writing Books in New and Different Ways
Yesterday I was talking about Google eBooks. Today I stumbled into something absolutely magical, and it includes a few Google book and non-book components, but neither begins nor ends there.
It began when I received a message from Second Life via a science group there about something called "Embryo Physics." What?, I thought, and logged in to get the notecard explaining matters. The notecard was even more intriguing, beginning: "Embryo Physics is a regular weekly seminar series for scientists from around the world held at Silver Bog Research. Beginning this week we will start presenting, one chapter per week, a new book “Embryogenesis Explained” being written by two of our regular contributors, Dr. Richard Gordon and Dr. Natalie Bjorklund-Gordon. This book is designed to explain embryogenesis to the general public. It is our hope that even those without a formal science background can and will participate and give us feedback. On other words, everyone with an interest in biology is invited to attend! We wish to receive feedback on the book as we write." It turns out that Dr. Gordon is the author of the well-known and highly regarded book The hierarchical genome and differentiation waves. (See the picture of the cover from Google Books at the end of this post.) That book was thoroughly scientific, academic, obscure, packed to the gills full of jargon, and highly regarded. He wants to make the same ideas a tad more accessible. I went to the beginning of the lecture in Second Life, and stayed until the last second before I had to dash downstairs to our own "Textbook of the Future" brainstorming session. The second picture for this blogpost is from Second Life & shows the last bit I could catch. In this picture, Natalie Gordon (who I assume is a relative of Dr. Richard Gordon) had begun the lecture and was continuing with slides from their vacation at Yellowstone. With this image she was illustrating a few core concepts of the evolution of embryogenesis by showing how you can actually see with your own eyes the difference in biota in colored bands as the distance from the edge of the hot springs increases. Wow. Wow. The combination of using personal stories to illustrate scientific concepts is always powerful for me. The language used to this point in the lecture had been a very nice job of adapting concepts to plain language. I know enough about plain language to appreciate the challenges of what they had done. As I was leaving they had just broken out a couple four-syllable words. Natalie had said that her philosophy was that if you REALLY know what you are talking about, any science concept can be explained to a 5th grader. I continued exploring more about them and this project after I arrived at my next meeting, downstairs from my office. I found they have a web site: Embryo Physics:http://embryophysics.org/ ... and a Google Group:
http://groups.google.com/group/embryophysics?hl=en ... as well as their Second Life space!
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Silver%20Bog/84/32/60 Here is the list of lectures from their earlier effort in 2009:
http://embryophysics.org/Lectures2009.html This isn't a "Cool Toy" per se, but it absolutely does use a lot of different cool tools and toys to do something profoundly original. Now, I am just waiting for the slides to turn up in Slideshare ...
