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An Awesome Poster on Social Media for Space

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One of my space geek Facebook friends has recently taken it to the next level. Remco Timmerman put together a poster on social media and the space industry. If my tons of NASA posts haven't let you know already, social media has played a huge impact in furthering the public impact of space research.

Remco's poster,  "Social Media for Space",  was presented at the International Space University ISU alumni weekend poster session last weekend. According to the ISU Facebook page, "ISU provides an interdisciplinary education in the context of an intercultural and international environment to support the development of future leaders." They always have a great YouTube channel chock full of space stuff.

Check out the poster below. A higher res version is available for download here. 

 

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Darius Simmons, Trayvon Martin and Barriers to STEM Diversity

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Eyes of the Innocent

Why would a young child be interested in a field such as science where they will be consistently seen as "the other"? 

As an advocate for STEM, I'm always looking to get more folks involved in science. As a Black man, it feels the most rewarding to help contribute to more women and minorities involved in scientific disciplines.  The science space lacks gender and racial diversity, which can bring judgments, stereotypes, and reactions that are often not based on truth.  During my career journey, I've often had to worry about being the only Black person around. If I make a mistake, I have to worry about it being attributed to just me or to generalized perceptions of the Black community. 

 

Both Trayvon Martin and Darius Simmons were young, unarmed, Black teens that were murdered because of what they looked like. They were profiled as dangerous, regardless of their actual intentions, and they paid the ultimate price when confronted by someone who believed in the profile. 

It's important to realize that in the case of Trayvon, Darius, and numerous other youths, its the barrier to LIFE, not just diversity, that has proven to be impenetrable.  Just like other children who have lost their lives, we don't know what contribution to society they may have made. How many future scientists, presidents, historians, or artists are being eliminated? 

Why would a young child be interested in a field such as science where they will be consistently seen as "the other"?  Because the dream of America is to be a real melting pot, where individuals can truly succeed regardless of their background. America strives to be a place where fields such as science accurately represents the broad diversity of the population.

One thing is for sure - many activists are being created and emboldened by this horrible situation. Let's make a change. I know I won't stop reaching out to make sure that the STEM community is diverse as it can be. #ScienceLooksGood indeed.

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Tech Tips: @Anjuan @BrothaTech @TatianaKing

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Old technology 4

Tech evangelist BrothaTech recently appeared in a YouTube interview with technology translator Anjuan Simmons.  Both are men of color within the technology space that I highly respect and it's great to see them collaborating on a project. While I have yet to meet Anjuan in person, we've interacted on a variety of social platforms such as Google+ about highly intellectual topics such as the power of Mountain Dew. I ran into BrothaTech at last year's Blogging While Brown convention. He's also known for having some of the most adorable kids on the planet. 

Check out Anjuan and BrothaTech in the video below! In BrothaTech's words: "Just a few of our subjects included where my tech interest came from, diversity in technology, my “BrothaTech” brand, iOS 7, my family, and the XBox One versus the PS4."

Anjuan has a series of other videos on his website with other luminaries within the tech space - here is one with Tatiana King, creator of Love At 1st Byte. Tatiana is my go-to resource for coverage via twitter during live events. Check out the interview with Anjuan and Tatiana below!

Check them out and let them know that Shareef sent you!

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Send Your Clones to Conferences Far and Wide

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Clone troops B&W

During the weekend of June 21st, two conferences occurred - Blogging While Brown in Harlem, NY and Netroots Nation in San Jose, CA. These are both conferences that cover issues that I am interested in, and I wish I could clone myself and go to both!

 I selected Blogging While Brown, but unfortunately I had to cancel due to a business obligation.  So here I was - two conferences going on and I wasn't able to go to either.  I was pretty pissed. The only solution was to use Twitter to follow the conference and essentially clone myself so that I could be in three places at the same time.

Technology to the rescue!  I used Tweetdeck  to watch both hashtags from the conference (#BWBNYC and #NN13). I also made sure to set up a separate filter for each hashtag and the word "question". This enabled me to watch for questions that people asked (so I could ask follow up questions), as well as find when questions were being thrown out to Twitter community to answer.  

I was able to interact with conference attendees so often that some people actually thought I was at the conference! My little Shareef clones attended the conferences and people actually mistook them for me! Check out the following tweets.

Good luck with cloning yourself and attending conferences from afar!

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Make Smaller Groups? Make More Scientists

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Tutoring Services
I'm a strong proponent of science and math education, and one way that this can be further achieved is by tailoring classes to the needs of students by grouping students by how well they are doing with the material. This has to be balanced with teaching an entire class of students which can vary with abilities, but it can be done. I was happy to read a recent New York Times article by Vivian Yee detailing the history of grouping kids by ability within schools, how it fell out of favor in the 80s, and its current resurgence. Grouping by ability has its issues that have to be handled gracefully, but if we want more scientists, smaller groups are key.

I grew up in the "Gifted and Talented" program in my hometown of Paterson, NJ. Our teachers did the best job that they could in challenging us, but it was implemented poorly: a 35+ student class is likely to vary wildly in terms of ability. The best moments were breaking up into small groups of 4-5 students and working on sessions individually. This is something that I've carried into my larger tutoring sessions.

What happened to many of us in the Gifted and Talented traditional class structure? We got bored. We started to screw around. I saw plenty of good students completely fall off of the wagon. The curiosity and challenge that needs to be instilled in many of our future scientists was squashed when faced with an educational situation that doesn't challenge them. I was lucky enough to have a good support system at home to reinforce lessons, but not all kids do.

Smaller groups and increased focus will take additional resources. This level of effort will take money, time, supplies, training, and additional teachers. But you know what? We need to invest properly in our future, even if it means other things suffer. What other things? I don't know ... like a sports arena?  Check out the clip below from All In With Chris Hayes which discusses "how a city closing schools at least partly due to money is willing to invest $100 million in building a basketball arena for a private university."

Grouping is also something that needs to be done very carefully. Race and class need to be considered so that the groups are not entirely homogeneous. The groups should be very fluid, allowing kids to pass between in a structured manner.  The idea is not to completely separate students of differing ability from one another, but to augment the original lessons with deeper experiences for some groups and basic building for the others. The lesson planning should be structured so that the smaller groups should interact very frequently, since most of the basic content taught should be the same. The objective should always be to move students upward, not to lock them into these groups so that they can't advance no matter what they do (a failure of many of the Gifted and Talented, Honors, and even AP courses that I've seen).  

Is this impossible? Nope. Difficult? Definitely. And it's a long term process. But it's well worth the effort. 

For additional ideas about changing education for the better, check out Sam Seidel's book Hip Hop Genius: Remixing High School Education, along with the accompanying video below.

 

This article also appears at TWIB