I was reading a popular OER Astronomy textbook yesterday. Long sigh. "Why did it take so long to..."? Regrettably not. "How very long will it eventually take to...", write an intro Astronomy textbook, that doesn't bungle the color of the Sun? I still don't know of a single one. With true-color in a leading image, and in illustrations. With no misconceptions about yellow stars, or scattering to yellow, or blackbody color, or color perception. With explicit mention of stellar classification color's non-perceptual white-point of blue Vega. With correctness from clarity, not from ambiguity and omissions. Such a text could have been written any time in the last few decades. People have been suggesting it. So how many more decades will we wait? It's a mistake to confuse systemic communication, coordination, and incentive dysfunction, with "people don't care" (as the interventions needed are different)... but they do superficially look so similar.
Similarly, atoms are taught very poorly, even by the incoherent standard of chemistry education content. I'm currently trying to decide whether to create a little exemplar of better, to speed up too-long conversations about transformative content improvement. "Atoms are little balls"; interactive accurate simulations; real pictures. Consider those pictures. There are lots of wonderful images and videos of atoms... on peoples' drives. Not in papers, for space. Not on lab websites, for why bother, when few visit. Rarely on youtube. A few show up in talks, also space constrained, also rarely on youtube. So to achieve a minimal standard of "when introducing a thing, show the bleeping thing", would require a lot of mucking about, asking after images, educating about copyright... sigh. At least accurate electron simulation is getting easier with time, with open-source python replacing expensive commercial replacing good-luck-with-that fortran. And yet, for how long will student understanding and careers suffer from rubbish content? One more year? 5? 10? 25? More?
As with individuals, society has a great deal of "yeah, I really should do that; been meaning to; but I just haven't gotten around to it yet".
> As with individuals, society has a great deal of "yeah, I really should do that; been meaning to; but I just haven't gotten around to it yet".
Most of it caused by "who's going to pay for it? I can't afford to do it on my own". And, sadly, the need to make money at every step of the way is what causes a lot of these problems. You wouldn't have to educate anyone about copyrights when dealing with pictures of atoms if there weren't a couple layers of rent-seekers in between you and the photographer.
> a minimal standard of "when introducing a thing, show the bleeping thing"
One thing I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone do yet is a kind of "continuity of zoom" image from everyday scale to nanoscale. Imagine a video (or better yet, a frame with a slider you can drag back and forth yourself) depicting an object - say, a metal sheet, or a fly's wing, or something - that starts in 1:1 scale, and then the zoom level gradually increases, going through overlapped perspectives of camera, optical microscope, ... [whatever they use in the middle] ... up to a scanning microscope, so you can watch as the image is being zoomed all the way to the atomic level. With no jump cuts in between. Would do wonders for people's sense of scale and understanding of what the world is made of.
> I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone do [...] continuity of zoom [...] overlapped perspectives
Years ago, when React was a mere virtual dom library with delusions of grandeur, I did a prototype of a customizable zoomer. Images, videos, maps, molecule viewer, and stacks of such. Zoom and drag around. So folks could create custom zooms for whatever topics they cared about, with whatever media they could find, with whatever concern for copyright they felt appropriate. In part to create an incentive to surface media from peoples' drives. It was a slog, and failing to focus on staging through an MVP, I burned out on it.
Now, with web dev far more mature, and browser 2D css far less buggy, an MVP would be rather easy for someone to do. Basically take a list of image urls paired with meters-per-pixel values. Here's an old simple images-only user test, just in case a hands-on motivates someone: http://www.clarifyscience.info/part/ZoomB?v=A&p=Gaax2&za=Hrr... .
I dropped the ball on that one. Long contact list of professors who wanted an email when it was usable. :/
But apropos our topic, our communication and coordination, tooling and culture, is missing something, when valued progress is allowed to have half-decade bus factor ones. Dropped-ball factor ones?
That's what the company I work with tries to do (among other things) https://youtu.be/ojW9d9HIQC8?t=15 Although it's really challenging to do well in realtime in google daydream grade VR
If one were unconstrained by development effort and sales, concerned only with deep transferable understanding, I wonder what one might explore with representations that were less cartoonish, more physically realistic?
Directly rendered electron density? With "bonds" implicit. Plucking, distorting, ripping, and assembling molecules grabbed by their nuclei. Or poked with others. With realistic and explicit time/space scale and dynamics. Captures of ab initio simulations, with their rich complexity and ambiguity.
Nuclear density, with alpha clusters, liquid drops, interesting shapes, and again, a hands on realistic dis/assembly and messing around.
It's pragmatically hard now. But arguably possible. So now, or years from now, there exists the question of how might it be used, how much might it help. How hard should we be trying to make it happen some years sooner rather than later. But we don't seem institutionally set up to explore such questions.
> google daydream grade VR
Yeah. I'm so very looking forward to the next year or three of hmds, especially AR. Wait, "in realtime"? I'm mostly bottlenecked on angular resolution. What challenges are you facing?
Haven't seen that. All the recent examples I saw were vector drawings (Flash animations, then HTML5 ones, and their renditions on YouTube).
Still, I assume that that 1968 video was mostly fiction and artist's imagination between ~ 10^-5 and 10^9. With current-era tech, we should be able to go down to 10^-8 with a real shot of a real object.
It’s by Ray and Charles Eames and is considered to be pretty groundbreaking. But, yes, we know a lot more and have more imagery regarding the small scales in particular than we did 50 years ago.
> There are lots of wonderful images and videos of atoms... on peoples' drives. Not in papers, for space. Not on lab websites, for why bother, when few visit. Rarely on youtube.
My approach to this, when I was in such a situation, was to put them on Wikipedia with the most liberal license possible. Assuming someone else hadn't already put a better picture, that is!
And from there, they made their way into other academics' presentations and suchlike - exactly as I intended.
Good approach. But that's a path, a pipeline, with a lot of steps, and potential for friction.
You've learned and been persuaded about what was originally a hypothetical benefit. Curationally sorted through a pile of media and made tradeoffs and selections. Learned about copyright and licenses, and had misconceptions about them addressed. Sufficiently resolved any concerns about its impact on you selling some media to publishers. Made a decision. Learned about the pragmatics of uploading. And executed.
The difficulty of facilitating that process varies enormously. Instant email responses, to contemplating the ethics of joining a line of graduate students following their professor like ducklings, struggling for a moment of attention. Self-spun-up on copyright, to repeatedly not getting it, to 'I sent you the image, just use it and cite me, this lawyer stuff is bs'. 'Here's an image' to 'let's make arrangements for you to come by and choose one of them'. A graduate student available and motivated to catalyze the process, or not. And so on. It can be trivially easy, or "this is just not going to converge any time soon".
It might be nice to have better infrastructure, to reduce the energy barrier here. Something more than libraries' scattered "creating OER" docs. Or someone for whom such community facilitation is their focus.
Similarly, atoms are taught very poorly, even by the incoherent standard of chemistry education content. I'm currently trying to decide whether to create a little exemplar of better, to speed up too-long conversations about transformative content improvement. "Atoms are little balls"; interactive accurate simulations; real pictures. Consider those pictures. There are lots of wonderful images and videos of atoms... on peoples' drives. Not in papers, for space. Not on lab websites, for why bother, when few visit. Rarely on youtube. A few show up in talks, also space constrained, also rarely on youtube. So to achieve a minimal standard of "when introducing a thing, show the bleeping thing", would require a lot of mucking about, asking after images, educating about copyright... sigh. At least accurate electron simulation is getting easier with time, with open-source python replacing expensive commercial replacing good-luck-with-that fortran. And yet, for how long will student understanding and careers suffer from rubbish content? One more year? 5? 10? 25? More?
As with individuals, society has a great deal of "yeah, I really should do that; been meaning to; but I just haven't gotten around to it yet".