Day 4/June 7, 2011: A Real Learning Day

A great day for learning and thinking. Three main topics were covered.
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The works of Dr. Charles Abramson (co PI, Oklahoma State University). He discussed his research and philosophy of learning and comparative psychology. He explained some exquisite and elegant experiments that he has done. His work has great appeal to me as a high school science teacher as he does not usually need or use elaborate and expensive equipment. As a teacher I have learned that you can do high level research with your students using simple equipment accompanied by well thought our experimental design. I have included some videos of our work with him today (see below).


http://psychology.okstate.edu/faculty/abramson/abramson.html#main

http://psychology.okstate.edu/faculty/abramson/


Here are many honey bees that are tethered to a modified bullet casing. The bees are ready for the upcoming conditioning demonstration

A student is conditioning the bees. The syringe has an odor that is released when the experimenter plunges it. That odor is the conditioned stimulus (cs). The cs is given to the tethered honey bees. Then the bee is immediately given the unconditioned stimulus (us) which is sugar water on a q tip. The bee extends her proboscis to the sugar water that is the unconditioned response (ur). Eventually many bees will exhibit a conditioned response (cr). That is the bee will extend it proboscis when it receives the odor from the syringe only. Before the odor was neutral it did not cause a response in the bee. The bee has learned to associate the odor with the sugar water.

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Dr. Susan Spencer (OCU, English Department) gave an intriguing lecture on a variety of topics. She presented the geography, history, poetry, politics and literature of the region we will be visiting in a fascinating way. She talked about Homer and the Trogan war and what it will be like when we visit Troy shortly. She described the area of Pergamum and its library that competed with the great library in Alexandria, Egypt at that time. We learned about the importance of the tulip in Turkish and Muslim culture and history. She prepared us for the importance of Atatuk, a revered leader who changed the course of Turkish history last century. It was an overwhelming experience, she gave out handouts which I will be reading over to get a better understanding of the area that we will be going to.

Dr. Charlotte Simmons a Mathematics professor also at OCU gave a talk about Pythoras of Somas. The person who is given credit for the mathematical concepts related to the right angle triangle. Of course we learned that the idea was discovered and used way before him. What we did not know was how and where he lived and how he cultivated a community that developed ideas and philosophies that have been passed down today throught the writings of Plato and Aristotle. I am sure many know about this but it was not familiar to me.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pythagoras/

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