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Creature castPosted by Lauren Urban
[Entry posted at 26th March 2010 02:40 PM GMT]
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Most university professors have ideas for how to get their students excited about the science they're studying -- rarely do those plans involve claymation. Unless, of course, you happen to be Brown University evolutionary biologist Casey Dunn's student.

"Nature documentaries like 'Blue Planet' and 'Planet Earth' were a big part of what got me interested in science, and it was fun to kind of ape the best parts of existing nature documentaries while giving it a more manageable sort of modular internet spin," says Noah Rose, an undergraduate biology major at Brown who took Dunn's invertebrate zoology class.

Along with Rose and other students who take the semester-long course, about five other undergrads and graduate students mentored by Dunn regularly contribute to "Creaturecast", a blog born out of a collaborative National Science Foundation grant on mollusk evolutionary relationships awarded to Dunn in 2008. As part of that grant, Dunn needed to demonstrate the broader impact of his research, and he decided to add a blog to his lab website to help communicate his work to the general public. Rose says that the blog is "a way to get excited about animals" and that it "provides a sort of wide ranging, integrative, and aesthetic approach to nature that you can't get from a lot of sources."

Dunn uses the blog as a teaching tool in his classroom and requires students to create an episode of "Creaturecast" as a final project. Rose created a video post on marine worms as his final project last fall. He interviewed a number of people for the video, including graduate students, a microbiologist, and a local bait shop employee. The post wriggles with footage of worm movement and animations created by Rose. He says that finding the right balance of entertainment and information in the video was challenging, as it was "easy to say nothing," and equally easy to say "too much."


Read more: Creature cast - The Scientist - Magazine of the Life Sciences http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/57262/#ixzz0jNHJ3nxq