Today is the first day of a module that I help to teach called ‘Our Ocean Planet’. It is completely different from other modules I work on because 1) it only lasts 4 weeks and is the only thing that the students who are taking it do for those weeks and 2) it has very little technical content. The idea of the module is for small groups of students to pick an issue relating to the oceans and develop some kind of ‘product’ designed to communicate the issue to a wide audience. In the past we have had groups produce talks, books (for various age groups), websites and quite a few games. It’s quite a fun and interesting module to be involved with because no two groups are the same and at the outset there is no knowing what direction any particular group will take both in terms of the topic/issue that they cover and the vehicle through which they choose to communicate it.
This year I am involved in two ways. First I will be ‘looking after’ four of the working groups (each with four students), although this going to be a somewhat lighter touch than in the last couple of years as there is only one formal meeting with each group each week. Secondly, I volunteered to give a few lectures to provide some background information on the oceans, aimed mostly at the students on the module who are not covering any marine science in the rest of their course. On the module we have students from various marine science and marine biology degrees but also some from geography, geology and environmental science and also some from English and creative writing. I gave the first of my lectures this morning, titled ‘Geography of the Oceans’, and covered the general distribution of the oceans on the planet, the shape and form of the seabed in different domains (continental margins, deep ocean floor, ocean trenches and mid-ocean ridges) and talked a little about the dynamic nature of the seabed and the Earth’s crust more generally (plate tectonics, seafloor spreading). The session seemed to go okay and I was pleased that I got the timing about right (this is always tricky when giving a session for the first time despite years of experience – partly because the more teaching you do the more comfortable you become just talking around a topic and this can mean that you take more time on topics than planned).
This afternoon the students have been out on and around Plymouth Sound taking photographs of the water and, in particular, litter and pollution in the water, and tweeting their pictures and thoughts about what they see. Later on they will be analysing this data to get a look at the bigger picture.
The real fun starts in a couple of days time when the groups start to properly form and, panicked by the short timescale available to them (3 weeks), start to decide on their topics and how they are going to communicate them. It would be nice to see some novel topics this year and some creative approaches to the communication side of things. We shall see.
Tim O'Hare 