Have people stopped trusting science? The data tell a surprising story

Have people stopped trusting science? The data tell a surprising story (Nature, 1 July 2026) shows something that I did not expect - see figure below.

• The about 20 percent drop for Republicans beginning around 2018 makes sense: Thanks Donald & Fox News!
• But, what causes the about 10 percent drop for Democrats starting around 2020 & the about 5 percent drop for Independents starting a few years later? Is that just a methods artifact due to COVID?

Ellis: Your Trusted & Experienced Teacher Colleague

This is pretty cool: imagine you have 24/7/365 access to a very experienced colleague who is also up-to-date with the latest research and best-practices when it comes to learning differences and mental health. Well, Ellis is supposed to be just that & (of course) is powered by AI.

• Ellis: Your On-Demand Classroom Companion
• Ellis Product Walkthrough 2026 (YouTube)
• https://www.askellis.org/

It's difficult to imagine that this could work...but a) it may be better than nothing and could b) be useful in Higher Education where the teachers (= professors) usually have little or no training or experience with such issues.

Ethics in GIS

Interesting read: Enlisting AI to Mainstream Ethics in Spatial Data Science Education

Here's a new-to-me term: Ethics Across the Curriculum or EAC - the idea that ethics should be woven throught the entire curriculum from beginning to end. Here are some resources:

• The Guide to the Geographic Approach  contains 15 open-access modules & some of those include ethical issues and questions.
• Now there is GISEthics.org and its collectiom of 21 case studies.

What to do in-practice? Three things: 1) use a formal case study analysis, 2) use a disucssion forum prompt, and 3) include an ethics-related learning objective. How you may ask? Try the AI-based Ethics Case Study and Discussion Prompt Creator and create yourself a case study that aligns with your course content, a customized discussion forum prompt. and even your learning objective for the course syllabus.

Here's a complete case study from Claudi.ai: When the Map Has a Memory

Poster Design: #evenbetterposter

Tired of the old 3-column or 4-column for your scientific poster? Try #evenbetterposter instead!

The Kitzmiller v. Dover Quiz!

Pretty cool: The Kitzmiller v. Dover Quiz

More about this topic here: https://ncse.ngo/articles/260

ChatGPT Edu

This - or something like that - is what we need at Westfield State University:

• AI Tools @ CSU
• ChatGPT Edu @ CSUN

Reimaging The University

No lectures, exams, essays: inside a twenty-first-century university is a terrible article about NMITE, a super-elite engineering college in the UK. Nothing of what they are doing is innovative at all - they can pull it of because they have 110 students and 50 staff and one degree: engineering. Good for them & their private funding, but none of this is scalable to public higher education. This article would have benefited from more context & nucance: as-is it reads like a NMITE press release or advert.

The future of universities

The future of universities is an excllent special in Nature. The focus is obviously on 'typical' universities and not the 'job mills' that are typical of public higher education in the USA such as state universities or community colleges.

GIS Certificate @ CCSU

Looks like they are running a 3-course GIS Certificate:

• Beyond the Map: Advanced GIS in Action
• GIS Advanced Certificate course
• GIS Essentials Certificate - Course 1 Fundamentals

They seem to have an Introduction to GIS & an Advanced GIS course - not sure what the 3rd course required course this.

Back in the days: a Bachelor's degree was 120 credits, the Gen-Eds were 40 credits, the Major was 40 credits, the Electives were 40 credits, a Minor was 18 credits,  a Certificate was 12 credits, and 1 full-semester course was 3 credits. Yes, there were some variations, but that's about what you could expect a normal public college or university.

Now the trend is towards 90 credits for the Bachelor's degree (completed in 3 years), Minors with 15 credits, and Certifciates with 9 credits.

Carl Sagan (1995)

 “I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…”

More @ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

IRB

Yep, the IRB process is both necessary & tedious.

• Excellent video here: Do you need an IRB??
• IRB Decision Tree (U. Wisconsin La Crosse)

LUDIA

Combine UDL & AI & you get LUDIA = Your AI-powered UDL partner.

Padlet!

Ah yes...we all used Padlet during COVID, but many of us (certainly me) have stopped using Padlet now that we are F2F again. But Padlet still works great, for example:

• Video Discussion Board where the students post one relevant video for a topic, for example ozone & global warming.
• Or, do the same with figures.
• There is also a Video Recorder where they could record a brief video of themselves talking into the camera.

Unfortunately, the free version of Padlet is limited to just 3 'padlets'...not sure how you could in-practice use that for daily teaching.

The Teacher’s Guide to Tech (2025)

The Teacher’s Guide to Tech (2025) is now available!

Climate Change Resources: Teaching & Learning

These teaching & learning resources frpm the Council on Foreign Relations are pretty impressive: https://education.cfr.org/climate-change-resources.

• Science
• Mitigation
• Adaptation
• Policy
• Energy
• Geoengineering
• Lesson Plans (highscholl & higher education)
• Simulations

Science!

 

NCSE's Climate Change Story Shorts

Climate Change Story Shorts lookl useful - here's some information from the NCSE:

NCSE's Climate Change Story Shorts provide a new, teacher-friendly take on Next Generation Science Standards storylines. These shorter instructional units with modular activities and optional sidequests engage students in the three dimensions to resolve one or more common misconceptions within one to two weeks of instructional time.

• More information here.
• Climate Change Story Shorts

Evolution vs Creationism

New polling from Gallup (22 June 2024): Majority Still Credits God for Humankind, but Not Creationism. It is pretty wild (or scary?) that only 24 percent 'agree' with the scientific opinion.

College Admission Rates

Nice data viz from Flowing Data: College Admission Rates for Where You Went to School. Here's the data in-case you want to try your own data viz: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data/.

Become a data viz SUPERSTAR

This loks promising: Become a data viz SUPERSTAR is a 5-part YouTube series from the folks @ storytelling with data to become, well, a data viz superstar. Could be usefuf for teaching data analysis and data viz.