Nelson Reading

I feel like this ties in with when we talked about reading the lines, between the lines, or beyond the lines. I agree with Eamon, this would be a great reading as an introduction to the course and talking about the work that you and Nancy do. It is interesting to look at pedagogy as something that was at one time rejected by academia. As a student you are inclined to believe that teachers do things that are the best for their students but as it turns out they are just as susceptible to stubbornness and politics as the rest of us. I also like when Nelson talks about the transition between the second two modes and the acceptance of uncertainty and how that ties into preference. It is like that day in class when Basil talked about his theory of how the Rocky Mountains were formed, what he was saying seemed reasonable and based on other information he's given us and his profession I trust him so I was inclined to believe what he was saying which puts me in the "Baskin Robbins" mode of thinking on that particular issue. Even though it was not really his intent there was not too much comparison with other ideas (mostly because it was a tangent).

In that section he makes two other points I appreciated. Firstly, his point about carbon dating and how science is not trying to attack religion about its new earth ideas it is saying that no matter where those ideas come from they do not stand up to empirical evidence. And that wrong ideas sometimes have good uses. I was really interested in what he said about the surface of lakes (the meniscus?) and the curvature of the earth. They were just really interesting points to think about. 

In the second transition section I could see the benefit of discussing hypothesis testing and paradigm choice and mixing and how that applies to things we have previously learned in science classes and the information we are learning now. 

As I said before, I think this article would be interesting to read at the beginning of the semester it would sort of justify Nancy and your approach to the course and why you do some of the things you do. You could also refer to some of the parts throughout the course as they apply to what you are teaching. You could probably get away with just assigning the first part of the article but it's really not that hard nor long of a read so it wouldn't be too much of an issue to assign the whole thing.