Today is the second of three days of meeting with the United Nations Scientific Experts Group on Climate Change, discussing both mitigation and adaptation possibilities with the expectation of creating a succinct report to the UN in a few months.

The first day of the meeting went well yesterday, though my presentation on Rice’s Connexions tool was pushed to today. I began the day by giving a short tutorial to the two student assistants and the writer for the group on how to use Connexions, and they all love it. After lunch, I gave my intro presentation to the full group of scientists (around 16), and then tried to launch into about the same brief tutorial that I gave this morning, but it didn’t go as well. Unfortunately, at least for now, the group as a whole didn’t see some of the benefits of the tool, as they are used to using Word’s ‘track changes’ feature.

There seemed was some resistance to learning the new environment, and so, for now at least, most of them will not be utilizing the tool. Rather, they will be shipping us their documents, having us post them to our site and to Connexions, and making remote comments via email. Oh, well. Hopefully, as time goes on, they’ll come to get used to the idea of Rice’s tool, and begin to use it on their own.

In the mean time, I am still working on the Computational Science Education Spotlight newsletter. Dave Joiner will be the first spotlit individual in the newsletter. I’ll post here again as soon as it is ready for viewing online.

Posted by wmyers in work