BRINGING HOMETOWN RELEVANCE TO GEOSCIENCE COURSES AND OUTREACH ACTIVITIES

Increasingly available on-line data can be effectively used to bring a “hometown touch” to geoscience courses and outreach activities. This is particularly valuable at the introductory level where it instantly engages students in course material, but is effective for the advanced student as well. For example, many people have never really thought about the topography of their hometowns and are fascinated to examine topographic maps that cover the area in which they grew up. The theory of plate tectonics becomes real as they see GPS data tracking near real-time plate motions of where they live. Flood frequency analysis is suddenly relevant when analyzing discharge records of familiar rivers. This is a valuable perspective for the geoscientist and non-geoscientist alike.

Applications of the hometown perspective include: 1) Hometown topography: obtain topographic maps of hometown areas and use them for basic map exercises. Maps can usually be inexpensively ordered from a variety of sources or printed from downloadable digital scans. 2) Hometown stream projects (http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/intro/activities/25138.html): choose streams of personal interest, and download data in order to analyze annual discharge patterns and perform flood frequency analyses. 3) Hometown plate motions: track plate motions using high-precision GPS data from hometown regions (http://sideshow.jpl.nasa.gov/mbh/series.html). 4) Hometown seismic data: examine recent and historical patterns of seismicity in hometown areas (http://earthquake.usgs.gov/ or http://pods.binghamton.edu/~ajones/) or analyze recent earthquakes using data from seismic stations in or near hometowns (http://rev.seis.sc.edu/ or http://www.seis.sc.edu/gee/about). 5) Hometown climate change: download temperature records from hometown areas and analyze changes over time (http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/station_data/).

At Princeton and other institutions that draw participants from a wide geographic area, learners get the added benefit of being able to compare characteristics of each other’s hometowns, thereby increasing the range of the group’s geographic and geologic experience. And even if participants are from similar areas, instructors can draw upon contrasting examples from other regions.