Cephalopodcast - The Ocean Podcast

Talmadge Memorial Bridge, Savannah, GA

I spent the last week in Savannah, GA, attending the 2008 National Marine Educators Association conference. In addition to doing a presentation for work, I also co-presented a session on ocean blogging with Rick MacPherson. It was a well-attended event, and I want to thank all the participants and Rick for making it a success.

I hope to post the audio and images from the presentation later this week when I get into an area with better bandwidth. We structured the presentation around the interrogatives. We both spoke about what is ocean blogging. Then Rick covered the who and why while I talked about the how, when and where. Regarding the latter, I noted that one place where you won’t find much information on ocean blogging is NMEA’s own ocean portal site, The Bridge.

The Bridge is a growing collection of the best marine education resources available on-line. It provides educators with a convenient source of accurate and useful information on global, national, and regional marine science topics, and gives researchers a contact point for educational outreach.

The Bridge is billed as: “An ocean of free teacher-approved marine education resources.” Given the protean nature of blogs, I understand why they might largely be absent from the site’s attention. But in the future I hope there will be a way of vetting blogs and other social networking sites for inclusion on some level.

Trolling Under the Bridge

Sites are added to The Bridge by moderators called TROLLS. This stands for Teacher Reviewer of On-Line Learning. It’s an odd acronym, and I suspect the folks at NMEA were thinking more about the piscatorial sense of the word than the more recent, negative connotation that has gained currency on the Internet. There is also the third meaning of the word, the legendary creatures that live under bridges and prevent passage of unsuspecting travelers. Again, usually a negative connotation, but I could see how it works.

So the other day I was looking for a catchy name for my Thursday feature, the one that covers the confluences of science education, environmental education and education technology. I’ve decided for now to call this section, Under the Bridge. It’s a cheeky reference to NMEA’s Web site. I hope to cover resources that might not otherwise make the cut on the official site*. It is also an incredibly oblique homage to another group of educators I work with, the ones at Worldbridges. They are an informal group that regularly webcast about many issues, especially those related to education technology. And they too have a habit of referring to their collective efforts as -bridges.

*I am a member of NMEA but not directly involved in The Bridge. This feature is my own effort and not affiliated with NMEA’s awesome outreach program.