Part 2: How I Used Social Media to Learn about Ice Mountains on Pluto - It's All Twitter's Fault

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to."
"I don't much care where –"
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go."

-  Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

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If you read my post about MOOCs, you may have gleaned that I like astronomy. I also use Twitter a bit.  It turns out, so do a lot of astronomers.  I mentioned following Dr. Mike Brown, the professor for one of the MOOCs I took; I also follow Dr. Adam Frank who taught the other one. Following them, led to, in no particular order:

• Dr. Katie Mack
• Emily Lackdawalla
• Dr. Sarah Horst
• Dr. Pamela Gay
• Dr. Phil Plait, the Bad Astronomer
• Dr. Alan Stern
• Dr. Alex Parker
• Alexandra Witze
• Astronaut Chris Hadfield
• NASA
• Mars Curiosity Rover
• Hubble Telescope
• Kepler Telescope
• Astro Pic of the Day
• NASA New Horizons

You probably heard we flew to Pluto recently.  Well, technically we flew PAST Pluto, snapped lots of pictures, and waited for it to phone home, fingers crossed all the time.  As a self-admitted astronomy nerd, this was pretty cool for me (and apparently for the New York Times, since it made the front page, above the fold).

New Horizon's closest approach happened to occur right after the San Diego Comic-Con, one of the largest conventions for people who like sciency, comicy, sci-fiy, nerdy things...like me. That weekend, my twitter feed was filled with the #PlutoFyBly and #SDCC2015 hastags.

  

It was all very interesting, but not yet obsession inducing, until Dr. Brown tweeted this:

Wait, what? Tholins? Dahell are tholins? Is that like The Tholian Web? A quick google search took me to Wikipedia (not pure evil, Wikipedia is a good place to start a search for information, just never a good place to end it).  There I learned that tholins are strange organic compounds not found on Earth, but formed when organic (carbon-based) compounds with which we are familiar, like methane, break down and ionize, and then reform into new compounds - tholins.  We don't see them on earth because of the extreme conditions needed form them to form...conditions like you might find on, oh, I don't know, Pluto, maybe?

So, I took a look at the references for the Wikipedia article, and found an article from NASA, Pluto: The 'Other' Red Planet, which gave a more detailed explanation about how tholins formed and why scientists believed they would find them on Pluto.  That led me to poke around on NASA's website for other information...and gave me a few more Twitter accounts to follow, as well as Instagram and YouTube and Google+ and blogs and ... down the rabbit hole I went.

So, that brings me to the point of this blog (finally).  Down the rabbit hole is the metaphor I use for that experience of learning something that excites you so much, that you get lost in the search for understanding.  Like Alice chasing a rabbit, you chase after that knowledge, following it wherever it leads you, which might start with Wikipedia, take a stroll through Twitter, leave you stranded at a blog for a while, tease you with a few YouTubes or some live newsfeeds...all of those sources of information you have at your fingertips.

I ended up spending all afternoon reading about Pluto and...other stuff.  I found a post by Emily Lackdawalla that explained what to expect with the flyby with links to all sorts of other things. I went to the Bad Astronomer's blog to read his very understandable explanations of what was going on. I bookmarked NASA TV and its feed on Ustream as a back up to watch the press conferences. I loaded Persicope on my iPhone so I could watch Pamela Gay's post-press conference explanations of what was found.  I even loaded a free Pluto Safari app on my phone that keeps me updated on the latest findings from our little dwarf planet.

The next day I watched two press conferences, one for when the fly by occurred and one later that night when Pluto phone home.  It was exciting to see the scientists learn that the New Horizons probe was still working.  Even more exciting were the press conferences in which they described some of the photos and data coming back. NASA and the New Horizons team were releasing information through social media to everyone at the same time they were telling the traditional media.  In fact, they released that now famous picture of Pluto and its heart on Instagram before the news conference - social media got it before traditional media did.

While watching the phone home conference, I posted to Facebook.  An old college friend of mine who majored in computer science asked about the communication protocol with New Horizons. I was able to find information on Emily Lackdawalla's blog that included a link to a Google Books entry about the probe...including the communications protocol.  Yes, I was trying to pull my friends into the rabbit hole with me.

The photo on the front page of the New York Times was discussed at the NASA press conference.  I doubt I'll ever forget when the scientists discussed that photo at one of their press conference.  Their excitement was contagious! They explained that they found no impact craters in this area, which meant the surface had to be relatively young, which meant there was resurfacing going on.  The mountains were actually mountains of water ice, the only type of ice strong enough to maintain those massive shapes (methane and nitrogen ices are too soft).  Something had to heave that ice into that formation.  Those two things meant there was probably some sort of geological activity, which meant the interior of Pluto might be warmish...which goes against what we know about planet formation!  In other words, I was watching new science being made.

I spent a lot of time looking at pictures. In my Science of the Solar System MOOC, we learned that planetary geologists look at images of solar system objects to try to find formations that look similar to thing we find on Earth, because here we can do observations  to figure out how they formed and extrapolate those findings to similar formations on other objects.  In other words, if you see outflow channels on Mars and you realize they look like the Channeled Scablands of the Northwest United States, then you can make an educated guess that the same type of flooding event cause both, which means at some point, there was probably flowing water on Mars.   So I tried applying what I learned in that class to what was happening in the real world (that world, of course, being Pluto...).

In other words, I was doing just what I hope my students do to learn.

And then I had an epiphany.  I learned all this stuff without ever opening a textbook or stepping inside a classroom.  Everything was quite literally available to me at my fingertips, either on my laptop or my iPad or my iPhone...and sometimes all at once (there's nothing quite like watching a press conference on your computer while refreshing Instagram on your tablet and Twitter on your phone). I didn't read a chapter in a book and take a multiple choice quiz on it.  I found something that excited me and learned about it. And I'm still learning about it.

So that brings me to the big question, and what I'll try to answer in this blog...how do I inspire my students to take their own trips down the rabbit hole?  What can I, as a teacher, do to change my pedagogy to one that will help encourage my students to be lifelong learners?  So stayed tuned if you want to learn more about things like social media in education or flipping classrooms or cell phones in the classroom.  Follow me down the rabbit hole. I don't know where we'll end up, but I hope it will be an interesting journey.