NatureNews reported yesterday that the clock for four-legged creatures has been turned back 18 million years. Anyone connected to the internet can learn this new information from the scientists who made the discovery. The video above is narrated by one of these paleontologists and the report from NatureNews sketches the facts.
As OER (open educational resources) these materials are the footprints of the future. Previous educational resources, especially printed ones like textbooks, are now obsolete on the dating of walking tetrapods. They will continue to place walking tetrapods 18 million years later than they should be on their timelines — for months or years until they can be updated and reprinted.
The NatureNews report and video are Five Star OER because they can be used as a direct interface to students from big science in almost real time. In his narration of the video, Dr. Ahlberg says: “I have been working personally in this field since the mid-1980s. I have had over 20 publications in Nature. And this is the most important paper that I have ever worked on.”
Watch the video and I think you will agree that the learning experience is worth making sure paleontology students see it. I was only #352 to watch it on YouTube. What can educators do to make sure Walking with Tetrapods gets into the learning mainstream? There is a lot we can do by optimizing the video for learning networks and linking to it robustly. Educators can fundamentally upgrade global learning by concentration on Five Star OER, and letting go of analog resources with less learning star power.
This goldnode of online learning is the work of the British Natural History Museum, where the actual Piltdown artifacts are housed. The image shown with this post is from the interactive tutorial at the museum’s website, where you are invited to compare how the fossils were examined at the time of their discovery with how they would be studied today. The museum describes the history of the artifacts, which were proven to be a fraud 40 years after they were discovered in 1912 by Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward at Piltdown in Sussex in 1912:
Their discovery came 50 years after Darwin published his theory of evolution, just when many people were beginning to think about our ancestors and question what kind of creature might have bridged the gap between apes and us. The only evidence we had of early humans was the skull cap of Java Man, thought to have lived 700,000 years ago, and the jaw of Heidelberg Man, estimated to have lived about 500,000 years ago.
The NatureNews report and video are Five Star OER because they can be used as a direct interface to students from big science in almost real time. In his narration of the video, Dr. Ahlberg says: “I have been working personally in this field since the mid-1980s. I have had over 20 publications in Nature. And this is the most important paper that I have ever worked on.”
