The Southern Illinois Paleontology Project Journal

Entry 1

Carbondale, IL
Monday, September 18, 2000

Text written during the first week of our collaborative paleontology project.

 
"Getting from point A to our destination will be an interesting process. Drop in to check on our journal from time to time."

Bob DeHoet, Museum Education Coordinator, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

Today I met for the first time with Mary and Daniel, two students from Lincoln Middle School (Carbondale) working with the University Museum and Department of Geology on a year long collaborative project.

In the initial phase of this project, Mary and Daniel will design Internet web pages and a museum display to tell the story of an earlier paleontology project. In the second part, they will join others in developing hypotheses on the geologic history of a local site.

In our meeting today, I talked with Mary and Daniel, who are students in Marilyn Hughes’s Academically Talented (AT) class, about putting together the story of a paleontology project that took place in Spring 2000.

In the Spring 2000 project, the Museum's Adjunct Curator of Geology (of the SIUC Department of Geology) and I worked with students from from Harvey's Basics In Geology program, Ms. Hughes’s AT class, Bob Baker’s 7th grade from Giant City (Carbondale), and three 2nd grade classes from Carruthers School in Murphysboro coordinated by Carruthers’ 2nd grade teacher Shirley Kreinert. Blanks Murphysboro High School science class was also involved.

The focus of the project was a trip to collect and analyze fossils from a field site, and display the products of the collection and analyses on the internet, in the schools, and at the Museum.

I showed Mary and Daniel paleontology specimens that had been collected as part of the project, and photographs that had been taken to document students collecting specimens and other information in the field. I also gave Mary and Daniel an essay written by AT students in the Spring 2000 which contained hypotheses about paleontology specimens from the project field site.

We concluded the meeting by discussing ways in which Mary and Daniel could begin to gather information to tell their story - these included interviews with students and facilitators who took part in the Spring 2000 paleontology project and personal research on specimens collected on the project.

The journal you are reading now will be updated every couple of weeks, and will document Mary and Daniel’s progress. The pages will include talk from discussions, bits of research, interview quotes, and other information that will ultimately be brought together in completed webpages and a final Museum display.

End Week 1

Bob DeHoet
Museum Education Coordinator
E-mail: drhoet@siu.edu

Harvey Henson Adjunct Curator of Geology, University Museum
Geologist, Department of Geology
E-mail: henson@geo.siu.edu