Sunday, January 11, 2015

New video questions—Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey


I've updated the "Cosmos in the Classroom" page to include question sets for episodes 1–12 of the Neil deGrasse Tyson-hosted Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.

The Cosmos page still has all the question sets for Carl Sagan's Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Those pages have been updated to include name, period, date info in their headers.

So now there are sets for episodes I-XII of Sagan's Cosmos and episodes 1-12 of Tyson's Cosmos. Each series has 13 episodes, but my intent is for students to watch those final episodes without question sets.

Cosmos in the Classroom

My own classroom practice is to follow each unit with an episode of Cosmos. (Sagan's in Physics and Tyson's in AP Physics 2.)

I'm disappointed that Sagan's Cosmos was been removed from streaming video at Netflix and Hulu in September, 2013. That prohibits me from using these lessons as "flipped classroom" assignments.

I own the DVD version of both "seasons" of Cosmos. But I've noticed differences in the episodes on DVD compared to the episodes that stream on Netflix. Some are trivial and insignificant. But one invalidated a question I wrote in an early draft of the Episode 4 question set.

I hope someone out there is cataloguing all the "disc vs. streaming" differences. I'm not even sure why they exist at all. But I haven't delved deeply into the issue, as so many other projects beckon.

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