Help me build a skeptical climate education portal
Students and teachers need skeptical science and we plan to deliver it.
There are many on-line sources of alarmist climate change education materials but none for the realistic skeptical view. A recent poll says that many teachers want to teach about the real climate debate, not just the alarmist side. But skeptical teaching materials are scarce, so we propose to build a climate change debate education website, with your help.
These are preliminary collections on their way to becoming part of a comprehensive and searchable database of skeptical videos. At this point each collection is for a specific scientist or other expert and more are coming, as we get funded.
Once the database is up and running all of these collections will be jointly searchable by various tags. We hope to include tags such as title, speaker, length, age, topic, as well format (presentation, interview, debate, etc.). There is a great deal of work to be done.
Most of the present descriptive tags are from YouTube. We hope to add more tags, especially the topic or topics covered by each video, as well as the format of the presentation. In many cases it is impossible to tell the topic from the opaque title.
At this time we are only including videos that feature the speaker the collection is based on. We do include videos that have other speakers, especially debates. We are not including videos about the speaker.
We have listed the videos by their length. For many educational uses length is very important, especially classroom use. For example, short videos may be best for introducing skepticism in the face of alarmist teaching, which we call gate breaking. Videos in the 10-20 minute range are often best for class use. Longer videos can be used for student projects. Some of the many videos in the hour range might be used in student theses.
Where several videos have the same length their order of listing is arbitrary, basically the order in which they were listed. One exception to this listing-by-length rule is when there is a series of videos of different lengths. These are listed in order and located based on the length of the first video.
There are some limitations to each collection, including these:
1. Each collection is probably incomplete. We welcome information about additional videos that meet our criteria for collection.
2. The age tag on each video is from the time it was posted on YouTube (until the time we collected it). This posted time may be very different from the time the video was actually made. Some have been posted years after they were made.
3. There are duplications, where different sources have posted the same video with different titles. The age tags for these duplicates can be years apart. We welcome your help in identifying duplicates. However, duplicates have their uses. For example, the total number of views is the sum of the views of the duplicates. One can also see which source gets more views, etc.
Despite these limitations, there is a lot of history here and a huge amount of content. The events videoed go back over ten years. Some issues have changed over time, but others have not. We plan to do some research on this, especially looking for timeless videos.
After many billions of dollars in climate change research, the big issues are far from settled. If anything the scientific debate today is more intense than ever. So we hope that these collections (and ultimately the searchable database) will help people understand the nature of the debate.
To support this project please donate here:
https://www.gofundme.com/climate-change-debate-educationStudents and teachers need skeptical science and we plan to deliver it.
There are many on-line sources of alarmist climate change education materials but none for the realistic skeptical view. A recent poll says that many teachers want to teach about the real climate debate, not just the alarmist side. But skeptical teaching materials are scarce, so we propose to build a climate change debate education website, with your help.
These are preliminary collections on their way to becoming part of a comprehensive and searchable database of skeptical videos. At this point each collection is for a specific scientist or other expert and more are coming, as we get funded.
Once the database is up and running all of these collections will be jointly searchable by various tags. We hope to include tags such as title, speaker, length, age, topic, as well format (presentation, interview, debate, etc.). There is a great deal of work to be done.
Most of the present descriptive tags are from YouTube. We hope to add more tags, especially the topic or topics covered by each video, as well as the format of the presentation. In many cases it is impossible to tell the topic from the opaque title.
At this time we are only including videos that feature the speaker the collection is based on. We do include videos that have other speakers, especially debates. We are not including videos about the speaker.
We have listed the videos by their length. For many educational uses length is very important, especially classroom use. For example, short videos may be best for introducing skepticism in the face of alarmist teaching, which we call gate breaking. Videos in the 10-20 minute range are often best for class use. Longer videos can be used for student projects. Some of the many videos in the hour range might be used in student theses.
Where several videos have the same length their order of listing is arbitrary, basically the order in which they were listed. One exception to this listing-by-length rule is when there is a series of videos of different lengths. These are listed in order and located based on the length of the first video.
There are some limitations to each collection, including these:
1. Each collection is probably incomplete. We welcome information about additional videos that meet our criteria for collection.
2. The age tag on each video is from the time it was posted on YouTube (until the time we collected it). This posted time may be very different from the time the video was actually made. Some have been posted years after they were made.
3. There are duplications, where different sources have posted the same video with different titles. The age tags for these duplicates can be years apart. We welcome your help in identifying duplicates. However, duplicates have their uses. For example, the total number of views is the sum of the views of the duplicates. One can also see which source gets more views, etc.
Despite these limitations, there is a lot of history here and a huge amount of content. The events videoed go back over ten years. Some issues have changed over time, but others have not. We plan to do some research on this, especially looking for timeless videos.
After many billions of dollars in climate change research, the big issues are far from settled. If anything the scientific debate today is more intense than ever. So we hope that these collections (and ultimately the searchable database) will help people understand the nature of the debate.
Donations are gratefully accepted. Make them here:
Project Director
Climate Change Debate Education
No comments:
Post a Comment