Teaching Geology, Google-Style - Chronicle.com:
Teaching Geology, Google StyleRocks, contrary to popular belief, do move. They just do it slowly, over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. The pace doesn't make for scintillating geology lectures or textbooks. So geologists Stephen Marshak and M. Scott Wilkerson have decided to goose them with Google Earth.
In the new edition of their textbook, Earth: Portrait of a Planet, due this month from W.W. Norton & Company, the two professors have added Geotours, a CD that guides students on instant virtual field trips using Google Earth, the search company's Web-based global mapping program. It's a way to see geology in action.
Students can fly over the Grand Canyon, the Amazon, or the peaks of the Alps, among other places, and dive down to get up close. Google Earth has the ability to zoom in and out. So at Mount Vesuvius, Marshak says, students can see the ruins of Pompeii and a nearby volcanic peak, and then zoom up to an elevation 10 miles above the planet's冱 surface and realize that the peak is merely a tiny cone growing from the remnants of a much larger volcanic crater. -- Josh Fischman
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