From: Andrew Fraknoi <fraknoi@admin.fhda.edu>
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 1999
Occu pying most of [my] time lately has been working on the second edition of "Voyages through the Universe," the textbook I write with Dave Morrison and Sidney Wolff (Saunders College Publishing.) We like to think of it as the first astronomy text with bad jokes, which makes it all the more remarkable of how well it has been received, especially in California. New edition will be ready this fall.
We're planning a major Silicon Valley Astronomy Lecture Series at Foothill College, cosponsored with NASA Ames, the SETI Institute, and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. The first speaker will be Geoff Marcy, discussing his planet discoveries, on Wed., Oct. 13, 1999.
At the January meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, I was asked to give a short review talk on the national scene for teaching astronomy to non-science majors. As part of this talk, I put together an annotated resource list of web sites that may be especially useful for college astronomy instructors who want to assess or improve their teaching. This resource list is now on line at: http://www.aspsky.org/html/astro/instsites.html If you have suggestions for other sites I should be including on the resource list (which will be given out at a number of other meetings and workshops in the coming year), I would be most grateful if you could let me know. Note that this list does not cover astronomy subject matter, but only the teaching of astronomy.
I'll also mention that the Astronomical Society of the Pacific has recently redone its web pages on astronomy education (at all levels). The new organizing page is:
http://www.aspsky.org/subpages/education.html
and it contains a number of other educational resources that may be of interest to college teachers (including sections on women in astronomy and debunking astrono- mical pseudo-science.)