WaterUnderground

Teaching & Supervision

Water Underground has a new home on the EGU Network Blogs

Water Underground has a new home on the EGU Network Blogs

The newest addition to the Network Blogs is a groundwater nerd blog written by a global collective of hydrogeologic researchers for water resource professionals, academics and anyone interested in groundwater, research, teaching and supervision. Water Underground was started, and is currently led, by Tom Gleeson. It is the first blog to be jointly hosted by the EGU Blogs and the AGU blogosphere. W ...[Read More]

FloPy: A Python interface for MODFLOW that kicks tail!

FloPy: A Python interface for MODFLOW that kicks tail!

Authored by: Kevin Befus – Assistant professor, Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering at the University of Wyoming Groundwater modeling is getting better. Models are becoming more sophisticated with simpler interfaces to add, extract, and process the data. So, at first appearances, the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) recent release of a Python module named FloPy for preparing, ru ...[Read More]

One hell of a great groundwater textbook now available free

One hell of a great groundwater textbook now available free

‘Groundwater’ the seminar text book from Freeze and Cheery (1979) is free in pdf now…just follow the links here. This text book is almost as old as I am and important parts of modern hydrogeology are rusty or non-existent (like hydroecology amongst other topics) but it is still lucidly written and useful.  I routinely send students to read chapters so I am happy that it is now available free. Kudo ...[Read More]

The new and exciting face of waterunderground.org

The new and exciting face of waterunderground.org

by Tom Gleeson I started waterunderground.org a few years ago as my personal groundwater nerd blog with the odd guest post written by others. Since I love working with others, I thought it would be more fun, and more interesting for readers, to expand the number of voices regularly posting. So here is the new face of the blog… What is the new blog all about? Written by a global collective of ...[Read More]

Making guidelines for graduate students

Making guidelines for graduate students

I strive for effective, compassionate supervision and I clarify my goals, approach and expectations in my guidelines for graduate students (available here, from McGill’s best practices in supervision). As I wrote, most students enter a relationship with a thesis advisor without a clear idea of what they can expect so I compiled this handout to give you some idea of what I expect of you as st ...[Read More]

How to peer review: skill-building in a grad classes

How to peer review: skill-building in a grad classes

I teach how to peer-review in graduate class because I think it is a core skill for any professional.  I first demystify peer-reviewing and academic journals, and answer questions that all students have about these topics that they have heard about but rarely learn about using this: I describe my personal experience as a manuscript submitter, reviewer and associate editor. And then I outline the s ...[Read More]

How I start good supervisory relationships with graduate students

How I start good supervisory relationships with graduate students

Many professors are confused about why a certain graduate student is happy or unhappy, under performing or performing well. I am far from a perfect supervisor, but I try to avoid this confusion by getting to know my graduate students on a relatively deep but professional level as quickly as possible, by doing the following in our first meeting: sharing results of a personality test; discussing our ...[Read More]

What busy profs would like to read in a blog post about active learning

What busy profs would like to read in a blog post about active learning

During a great workshop today on active learning in engineering at McGill I asked two questions (using Socrative) , of the audience. Here is a summary of 24 answers I received: 1) I would like to read blog posts about: activities for large classes (18% of people) activities for small classes (30% of people) technology in active learning (22% of people) wacky or creative ideas for active learning(3 ...[Read More]

Surprises and lessons learned from co-teaching an inter-university graduate course

Surprises and lessons learned from co-teaching an inter-university graduate course

Contributed by Grant Ferguson, University of Saskatchewan grant.ferguson@usask.ca   In an earlier blog post, Tom discussed some of the advantages and disadvantages of co-teaching a blended graduate course to students at McGill University, the University of Wisconsin – Madison and the University of Saskatchewan. This course wrapped up last month… we definitely learned a few things during ...[Read More]

Great groundwater video!

Great groundwater video!

Display "Groundwater Animation" from YouTube Click here to display content from YouTube. Learn more in YouTube’s privacy policy. Always display content from YouTube Open "Groundwater Animation" directly Clear graphics, good message and an awesome sing-along. what more could one ask for? the only message that I would add is the importance of virtual groundwater use in what we de ...[Read More]