Teachspin - Contact Advanced Laboratory Physics Association

Advanced Laboratory Physics Associations
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Advanced Laboratory Physics Association (ALPHA)

You are invited to become part of a new association dedicated to shining a spotlight on advanced laboratory instruction. The goal is to provide a forum for communication and to act as a centralized advocacy group spanning the American Physical Society and the American Association of Physics Teachers and including faculty from all over the world as well. It has already begun to forge a community of faculty and staff who can help each other to create and maintain superb upper division teaching laboratories. Along with AAPT, APS and NSF, they haelped to create last summer's Topical Conference on Advanced Laboratories. This summer they are sponsoring the Advanced Laboratory Immersions. You can read about them in our December 2009 newsletter of at the ALPHA website.

To sign up for ALPhA, please go to http://www.advlab.org.

AAPT

There is an advanced lab listserv which was created through AAPT. You can either subscribe or just browse at at http://mail.aapt.org/read/login/. To get started, without joining, do not put in your email address. Just click on All Forums and then click on advlabs-l (in the left column).

You will be able to see previous submissions. clicking on the upper right magnifying glass will allow you to search words in the subject lines of messages. If there is a thread with follow-up messages, you can view the whole set by clicking on the subject line.

If you want to subscribe, but would prefer to get the posings as just one collection each day in a single email, you can do this. Once you have subscribed, go again to http://mail.aapt.org/read/login.

Log in and click on My Forums in the left column. Under Membership Type, you can select "digest: one daily email with all messages for that day" or other options. If you click on Advanced, you can set/cahnge your password.

PIRA

Members of the TeachSpin community may also find information about the Physics Instructional Resource Association (PIRA) of interest. You can visit them at http://pira-online.org. PIRA members are involved in building and supporting lecture demonstrations and the introductory laboratories as well as being involved in the entire range of undergraduate instructional labs. In addition, PIRA acts as a center for the exchange of ideas and information for outreach projects both in schools and the wider community.

AG Physikalisches Praktikum

European members of the TeachSpin community will be particularly interested n a coalition of faculty and staff who both teach and support the instructional laboratories in Germany. The official site for the AG Physikalisches Praktikum is http://www.uni-magdeburg.de/pplt/plt.html.

A major focus of the group’s efforts is the Praktikumsleitertagung which is hosted by a differenct university each year. These links will give you an idea of what happened at previous conferences. They also offer individual tutorial courses.

PLT, 2008 - University of Tuebingen (http://www.plt2008.uni-tuebingen.de)

PLT, 2009 - FU & TU Berlin (http://www.plt2009.de/index.html).

In March 2009 Barbara and Jonathan Reichert had opportunity to attend the meeting in Berlin where they got to meet so many of the people with whom they have been talking to over the years.

Currently, the 2010 meeting is being planned at the University of Vienna September 22-24. We will post the website as soon as it becomes available to us.

In conjunction with the DPG, the group also sponsors a spring meeting at which specific new teaching techniques and instruments are presented. TeachSpin’s own Prof. Rene Matzdorf was an invited presenter in 2009, when he gave a talk on the Quantum Analogs apparatus he helped to develop.