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Faculty Spotlight

What Happens When Stars Collide? Mike Guidry Professor   Astrophysics

Dr. Michael Guidry's career in the discipline of physics has been marked from the beginning by a dedication to improving teaching and a commitment to innovation with new web-centric tools. As a scientist, Michael has always used technology at some level. Looking at how technology is used at the university level, he notes that professors in his field will use the technology in their research but will often resist using it in their teaching.
 
Using the Internet to bring rich resources to educators has always been a part of Mike's work. With his wife, Jo Ann, and Dr. Wayne Kincaid, a colleague, he developed a K-12 initiative which involved creating a website called webTeacher. The goal of the site was to teach Web technology to educators, with modules that addressed the needs of novices as well as advanced users. Although the target was K-12 educators, the site is also heavily used by university instructors and a variety of other groups such as state governments for training. The webTeacher site has been featured in Newsweek and on the Learning Channel.


In the early 1990s, in the days when Mosaic was the only browser available, he began developing applications for computational science courses as part of the Computational Science Education Project. These development activities became the Computational Science Education Project, funded by the Department of Energy. What he was endeavoring to do was to explore the possibilities of the newly invented Web, to push the new technologies and see what would emerge for education. At that time, he was programming applications and looking for cross-disciplinary uses.

In 1996, his department chair asked if he would teach introductory astronomy, a subject he hadn't taught in a decade. He immediately saw it as a natural vehicle for the new technologies he'd been exploring as an engaging hobby. He points out that astronomy is a discipline in which visual representation is a powerful tool.

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