The Suez Canal, featured in this learn node, is an enormous topic spanning the globe in influence, and with a story that continues over several millennia. This learnode contains 3 sources that individually and together provide a general overview and lead into other materials so you can traverse this rich subject for yourself.
Linking the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, this feat of engineering opened in 1869. Although not the first canal (earlier ones, though not exactly in the same location as the modern one, include ones built by Darius I and Trajan), the modern canal stretches over a hundred miles, from Port Said on the Mediterranean to Suez and the Red Sea. Its opening was the cause of international celebration and was attended by royalty from all over the world; it was also marked by the opening of the “Old” Cairo Opera House, which has since been demolished.
This learn node begins with the official website of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet which provides detailed background, describes current events and is a platform for the writing and thinking of this leader. This website is an example of a new kind of biography made possible by the Internet: an open presentation by a person of him or herself. Clearly, this type of biography cannot be expected to be unbiased, but it offers new direct intimacy with the personal views of its subject.
The image for this learn node is a chameleon from an animation in the terrific tutorial Optics for Teens created and hosted online by the Optical Society of America. If a look through the tutorial makes you curious to learn more about optics, a full Optics course is offered by MIT Open Courseware (tree illustration from Lec# 3). If your interest is roused to know more about chameleons the report of scientists developing computer models for learning about chameleon habitats in Madagascar is offered here by the American Museum of Natural History. And you can learn a lot more about these amazing lizards at the San Diego Zoo’s Chameleon page. There the optical mastery of chameleons is described:
The chameleon’s eyes are the most distinctive among the reptiles. Each eye has a scaly lid shaped like a cone, with only a small, round opening in the middle for the pupil. The chameleon can rotate and focus its eyes separately to look at two different objects at the same time! This gives it a full 360-degree view around its body. When the chameleon sees prey, both eyes can focus in the same direction to get a clearer view.
In Bangladesh, millions of deep wells were drilled to end use of bacteria-laced surface water. It worked: for instance, infant mortality dropped sharply. But many of the wells turned out to contain high levels of naturally occurring arsenic—an extremely toxic chemical element with serious health effects. Today, experts are working to develop inexpensive methods of removing arsenic from the water.
So how would you get arsenic out of water? Three pages from a Stiochiometry tutorial at Carnegie Mellon University’s openlearning initiative describes a method developed by Prof. Fakhrul Islam, a chemist at Bangladesh’s Rajshahi University. The tutorial is Arsenic remediation: Using powder to absorb arsenic from water.
From introducing the concept, to developing the subject, to real world examples, to advanced “how-to,” this learn node provides an open content concept cluster for the business education topic: mapping value streams. The open courseware from the University of California at Irvine on the subject Fundamentals of Business Analysis is an introduction to the roles of the business analyst. The Irvine course is a primer and review for the basic roles of the business analyst.
The small section where these maps head up the home page of the PCL Map Collection is a dynamic node for learning provided by the University of Texas Libraries. This week, in addition to subject specific (Bhutto) Pakistan maps, the section provides maps of Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Chad, Darfur, the Turkey/Iraq Border, the US temperature (it is cold!) and tracking, primary, caucus and other political US maps relevant to the Presidential primaries now underway. By keeping this repository of current affairs maps available the UT librarians provide a superb cluster of geography in their corner of the global learning commons.
This learn node points to a video lecture from Yale online: Discovering Exoplanets: Hot Jupiters. In the image above the shadow is from the hand of Yale Professor Charles Bailyn, Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Astronomy who delivers this and other lecture videos that are part of the Yale University open courseware for the course: Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics (Spring 2007). The course description says that:
Professor Bailyn explains how the outlook of our Solar System can predict what other star systems may look like. It is demonstrated how momentum equations are applied in astronomers’ search for exoplanets. Planet velocities are discussed and compared in relation to a planet’s mass. Finally, the Doppler shift is introduced and students learn how it is used to measure the velocity of distant objects, such as galaxies and planets.
Astrophysicists are discovering new extrasolar planets—those outside our Solar System—almost daily. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope (originally called SIRTF, or the Space Infrared Telescope Facility) and AMNH’s Lyot Project Coronograph are two of the many technologies uncovering the attributes and evolution of these faraway worlds. The techniques employed by these instruments may one day help answer one of astronomy’s reigning mysteries: do any extrasolar planets host life?
This learn node points to the page here at MIT Open Courseware for digital tools like the one illustrated above called Curves in Two Dimensions. There are more than two dozen tools for topics ranging such as precalculus, algebra and vectors, curves, surfaces and differential equations. In the MIT course with tools like the one shown are chapter outlines like this one called Curves about, as the Introduction explains:
“The tools of calculus developed so far allow us to describe most of the important properties of a smooth curve: which are its direction at any point, and how much it deviates from straightness there. This is measured by its curvature. How its path differs from planarity is measured by its torsion, also easily calculated.”
The illustration below shows a learn node, which you can use as an educator to make webpages more findable. The top little circles illustrate links out to content nodes related to the subject of the large circle. Bottom left, experts connect to the node affirming its quality - giving it juice. Bottom right, a student connects to the node to learn the subject of its content.
This learn node begins with the 
If your interest is roused to know more about chameleons the report of scientists developing computer models for 
