[Mesquitelist] Mesquite in a Biology Lab

Wed Aug 20 14:10:54 PDT 2008

Peter Weston  at Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney and I developed some simple sessions to teach phylogenetics using Mesquite and PAUP to relatively untrained students, some of whom were naive computer users. This was part of our ongoing collaboration with the University of New England in systematics theory training as part of a 3rd year course. This was an upgrade and shortening of a previous version that used DELTA and MacClade and PAUP. Overall it went reasonably well, although inexperience with biology and computers created some difficulties. If you have a more homogeneous group of students (we did not!) this should work reasonably well. Please contact me off list if you want more information. 
For the future, we will drop PAUP entirely and move to a more platform-independent system using (e.g.) TNT and POY with Mesquite so that the students can use either Linux*, PCs or Max. 

Incidently, I recommend you drop the spreadsheet entirely, as Mesquite will provide that facility, and you won't have to convert data from one format to another. 

Best wishes
Buz

*has anyone tried Mesquite on the EeePC?

George D.F. (Buz) Wilson
Australian Museum (Marine Invertebrates)
6 College Street, Sydney 2010 Australia
tel: +612 9320 6287
fax: +612 9320 6042
email: buz.wilson at austmus.gov.au (Museum)
email2: buz at optusnet.com.au (home)

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Today's Topics:

   1. Question about using Mesquite in an Introductory  Biology
      Laboratory (Robert E. Loeb)

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Message: 1
Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:29:49 -0400
From: "Robert E. Loeb" <rxl5 at psu.edu>
Subject: [Mesquitelist] Question about using Mesquite in an
        Introductory    Question about using Mesquite in an
        Introductory    Biology Laboratory
To: <mesquitelist at mesquiteproject.org>
Message-ID: <003601c902f2$bad78f00$3086ad00$@edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"

Colleagues,

I am new to the list, so please excuse my ignorance if the questions I ask
have been answered before. 

The introductory Biology class (first semester course) I will teach for the
first time this semester provides an overview of phylogeny for about a third
of the course.  I was introduced to Mesquite at a program on Cladistics
offered by the American Museum of Natural History for High School Teachers
and want to incorporate the use of Mesquite in the laboratory. Has anyone
developed laboratory exercises for an Introductory Biology course using
Mesquite that you (they) would be willing to share?

Another related question, since my small campus has few specimens, I wanted
to use Excel spreadsheets containing morphological (in the case microbes,
cytological) characteristics for groups so that the students could use for
analysis in Mesquite.

In advance, thanks for your assistance.

Best,

Rob

Robert Loeb, Ph.D.

Kenan Fellow

National Tropical Botanical Gardens

Associate Professor of Biology and Forestry

Penn State DuBois

College Place

DuBois, PA 15801

814-375-4707

814-375-4724 (FAX)

Personal Web Site:  <http://www.personal.psu.edu/rxl5/>
http://www.personal.psu.edu/rxl5/

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