Academia
tfk | April 20, 2011Aaron Schwarz has a petition urging The White House and Congress to unlock science research:
Three years ago this week, the National Institutes of Health announced that all medical research they fund would have to be published as "open access" -- available to anyone, for free, over the Internet. The policy has been a huge success, but now it's time for the rest of the government to follow suit.
That's why we're teaming up with libraries, universities, and patient advocacy groups to demand every publicly-funded publication be made open access. If we're going to be spending billions of…
omnibrain | April 20, 2011I was digging through some of my old blog posts and had almost totally forgot about this artwork I commissioned for the blog when I first started back on blogger. Check it out and then I'll fill you in on what I've been up to and why I've been so sparse over the last many months.
I stopped blogging consistently a while back, and it was for a great reason, I promise!
About a year ago, after I passed my prelims, I went on the job market. I interviewed for a couple academic positions (mainly liberal arts) and a number of industry/government jobs. I finally decided to 'sell out' and take the…
catdynamics | April 16, 2011We should do microbooks.
Electronic microbooks.
Like Apps, for $.99 each - sold as iPad/Kindle reads, with graphic.
Shorter than proper books, longer than blog entries or articles, designed to be of some lasting value. Something to read on a train, or a plain.
Yes, in the fiction limit this is the traditional short story, but there should be a potentially interesting niche here for educational material and general non-fictional commentary.
For impulse buys, viral reads, fast updates on interesting things.
jdupuis | April 16, 2011Yeah, and I'm touchy and upset and discomfited by this whole thing as much as anyone. This is about my touchiness, not yours. Although please feel free to add your own feelings in the comments.
Thinking about it over the last few days I've come to glimpse the sources of my own unease.
And I've come to think that they are related to the various threads that are becoming tangled up in this controversy. It's almost like there's a Cartesian diagram with four or more quadrants of issues and all the various responses are each focusing on one drawn through one or two or three of those quadrants…
jdupuis | April 11, 2011Welcome to the latest instalment in my occasional series of interviews with people in the world of higher education and scholarly publishing.
This time around it's a bit different with the circumstances being a little unusual. Last week I did a back-of-the-envelope tweet about the Twitter habits of senior academic administrators and my experiences creating a list of those administrators. The uses of social networks in education is an area that really interests me and the habits of those senior administrators was something I'd been wondering about.
Well, my old blogging buddy Stephanie…
drorzel | April 9, 2011Over in LiveJournal land, nwhyte just finished reading all the Hugo-winning novels, and provides a list of them with links to reviews or at least short comments. He also gives a summary list of his take on the best and worst books of the lot.
The obvious thing to do with such a list, particularly in LiveJournal land, is to take the list and mark which ones you've read, and so on. In th interest of a little variety, though, let me suggest an alternate game: the academic parlor game "Humilation," invented by David Lodge, in which literary academics admit to not reading various classic works,…
jdupuis | April 8, 2011Hey, it wasn't me that said that. It wasn't even another academic librarian.
It was Joshua Kim in his post from today's Inside Higher Ed, 5 Reasons Librarians Are the Future of Ed Tech.
It's a great post, talking from an outsider's perspective about what librarians bring to the educational process. Kim concentrates on the role that libraries and librarians can play in moving into campus educational technology roles but really, the list he gives applies to the roles that we can play all across the various functions on average campus. Especially those we play as librarians.
Not as…
drorzel | April 8, 2011It's college admissions season, which means a steady influx of high-school seniors thinking about coming here next year, making campus visits. Most of these students sit in on at least one class, to get an idea of what it's like. Which occasionally leads to odd things, but nothing stranger than what just happened: a prospective student just sat in on my junior/senior level elective class on quantum mechanics in the state-vector formalism. I suspect he didn't get a whole lot out of today's lecture, on changing state vectors and operators from one basis to another. In fact, I suspect this might…
catdynamics | April 6, 2011I don't listen to my phone messages...
not at work, not most of the time.
seriously, and not just because of my constant attending of meetings of the ad hoc subcommittee of the standing committee on WTF do we do now
this is because almost anyone who actually needs to get hold of me knows to either e-mail, or call my cell, if they are cleared to have my cell number.
The university at some point switched to a VOIP phone for cost savings, this had several effects:
if the internet goes out, so does our phone service, no redundancy;
the VOIP voicemail (apparently) randomly expires the…
jdupuis | April 6, 2011...Or not?
Not surprisingly, one of my professional interests is the use of Twitter and other social networks/media in higher education. And not just for educational/classroom purposes but also for outreach.
In other words, people who work at a college or university using Twitter in an official capacity to reach out to other people outside their organization. Of course, this applies to using Twitter to recruit students, to reach out to parents, to connect to similar external departments or organizations.
It also applies to outreach within an organization. For example, we use twitter at my…
drorzel | April 6, 2011I'm deep in editing mode at the moment, and faintly depressed at the number of words I have managed to remove by changes like turning "was [verb]ing " to "[verb]ed." It's a tedious and labor-intensive process that is weirdly exhausting-- all I'm doing is sitting in a cafe somewhere reading text with a red pen in hand, and yet I'm completely drained at the end of the day.
And, of course, this process is interrupted periodically by the need to go to meetings.
One of the great frustrations of my job is the number of meetings in academia. It's gotten slightly better in the last couple of years,…
drorzel | April 2, 2011Thursday's post about the troubles of biomedical scientists drew a response from Mad Mike saying that, no, biomedical science Ph.D.'s really don't have any career options outside of academia, and pointing to Jessica Palmer's post on the same subject for corroboration. Jessica writes:
This is something I've tried to explain many times to nonscientists: most of the esoteric techniques I mastered during my thesis aren't useful outside a Drosophila lab. They're not transferable to any other field of biology, let alone any other scientific or nonscientific profession. Those skills I picked up on…
drorzel | April 1, 2011I've got draft versions of all the chapters of the book-in-progress now, which is great. Of course, when you add up all the words in those chapters, it comes to 92,000, when the contract calls for 70,000. Which means I've entered the part of the writing process where progress is measured not by how many new words I type, but how many old ones I can make disappear.
I always find this faintly depressing, but it's a nearly inevitable part of serious writing for me. There have been a few cases where I've had open-ended writing assignments-- one of the papers I published in grad school, and my Ph.…
catdynamics | April 1, 2011Word is that President Obama will be announcing a bold new initiative in the physical sciences later today, providing major sustained funding boost and significant increases in funding across the board, including new major research faciltiies, accelerated funding of ongoing projects and more money for pure "blue sky" research, as part of a coherent plan to boost the economy and provide a long term path for sustainable growth.
Confidential sources at NaSA tell me the President will make space science the cornerstone of the new policy:
"Obama is sick of hundreds of billions of dollars being…
jdupuis | March 31, 2011This series of four posts by William M. Briggs is pretty interesting stuff.
The kind of thing where I'm torn: is it the most brilliant and perceptive thing I've ever read about higher education or is it a series of slightly early April 1st posts?
Dear Internet, I really need all you people out there to help me figure this one out. Which way does it go.
And by the way, you really have to read all four posts to get the complete message. The comment streams are interesting too.
University Professors Teach Too Much: Part I
Here is what everybody knows: the best researchers are often not the…
drorzel | March 31, 2011Via Mad Mike, a discussion of why it sucks to be a biomedical scientist:
87% of my blog-related e-mail is from unhappy, bitter, troubled, distraught biomed grad students, postdocs, technicians, and early-career faculty. Others write to me with problems, but these tend to be of the "I'm frustrated with my advisor" sort rather than the "I'm being tortured, abused, deported, sued, and I fear my academic career is over" sort that I routinely get from biomed people.
I specify biomedical rather than the life science in general because, as far as I can tell, the ecologists and botanists and…
jgoldman | March 30, 2011...For a feature article in this week's Nature on how scientists go about developing and managing online personas. You can check out the article - for free - here. It's a good article, and you'll probably recognize some other familiar faces (e-faces? blog-faces?) in it as well.
While the interview, which I did back in the beginning of February, was enjoyable, I fear that my quotation in this article is slightly out of context. To be fair, I don't remember the exact course of the conversation I had with the writer - but here, I'll use my blog to make clear what I meant and ground my statement…
drorzel | March 30, 2011I got my student comments from last term's intro mechanics course yesterday, which is always a stressful moment. As tends to happen, they were all over the map, with some students really liking me and others absolutely hating me.
It struck me while I was reading through the written comments that the experience is a lot like reading Amazon reviews of my book. I think there's actually a decent analogy between the response of authors to reviews and the response of faculty to student evaluations:
-- Really good comments can make you feel great, but the negative ones make you feel worse. I've got…
catdynamics | March 30, 2011A university is a self-perpetuating oligarchy.
A university chooses its own members, restricts membership, and governs from self-selected internal member promotion.
QED
Ok, so this a somewhat platonic abstraction of a private university, and the selection is from the meta-pool of members of the ensemble of universities, that are suitably like the particular university.
But, a self-perpetuating oligarchy it is.
Public universities, well, it gets complicated - they may be totally under external control or under nominal external control or have some open feedback loops to the external world…
catdynamics | March 29, 2011There ought to be some.
Google Fellowships that is.
Or better still, sabbaticals.
Preferably for totally useless academics, like computational astrophysicists with random erratic interests.
Just saying.
'cause I can.
And you know they could...
Please.