Academia
drorzel | July 16, 2010Back in one of the communications skills threads, Karen comments about science and humanities:
It's easy enough for a humanities major to avoid doing much science in school. The converse is not true. It strikes me that for those earlier scientists who attended univeristy, both their early education and university years were more suited to focusing on the science.
This relates to the communication issue as this often means that the science inclined are often put in a position of being evaluated on their communication in area that are areas of weakness for them, those areas where communications…
catdynamics | July 15, 2010Apparently I write like David Foster Wallace...
Say what?
Oh, that David Foster Wallace.
Er.
Cool.
Now you go play with "I write like"
h/t Chad - who apparently has dissociative writing disorder or something...
jdupuis | July 15, 2010When we think of outreach and recruitment, we don't usually think of using the library as a tool to attract students to our institutions. Here at York I do occasionally take part in Faculty of Science & Engineering outreach activities -- mostly when the library is included in high school science class tours of the institution.
Rather than do something really boring like a "here's the reference desk" tour, I like to take smaller groups down into our teaching lab and do (hopefully) fun and amusing interactive sessions on the current state of the information universe. You can get an idea…
clock | July 14, 2010Marie-Claire Shanahan is an Assistant Professor of Science Education at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. As a former science teacher, she was always surprised by the ways that students talked themselves out of liking science - and she decided to do something about it. She now researches the social and cultural aspects of science and science education, especially those related to language and identity.
Marie-Claire and I first met online, then also in Real World when she attended ScienceOnline 2010, after which I interviewed her for my blog. You can check out her…
jdupuis | July 14, 2010Usually every day brings one or two interesting things at InsideHigherEd, but today is a bonanza.
The Ed Tech Sonic Boom
Today, we are able to leverage a set of well-developed and stable technologies to build in pedagogically advanced active learning methods into a wide variety of courses and modes of instructional delivery. To be a great teacher it is no longer a prerequisite to be a dynamic and gifted lecturer. Rather, faculty can partner with learning designers, librarians, and teaching specialists to create dynamic, student-centered courses that allow students interact and create with…
drorzel | July 13, 2010we have a summer student seminar series, in which students who are doing summer research give 15-minute talks about their research. These are generally pretty good-- our students are, by and large, very good public speakers.
One thing that I always find interesting about this is how many of the students end up sounding just like their advisors. It's not just the content of the talks-- which obviously is approved by the advisor before the talk is given-- but also the style. Some students even pick up the mannerisms of their advisors-- verbal tics, hand gestures, etc. You see the same thing…
drorzel | July 13, 2010Yesterday's poll about "outreach" activities drew 117 responses by this morning. Since PollDaddy stupidly calculates percentages for ticky-box polls based on the number of total selections, not the number of people who vote, the graph you get when you view the results is kind of useless. A better version, using the "CHECK THIS BOX" count, is here:
These responses line up reasonably well with my own impressions of the term. I'm a little surprised that "Demo Shows" doesn't get 100%, even if you factor out the three people who clicked "I would not deign to know what outreach is." This probably…
drorzel | July 13, 2010It looks like I may well be getting together with some friends from college in Alabama on the first weekend in October, to go to a college football game. The logistics of getting to Tuscaloosa make this seem like an awfully long weekend, but I would feel guilty taking two days off just for football and college nostalgia.
It occurs to me, though, that the state of Alabama contains many fine educational institutions, which must have physics departments and students. If any of them would be interested in hearing a talk from me (I can talk about research (single-atom trapping for radioactive…
neurotopia | July 12, 2010Even kids in jr high can figure out that we've been spoon-fed some misconceptions of how scientists look and act. I wonder where they get these ideas from. Certainly not the media. They would never create caricatures of real people.
jdupuis | July 12, 2010As if Pepsigate wasn't enough to get people riled up, this could be even move apocalyptic!
H. Steven Wiley takes a close look at the real Two Cultures, Scientists vs. Engineers!
In the past, I have heard there was conflict between the "two cultures" of science and the humanities. I don't see a lot of evidence for that type of conflict today, mostly because my scientific friends all are big fans of the arts and literature. However, the two cultures that I do see a great deal of conflict between are those of science and engineering.
*snip*
At one extreme, you have basic scientists, who seek to…
drorzel | July 12, 2010I spent this weekend in Baltimore for the summer meeting of the Committee on Informing the Public, held at the Maryland Science Center, which is a really nice science museum. This has left me feeling jet-lagged, a neat trick when I never left the Eastern time zone, but perhaps Saturday's visit to Pub Dog had something to do with it...
We had a number of discussions about the meaning of the word "Outreach" in a physics context, which is one of those Damon Knight/ Potter Stewart, "I know it when I point at it" kind of terms. I'm interested in what opinions people outside the committee have,…
drorzel | July 9, 2010Thoreau offers without qualification some complaints about a paper in a glamour journal, ending with:
All of this might have been excusable if the big flashy Glamour Journal paper had been followed up with more detailed papers in other places (a common practice in some fields). However, when I searched to see what the authors have done since and whether they've cited that paper, the only places I found them citing their own paper was in papers only marginally related to the work published in the glitzy place. So there was no follow-up, just something that was trendy enough to get into a…
drorzel | July 8, 2010Kevin Drum has done a couple of education-related posts recently, first noting a story claiming that college kids study less than they used to, and following that up with an anecdotal report on kids these days, from an email correspondent who teaches physics. Kevin's emailer writes of his recent experiences with two different groups of students:
Since the early 1990's, I have pre and post tested all of my introductory mechanics classes using a research based diagnostic instrument, the Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation. This instrument is based on research by Ron Thornton at Tufts that…
catdynamics | July 7, 2010I just had an ice cold Pepsi this afternoon.
It was 35+C (ok, in the mid-nineties), I had just come back from a long hot walk through the kidfest day at the Artfest and I just had to have it.
It was so refreshing, and cool, and invigorating. Why it was exhilarating.
Don't know about the "Aids Digestion" bit - 'course it was Diet... not the same, eh?
It will, probably, be the only pepsi I have this month.
So, us physical science bloggers can be like total sluts, what with Pepsico having bought a blog on scienceblogs.com and many of the other bloggers quitting or suspending operations.
Not.…
drorzel | July 7, 2010Over in yesterday's communications skills post commenter Paul raises a question about priorities:
I wonder to what extent good writers, public speakers and communicators are being promoted in science in place of good thinkers - people who can challenge prevailing dogma, invent promising novel approaches to old problems, and who have the intuition needed for deducing correct theories from just a few observations.
I think of this as the "Weinstein Perelman Theory" because Eric Weinstein on Twitter has been pushing something similar with respect to Grisha Perelman turning down major math…
jstemwedel | July 6, 2010I saw a story in the San Jose Mercury News that I thought raised an interesting question about sick leave, one worth discussing here.
As it turns out, all the details of the specific case reported in the article sort of obscure the general question that it initially raised for me. But since I'm still interested in discussing the more general problem, here's a poll to tweak your intuitions.
In cash-strapped community college system, an administrator collecting paid sick leave is ...online survey
The question that the headline and first two paragraphs of the article raised for me was about…
jstemwedel | July 6, 2010I noticed a short item today at Inside Higher Education about Mike Adams, an associate professor of of criminal justice at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington , who is suing the university on the grounds that his promotion to full professor was denied due to his conservative Christian views. (Apparently, this legal action has been underway since 2007.)
I know very few details of the case, so I'm in no position to opine about whether Adams should or should not have been promoted. But there's one element of the case that seems to be legally interesting:
But part of the judge's…
jdupuis | July 6, 2010Nice article by Vit Wagner in Sunday's Toronto Star, Tough times, but some bookstores have a different story.
A couple of different independent bookstore owners/managers in the Toronto area talk about some of the challenges faced in surviving and even thriving in what should be a period of death and decline for bricks and mortar bookstores.
But while some of the competition is retrenching or worse, BakkaPhoenix, which recorded a double-digit increase in sales last year, is expanding. In stark contrast to the recently shuttered This Ain't the Rosedale Library, BakkaPhoenix is readying a fall…
drorzel | July 6, 2010As I am still getting lengthy comments at the Chris Mooney post accusing me of making unreasonable demands on scientists, I thought I should spell out as explicitly as possible what skills I think scientists ought to have. This probably won't solve the problem, but it'll give me something to point to the next time I get asked.
So, what communications skills should scientists have? The answer depends on what kind of science you're going to do, and what you want to do with it.
First and foremost, though: If you want to be a successful scientist, you need good communications skills. Full stop.…
jgoldman | July 6, 2010Last week, Travis, Christie, Scicurious and I spent about 45 minutes in a skype conference call.
The first 15 minutes were spent making fun of Travis for his strange Canadian speech patterns, and sympathizing with poor Christie for not being able to talk to us while enjoying the beautiful Hawaiian air, because just as we were about to start, the gardeners started making noise outside. What a travesty. Of course this was all before Travis hit the record button on his recording software. Next time, maybe we'll record that stuff too.
So what's left are a handful of random musings on life as a…