Category Archives: Academia

Posted in Academia, Open Science, Science Education, Science Practice

LIS BIGWIG 07 – a librarian’s dream for Facebook

Posted on June 26, 2007 by Bora Zivkovic | 1 comment

Libraryman just gave a Presentation about it, and Danica likes it. Anyone using it yet?

Posted in Academia, Blogging

The Headline of the Week

Posted on June 13, 2007 by Bora Zivkovic | Comments Off

“Fine in practice, but how does it work in theory?”

This headline (in a French paper, of course), prompted Sally Green to pen a fine, fine post – an Obligatory Reading of the Day – about class, education, the psychology of class, the difference between academia and the real world, the difference between theory and practice, and the difference between the people who fight for the equality of opportunity and the people who oppose it (and their rhetoric).

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Posted in Academia, Education, Framing Science, Society

Danica Needs a New Job!

Posted on June 4, 2007 by Bora Zivkovic | Comments Off

Graduate of the University of Belgrade (Serbia), City University (UK) and UNC-Chapel Hill (USA), with a Masters from University of Belgrade, Danica Radovanovic is currently in Belgrade without a job and she is looking for one either in Serbia, in Western/Northern Europe or in the USA.
Danica is the tireless Serbian pioneer in all things online: blogging, open source, Linux, science blogging, open science, social networking software, online publishing, eZine editing, etc. She is the force behind putting Serbian science online and making it open. She has done research on Internet use in Serbia in comparison to the UK and the USA and has been a tireless advocate for the Internet, open source computing and Open Science, travelling around Serbia and the world talking about it. She is also a cybrarian and has experience working at the Library of Congress.
You can learn more about Danica here and check her LinkedIn CV/Resume (expanded). She will send you the real Resume on demand.
This is your opportunity to snag someone with boundless energy and enthusiasm, coupled with knowledge, skill and experience. Do you or your organization need someone like that?

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Posted in Academia, Balkans, Blogging, Open Science, Personal

More than just Resistance to Science

Posted on May 31, 2007 by Bora Zivkovic | 16 comments

In the May 18th issue of Science there is a revew paper by Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg. An expanded version of it also appeared recently in Edge and many science bloggers are discussing it these days.
Enrique has the best one-sentence summary of the article:

The main source of resistance to scientific ideas concerns what children know prior to their exposure to science.

The article divides that “what children know prior to their exposure to science” into two categories: the intuitive grasp of the world (i.e., conclusions they come up with on their own) and the learned understanding of the world (i.e., conclusions they absorb from the adults around them):

16 Comments

Posted in Academia, Cognition, Creationism, Education, Framing Science, Ideology, Politics, Pseudoscience, Psychology, Religion, Science Education, Society

There is nothing I like doing more than herding cats!

Posted on May 17, 2007 by Bora Zivkovic | 5 comments

Business customers and children can be tough to manage online, but can you imagine managing scientists! They are already hard enough to satisfy in their native environment offline (e.g., to look beyond the usual metrics when awarding tenure). I know, I am making links in this post so cryptic, you’ll just have to click to see what on Earth I am talking about and make your own connections…

5 Comments

Posted in Academia, Blogging, Personal, Science Practice

The Greatest Innovation

Posted on May 3, 2007 by Bora Zivkovic | 2 comments

Spiked and Pfizer are asking:

‘What’s the Greatest Innovation?’ is a survey of key thinkers in science, technology and medicine, conducted by spiked in collaboration with the research-based pharmaceutical company Pfizer. Contributors were asked to identify what they see as the greatest innovation in their field. More than a hundred experts and authorities have responded already, including half-a-dozen Nobel laureates.
The survey will roll through May and June, and the discussion will go live at an event in central London on Wednesday 6 June

What is the difference between innovation and discovery? This is what the press release says:

spiked’s editor-at-large, Mick Hume, said: ‘Some choose “sexy” looking innovations, others apologise for the apparent dullness of their arcane choices. But whatever the appearances, almost all of our respondents exude a sense of certainty about the improvement that innovations in their field are making to our world, and the potential for more of the same.’
Astronomer Stephen W Squyres said ‘rockets capable of reaching space’ were the obvious choice in his field, while developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert pointed out that without the microscope ‘cells would not have been discovered’. Dr David Roblin, vice president of Pfizer Global R&D, hailed the ‘modern clinical trial’ as the greatest innovation in the field of medicine.
Sir Tim Hunt, Nobel laureate and principal scientist at Cancer Research UK, said recombinant DNA technology has made the biggest difference to the way biologists work today. ‘We couldn’t have gotten anywhere without it.’
Howard Garner, professor of cognition and education at Harvard, believes the ‘cognitive revolution’ was a major innovation: ‘Researchers peered inside the black box and, through theoretical models and experimental interventions, attempted to describe the mental structures and processes that are – or give rise to – thoughts as well as behaviours.’
According to science writer Philip Ball, ‘the essence of the molecular sciences is understanding the shape, structure, constitution, location and dynamics of molecules’. Therefore, he says, analytical tools such as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy and optical, electron and scanning-probe microscopies ‘are quite simply what makes the discipline possible as a modern science’.
‘”Random search” has revolutionised the checking of facts, the discovering of new information, the gleaning of leads’, said science writer Matt Ridley, while Paul Parsons, editor of BBC Focus magazine, hailed ‘anything that enables us to rub out our mistakes and correct them; to go back and put things right’.
While it is impossible to choose one single innovation mentioned in the spiked/Pfizer survey as the key moment in human history – whether it’s the discovery of nuclear fusion, the invention of eye glasses with arms or text messaging – the survey itself marks some of the triumphs of human ingenuity.
According to Hume, ‘the results of the survey hint at how much more could be achieved if there was a stronger cultural affirmation of the problem-solving potential of scientific experimentation and bold innovation’.

All good examples, but, none of them would be of much use today (or ever) without the computer and, importantly, without the Internet. And those are important innovations in EVERY field. My field would not even exist without continuous, long-term data-collection by computers. And enormity of data produced by computers could not be disseminated without the Internet – publication of summaries as papers is just not enough any more.

Posted in Academia, History of Science, Science Practice

Obligatory Readings of the Day – Copyright

Posted on May 3, 2007 by Bora Zivkovic | Comments Off

Rob identifies some old pernicious frames, makes suggestions how to counter them and offers more modern ways to frame the question of copyright in this three-part post:
Empty Rhetoric: ‘Intellectual Property Is Property!’
Copyright and scientific papers
Copyright is Censorship

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Posted in Academia, Science Practice

Undergraduate Research – some examples

Posted on May 1, 2007 by Bora Zivkovic | 3 comments

Jake, Chad, Rob, Janet, Chad again and Chad again. have already written everything important about today’s Buzz topic – the undergraduate research. What I will do is add a few examples and you draw conclusions why this worked (or not) for each one of them.
A Self-Starter
Kevin Messenger loved snakes all his life. He did his own research in high school, a standard survey of herps in the Sandhills area of North Carolina. He presented that at a meeting of the Herps society while a high-school senior. He went to college to NCSU because he wanted to work with Hal Heathwole. He got his own first grant as a college freshman which resulted in a really nifty (I think still not published, but presented) paper on the effects of moonlight on nocturnal snake activity. He breezed through college. Nobody really cared if he got Ds in English or Chemistry classes – he aced all biology classes though, including some graduate level courses he took quite early on. He also got involved in some gecko research with my lab-buddy Chris. He barely graduated when he already had a grant to go to China to do a herps survey of a previously unsurveyed (and rarely visited by Westerners) are of China. He reported his findings in a series of guests posts on this blog. What a fun way to get a Masters…
A Surprise
Laura Jolley was considered by some of our faculty here to be a bookish type – excellent grades, but perhaps growing up with too sheltered life to want to get dirty with research. So when she applied for a hard-to-get grant to go to Africa to do AIDS research most were reluctant to sign a letter of support for her. Dr.Nick Haddad, who saw her in actiuon in his ecology core course, gladly signed and was delighted when she actually got the money. You have to scroll down here (one should think NCSU folks would learn the notion of permalink by now!) to read about her accomplishments and I have also mentioned her in this post. She spent two summers in Ghana and one in Lesotho living with the locals, doing the research on local attitudes and knowledge about sex and AIDS and devising strategies for education and prevention. She is in graduate school up in DC right now studying public health and epidemiology.
A Hidden Gem
Amy Hughes was my student in a physiology lab which, as its most important component, has an independent project. Amy is smart, but was shy and not with the greatest of the GPEs in the world at the time. She had no idea what to do for her project except that she liked handling crayfish in one of the lab exercises and wanted to work alone (i.e., not teamed up with another student or two). I have no idea how and why I figured out that she would be just the right person to do this long and tedious study, but she did brilliantly and when I showed the data to a professor he promptly got some funding for Amy to repeat and continue the work as her honors project. The result is the first ever study published on a blog – the famous crayfish circadian/melatonin/aggression post. She went on to Minnesota where she got a MS in epidemiology (I think her work there should be published by now), came back to NCSU for some more fun and classes and will start medical school next semester. Oh, and she came to the Science Blogging Conference.
Obvious from the beginning
Elizabeth Daubert was one of those straight A students who ran out of classes and had to take all graduate-level courses in her senior year, including the extremely tough two-semester General Physiology with Bob Grossfeld (NCSU is a big campus yet it is eerily quiet on the days when there is an exam in this course). My PI did not do any undergraduate research, but when Chris and I were running the lab (and far too many experiments) he let us hire undergrads to help us. Most of the people we hired were pretty much content to be paid to feed the animals, but Elizabeth wanted to do research. And she did. She got fully involved in several of my experiements – all aspects of it, not just the drudgery work. Now, my boss is a brutally honest person and, if he is not prepared to write a stellar letter of recommendation for you, he’ll politely refuse to write one at all. But he wrote a letter for Elizabeth when she started applying to grad schools. Every place she applied to (except Stanford) called her for an interview and wherever she went she was referred to as the “candidate with the Underwood letter”! I have no idea what he wrote, but people in the field understand that if he writes one, it is to be taken seriously. She got accepted/invited everywhere. She is happily enjoying (scroll down) her neuroscience graduate studies at University of Virginia right now.
Now go read what others have written about the theory of undergraduate research and think how Kevin, Laura, Amy and Elizabeth fit in there.
Update: Kate, Propter Doc, Guru, Laelaps, Jason and Kayhan add their experiences.
Update: Jenna and Larry add their perspectives.

3 Comments

Posted in Academia, Science Education

Blogger Perceptions on Digital Preservation Survey

Posted on April 25, 2007 by Bora Zivkovic | 2 comments

If you have a moment, this is a useful study to participate in:

Do you blog? If yes, then please consider participating in an online survey from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Information and Library Science. The study, Blogger Perceptions on Digital Preservation, is being conducted under the guidance of the Real Paul Jones. The study team is interested in hearing from all bloggers on their perceptions on digital preservation in relation to their own blogging activities, as well as the blogosphere in general. To hear more about this survey, please visit the study’s fact sheet at http://www.ils.unc.edu/~hcarolyn/blogsurvey/. From there, you can link out to the web-based survey. The survey will be available from April 25 through May 23, 2007. We believe blogs are valuable records of the human experience. Help to contribute to continued access to these important records by participating in our study. If you have any questions, feel free to contact Carolyn Hank, the study Principle Investigator, at hcarolyn AT email DOT unc DOT edu. Thanks!

Posted in Academia, Blogging, Medicine

Lablit Survey – why leave science?

Posted on April 9, 2007 by Bora Zivkovic | 4 comments

Do the survey for this week and let me and John know how you answered and why:

Most likely reason a scientist will leave research?
Can’t find a permanent position
Desires to earn a higher salary
Sees no correlation between hard work and eventual success
Wants to make a greater impact on society
Feels love of science could be better expressed in another career

4 Comments

Posted in Academia, Science Practice

Publishing on blogs in social sciences

Posted on March 31, 2007 by Bora Zivkovic | Comments Off

Alun Salt will be leading a session about the Peer-to-peer publishing and the creative process, i.e., publishing papers on blogs at the Classical Association conference at Birmingham so he has written a post on things he wants to say there – quite an excellent summary of pros and cons of the idea and clearing away some common misperceptions.

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Posted in Academia, Blogging

Academia is slow, conservative and over-cautious

Posted on March 19, 2007 by Bora Zivkovic | 2 comments

Being constantly online and at the same time out of academia skewed my perspective, and I kinda expected that most of my old profs would not be so hot about publishing in online open-sorce journals (and even thinking that Science is still a place to go, oy vey!), but this is quite disheartening, especially for the medical (that woudl include biology, I presume) field:
Scientists Are Wary Of Online Journals

Scientists and researchers appreciate the speed by which online journals can distribute new findings to their colleagues and the academic world, but they fear non-traditional publication can affect their chances of promotion and tenure, according to new study released by professors at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the University of Munich.

Posted in Academia

Horowitz still at it….

Posted on February 22, 2007 by Bora Zivkovic | 10 comments

Trying to push an anti-free-speech bill in Arizona:

The Arizona bill, if enacted, could take self-censorship in schools to a new level.
“This is yet another bill that is seeking to restrict the free exchange of ideas on campus, and, frankly, this is probably the most extreme form we’ve seen yet,” Fitzgerald said. Unlike its cousins in other states, it lays out specific penalties when a teacher or professor advocates “one side of a social, political or cultural issue that is a matter of partisan controversy.”

And where MSM has to retain a dignified tone, the blogs can move in and trash the idiot with the full force of scorn Horowitz really deserves:

Nothing you say or write can be trusted or taken at face value–certainly not this newest tantrum. Your language play is too crude… you are like a con artist who has tried his tricks on the same people once too often.

10 Comments

Posted in Academia, Ideology

Is it possible to collect enough this way?

Posted on January 31, 2007 by Bora Zivkovic | Comments Off

Graduate school is expensive, even with grants and loans. Perhaps if a lot of A-listers linked to this, it could be possible to collect enough. (via Chickpea Science)

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Posted in Academia, Blogging

Science Under Attack II – blogospheric response

Posted on January 27, 2007 by Bora Zivkovic | Comments Off

There are also more responses to the U of California lawsuit described by Sara Robinson the other day.
See what Amanda and PZ Myers have to say about it.
Edit: and Mike

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Posted in Academia, Creationism, Religion

“What God Created on the Fourth Day?” is not an SAT question, sorry!

Posted on January 24, 2007 by Bora Zivkovic | Comments Off

Most of our anti-Creationist battles are over efforts to infuse Christian religion into K-12 education. One common battlefield is the courtroom where our side has (so far, until/unless the benches get filled with more clones of Priscilla Owen) won. But another place where we can stop them is the college admission office.
Sara Robinson of the Orcinus blog (which everybody should read daily) revisits, in more detail than I ever saw on any science blogs at the time this first started, the legal battle between the University of California and the Calvary Chapel Christian School over what constitutes permissible educational standards:

The battle started back in late 2005, when UC reviewed Calvary’s courses and decided that several of them — including “Special Providence: Christianity and the American Republic and “Christianity’s Influence on America,” both history courses; “Christianity and Morality in American Literature,” an English course; and a biology class — did not meet their curriculum standards, and would not be counted toward the admission requirements when Calvary students apply to UC.

Sara goes on to say later on something that I expect our resident science philosophers, historians and ethicists to chime in on:

When it comes to the history and English courses, they’re absolutely right. We all look at language and history through the filters of culture. The subjects lend themselves to multiple interpretations, depending on your perspective. Understanding this, and being exposed to the full range of perspectives in these fields — including religious ones — is an essential part of secondary and undergraduate education.
But nobody, save the Christian schools, teaches science or math that way. There is no African-American or Latino or feminist or Jewish or Russian science (Hitler and Stalin notwithstanding). There’s just a method, and a group of techniques, and the skill-building and knowledge base required to use them well. Scientists do their best — with varying degrees of success — to uncover their cultural biases and move beyond them. The greatest ones regard bias as a dangerous source of error: it can blind you, and lead you to draw the wrong conclusions from the observed facts. For that reason, any textbook that starts off by telling you to believe a 2,000-year-old religious scripture over your own lying eyes is not teaching science. It’s putting students on the path to a Christian version of Lysenkoism.

But the whole essay was prompted by Sara’s initial sense of despair she felt before discovering this case:

I’ve been saying for a long while now that the power to end the Intelligent Design fiasco, firmly and finally and with but a single word, rests in the manicured hands of the chancellors of America’s top universities. The message is short and simple: “Teach what you like, it’s all fine with us. But if you put ID in your science courses, we will not accept those courses as adequate for admission to our campus.”
Making this kind of public statement would be one small step for a university chancellor; and one giant leap for American science education. Somebody, somewhere, needs to set a firm standard. If our universities — which bear responsibility for training our professional scientists, and maintain the labs and faculties responsible for much of our best research — won’t stand up and draw that line, then we really are well and truly lost.

Well said. Feel free to add comments either here or over on Orcinus .
Technorati Tag: teaching-carnival

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Posted in Academia, Creationism, Education, Evolution, Science Education, Society

H-Index

Posted on December 8, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | 1 comment

A few days back, Alex posted about a new, easy way to calculate one’s Hirsch Number (“H-Index”), a widely used measure of one’s publications’ worth. Yup, I did it for me and no, I am not telling you my number….
The site that published this, The Epidemiologic Enquiry, now that I had some time to take a longer look, has a bunch of other interesting things posted about scientific/medical publishing and the methods of epidemiological research. Worth a look.

Promoting Ethics in Science:

Posted in Academia

Publishing company releases first comprehensive guide on publishing ethics

Posted on December 8, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | Comments Off

Increasingly, journals are appearing in front page scandals that expose undisclosed industry support of research and scientists who have faked results. Blackwell Publishing, trying to prevent such problems, recently released a comprehensive guide on publication ethics to the editors of its 805 academic journals. These principles provide practical advice to inform policies on a broad range of topics such as conflicts of interest. While the guidelines will not be mandatory, experts seem pleased and expect the move will help to clean up academic publishing.

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Posted in Academia

Academic Blogging of the Fortnight

Posted on December 4, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | Comments Off

Teaching carnival #17 is up on silver in sf

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Posted in Academia, Carnivals, Education

Blogging Professor!

Posted on November 30, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | Comments Off

Is this the first such thing? A faculty position at UNC school of journalism. From the job ad:

This person should be highly skilled in writing and editing online news, in blogging and in developing news content for the web.

Apply if you think you can and want to do this.

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Posted in Academia, Blogging, Media

College Presidents should blog

Posted on November 22, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | Comments Off

Brian says that College Leaders should blog, commenting on this NYT article.
Sure, there are pros and cons, a steep learning curve and the potentially huge benefits along with the risk. But in the 21st century, it just has to be done. A leader who does not embrace online technology to foster a two-way communication is irrelevant and will go the way of the dinosaurs. A leader who does will evolve wings and learn to fly, adapted to the new environment.
Brian offers to help any University President set up a blog and get started, gratis. Take him up on his offer if you are a Top Dog at your school.

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Posted in Academia, Blogging, Education

Fear And Self-Loathing at Cornell

Posted on November 17, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | 10 comments

Remember Amanda Doerty, the so-called Hot Abercrombie Chick? Just one of many bloggers to be shown to be a hoax?
Now, do you think that this Rachel Brenc is real? I’d rather believe that this is a man in disguise. I hope no young woman really thinks the way she does. Zuska, Janet and John explain why, so I don’t have to. The child of privilege, despising everyone under her, self-assured of her own success because her self-professed attractiveness will help her nab a husband who can step into her father’s shoes and continue protecting her white, conservative privilege.

10 Comments

Posted in Academia

Underfunded? Or Unpopular?

Posted on November 2, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | 2 comments

This week’s question in the Ask a ScienceBlogger series is:

What’s the most underfunded scientific field that shouldn’t be underfunded?

The first and obvious answer is, of course, “my field“, whatever it is.
But then….

Posted in Academia, Basic Biology, Science Practice

Not more scientists, but more science-literate citizens

Posted on October 26, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | Comments Off

A short but good article by my schools’ President (April 25, 2006, also here).

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Posted in Academia, Education, North Carolina, Science Education

The Academic Blog Portal

Posted on October 4, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | Comments Off

From John Dupuis via ACRLog, news of Academic Blog Portal wiki collecting (in a Chinese Classification of Animals kind of way) all the academic blogging goodness. It is currently heavy on humanities side, but you can add science blogs there if you want.
I wonder if something like this should be linked from somewhere there…

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Posted in Academia, Blogging

Teaching Carnival #13

Posted on October 2, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | 9 comments

Welcome to the thirteenth edition of the Teaching Carnival where we discuss all things academic, from teaching to college life, from HigherEd policy to graduate school research. Last time, I separated the Two Cultures in a way. This time I want to keep them mixed – both sides of campus often deal with the same issues anyway. There are tons of links, so let’s start right away…
SATs and getting into college
Chad Orzel of Uncertain Principles commented on the top SAT essays published by the NYTimes. He argued that writing a decent essay in 25 minutes with a prompt not known in advance is harder than we think. In the comments, Dave Munger disagreed, so Chad wondered how would bloggers do on such a test. Out of that exchange, the Blogger SAT Challenge arose. Dave and Chad set up an SAT-essay-like online test and chellenged the bloggers and commenters to write an essay that is better than the NYT examples. They got real-life SAT scorers to grade the essays and had a huge response. The essays will be graded both by professionals and by readers (in a Hot-or-Not method), and the results will be revealed tomorrow. Can’t wait to see them. Update: Here it is! And, as Dave and Chad note – the kids did better than bloggers!
Jennifer Ouellette comments on the SAT Challenge and moves on to strategies in becoming a science writer. Includes fashion advice.
Getting out of college…
Chad again, on sports and graduation rates.
…and into Graduate school
Chad again: should you apply?
Bill again: How to hold an effective (lab) meeting.
Quod She: To professionalize or not to professionalize – Is there really any question? JJC responds. Yellow Dog comments on the exchange.
Cheating and plagiarism
Joseph of Corpus Callosum found a study that breaks down the attitudes towards cheating by major. Can you guess which students think cheating is OK?
Turnitin news triggered quite an outpouring of blogging over the past couple of weeks. It’s hard to summarize each post individually – one needs to read them all to get the feeling for the overall range of responses, so please, do read them all: Steinn Sigurðsson of Dynamics of Cats, Senioritis on Schenectady Synecdoche, John Walter of Machina Memorialis, Concerned Professor, Michael Bruton of Kairsonews, Linda on Kairosnews, Lanette Cadle of Techsophist, Clancy of CultureCat (and again), Jerz on the Literacy Weblog, Mike Edwards on Vitia (and again) and Joanna Howard of Community College English.
The invisible sexism in (science) academia
The whole avalanche of heated blogposts started when Chad wrote about the Pipeline problem in physics. He got many angry (and not so angry responses) both in the comments and on other blogs, including not one but four posts by Susanne Franks of Thus Spake Zuska – here they are: One, Two, Three and Four and then another one on the same topic. Bill Hooker of Open Reading Frame chimes in with two excellent posts. Kate of A k8, a cat, a mission and Jessica of Bee Policy have more. The referee, Janet of Adventures In Ethics and Science puts everything together in two posts here and here. All of those posts also got many comments, well worth your time to read.
Don’t ever call my daughter a coed, says Jo(e). Or a friend?
Teaching and getting feedback
Abel of Terra Sigillata reports on a speech by Dr Bruce Alberts, recently departed president of the US National Academy of Sciences on the needed changes in science education at colege level. This one is a must read!
Mike Dunford of Questionable Authority got parachuted into an Intro Biology class and was dismayed by the results of his first quiz. He asked his readers for feedback: was he doing something wrong? And the commenters responded – oh, did they ever! Sandra Porter wrote an excellent post in response (another must-read of this carnival!). In the end, Mike comments on how much he has learned from the blogospheric response.
Dr. Virago of Quod She asked if it is OK to teach the reseach paper in a lit. class and received useful responses. New Kid On The Hallway chimes in on the topic.
Susan Marie Groppi is having difficulties with her students’ understanding of Darwin.
EL of My Amusement Park is wondering about High-culture vs. low-culture in the syllabus in Crisis of Conscience: Teaching Pop Culture.
Pilgrim/Heretic asks for advice on teaching history class.
Lab Cat is teaching writing in a science class.
Jo(e) is excited because her students are excited about Jane Goodall.
Geeky Mom: Teaching Is Hard!
Ryan Claycomb of Raining Cats and Dogma gets feedback with his undergrads’ First Papers and then has to deal with grading just before the Five-Week Slump. Oh, and the physical arrangement of the classroom is important.
Refrigeration!? Anne thinks it is fascinating.
When the quest for fairness becomes a tyranny of unfairness.
Parts-n-Pieces on Learned Helplessness: New Media Writing and Underprepared Writers (part 2)
White Bear: How do you know you’re done reading? (including reading a blog post before commenting)
Respodning to error – grammar checker?
Carrie Shanafelt of The Long Eighteenth: How to reach the unreachable. Or should they be called coolers?
Flavia of Ferule & Fescue: Does my advice matter?
No Fancy Name on getting started. I was a kid like that. Blogging cured my problem.
Dr.Crazy: Independent Thinking in the Freshmen Writing Classroom and More on Students and Analysis.
Rob MacDougall: The Secret Syllabus.
Blogging, Technology and Education
Chris of Mixing Memory is asking how can his blogging be more useful to educators.
Jenna of Cyebrspace Rendezvous wrote Reasons to Blog #249: Practice makes homework easier
Josh Wilson comments on the evolution of peer-review. So does Anthony of Archaeoblog.
StyleyGeek tested an assessment simulation and found it lacking.
Lanette Cadle is using blogs in her class.
Timna: this online thing, perhaps it is working too well? and how do you grade it?
Jill/txt on citing Wikipedia. How about citing properly?
Geeky Mom on the use of technology in the classroom.
Gina Trapani on taking good notes. Heck, just taking notes at all.
Liz Evans: Using Student Podcasts in Literature Classes.
I am organizing a Science Blogging Conference, which will have a strong educational flavor.
What is Higher Ed all about?
Teaching – process of outcome? Jenny D and EdWonk comment.
From Dean Dad, always an interesting perspective: Hooray! It’s Defective!
Michael Berube is having great fun with the reception of his book here, here and here (warning: snark and satire abound).
Fun in the classroom (and just outside)
David Silver in sf went on an eye-opening Field trip. So did Emily Louise Smith.
Cliches in the classroom.
In-between serious posts about lab meetings, neuroscience and photography, Jenna collects classroom quote here, also here and here.
This is how quotes originate in the first place.
How to stay in grad school (Via)
Revere reports that the beginning of the college year is also high season for the condom industry (this is a different meaning of the word “fun” in the subsection title of this carnival). Perhaps because of the new meaning to the phrase Raging hard-on. And this is not fun, but it fits topically in this section: Effeminate women.
Profgrrrl: fun and games with students: electronic version
Jo(e): The Devil Wears Satin.
And that is it for this edition! We’ll meet again on October 15th at m2h blogging.
In the end, I have to bitch again… It took me about an hour to put together Tar Heel Tavern last night. It took me about twenty hours (and the weather outside was so beautiful today, while my wife and kids wanted to spend time with me as well as use the computer!) to put together Teaching Carnival. Sifting through about 100 delicious tags and Technorati tags takes so long. Each of the tagged posts first has to be checked for date (because search engines do not care), and if it already appeared in a previous edition of the carnival. Is it a blog post at all, is it appropriate for the carnival? Then I had to read them all to see in which subsection they belong. Then I had to look around the blogs, including some usual suspects of this carnival, to find tagged posts that were not caught by search engines, as well as posts that were (apparently) not tagged but deserve to be included. Out of 540 carnivals, this is the only one that uses tags. Submission by tagging is a cute idea but it does not work. Why do academics have to be the ones to do stuff in a complicated way when e-mail and blogcarnival submission form are so simple, easy and reliable ways of collecting entries? Nobody should spend this much time and effort in hosting a carnival. BTW, thank you to people who sent me their entries by e-mail – about 10 entries out of a hundred.
Technorati Tag: teaching-carnival

9 Comments

Posted in Academia, Carnivals, Education, Science Education

Teaching Carnival info…

Posted on October 1, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | Comments Off

I will be posting the Teaching Carnival tonight.
Delicious tags look OK, but Technorati looks awful and I know it does not pick tagged posts with any predictability. So, if you want to make sure your post is included, you can still e-mail me the Permalink at: Coturnix AT gmail DOT com by 5pm Eastern today.

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Posted in Academia, Carnivals

Can blogging raise your SAT scores?

Posted on September 16, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | 1 comment

Don’t know, but we can test this hypothesis.
Go to Cognitive Daily and/or Uncertain Principles and take the test (and read what they have to say about it, each from his own perspective).
It is just the essay part of the test. You get the prompt. You write. After 20 minutes (you are typing – kids who write with pencils get 25 minutes), it is over. You can choose to submit your essay or not once you are done.
Dave and Chad will score the results and have the essays graded by professionals (English teachers, hopefully some real-life SAT scorers), as well as blog-readers. Then, they will post the results (and essays) and we can all discuss them.
I have not done mine yet – waiting to have guaranteed 20 minutes of peace and quite – but I am afraid.
With blogging, we choose our prompts. If I want to react fast to some breaking news, I post a link, a quote and a one-liner.
Longer, more thoughtful essays sometimes go quick, but more often take days to write – thinking about it and writing it in my head first, then doing online research looking for additional info and appropriate links, then the actual writing (which usually does not take long), then quick spellchecking and editing, then posting. It takes more like 20 hours than 20 minutes. How about you?

Posted in Academia, Blogging, Education

The best of Higher Ed blogging

Posted on September 15, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | Comments Off

Teaching Carnival #12 is up on Scrivenings.
Next time, on October 1st, the carnival will be hosted by me here. I will be posting an official ‘call for submissions’ in a few days, but in the meantime, if you write a post that has something to do with Academia and Higher Ed, please try to remember to tag it with the “teaching-carnival” tag. Still, since the tagging technology is unreliable at best, you can only be guaranteed the inclusion of your entries (and yes, multiple entries are welcome) if you e-mail them to me at: Coturnix@gmail.com. Put “Teaching Carnival” in the title and inquire again if you do not get a Thank You note from me within 24 hours.

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Posted in Academia, Carnivals, Education

Higher Ed

Posted on September 1, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | Comments Off

Teaching Carnival is back from summer break and the edition #11 is up on WorkBook.

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Posted in Academia, Carnivals, Education

History of the University

Posted on August 11, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | 1 comment

There are several excellent book reviews in the latest American Scientist. Check them out for reviews of Dennett and Collins books, if nothing else, but the one that caught my eye was the review of Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University by William Clark, which I will, just because of this review, put on my Amazon wish list. It is a history of academia and how it got to be organized the way it does today.

Posted in Academia, Books

On Horowitz

Posted on August 10, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | 2 comments

This – “Apart From Being An Idiot, Horowitz Is Also An Unwiped Anal Orifice With Hemorrhoids” – is the worst and nastiest blog-post title I ever used. But I was furious. See why…. (first posted here on March 05, 2005, then republished here on December 10, 2005):

Posted in Academia, Cognition, Education, Ideology, Politics

Are you a graduate student and a blogger?

Posted on August 9, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | Comments Off

If yes, than Carnival of GRADual Progress is for you.

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Posted in Academia, Carnivals

Student Evaluations

Posted on August 3, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | Comments Off

I wrote this on March 03, 2005 on Science And Politics and reposted it on December 10, 2005 on The Magic School Bus. The title says it all…

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Posted in Academia, Education

What makes a memorable poster, or, when should you water your flowers?

Posted on August 3, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | 1 comment

Being out of the lab, out of science, and out of funding for a while also means that I have not been at a scientific conference for a few years now, not even my favourite meeting of the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms. I have missed the last two meetings (and I really miss them – they are a blast!).
But it is funny how, many years later, one still remembers some posters from poster sessions. What makes a poster so memorable?

Posted in Academia, Chronobiology, Science Practice

Are you blogging about Higher Ed?

Posted on August 1, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | Comments Off

The Teaching Carnival is on summer break, but the school is going to start soon, so start tagging your posts with the ‘teaching-carnival’ tags and check out the Fall lineup of hosts. The next edition, exatly one month from today, will be on WorkBook.

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Posted in Academia, Carnivals

Scientist Rock Star!

Posted on July 27, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | 10 comments

In an interview in Time magazine, Morgan Spurlock said, among else (and you should go and read the “else”):

We’ve started to make science and empirical evidence not nearly as important as punditry–people wusing p.r.-speak to push a corporate or political agenda. I think we need to turn scientists back into the rock stars they are.

Chris brought this quote to the bloggers’ attention and Shelley was the first to respond:

I find this quote so refreshing (not just because it places us scientists up on a lofty pedestal), because it validates scientific authority figures as someone worth listening to.

Dan Rhoads picked up on this and, after putting in his two cents, turned this into a meme or sorts, or an alternative “Ask The Science Blogger” question, tagging three people to answer the same question: who might qualify as a scientist rock-star?
Hsien Lei was the first to respond. RPM will probably respond soon, and I will try to think of something under the fold….

10 Comments

Posted in Academia, Science Education, Science Practice, Science Reporting, Society

Postmodern Conservatism

Posted on July 27, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | 2 comments

This post I first wrote on February 28, 2005, then re-posted here on December 10, 2005. About conservative relativism and the assault on academia:

Posted in Academia, Education, Ideology

Wealth of Science

Posted on July 23, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | 2 comments

Phil Plait has an excellent post: Wealth of Science:

Then the author said something that literally startled me:
“Scientists, till recently at least, effectively donated the wealth they created.”
He’s absolutely right. Again, wealth is not the same as money. Scientists take a relatively small amount of money (compared to, say, the cost of an attack helicopter or the building of a bridge) and turn it into wealth. Knowledge. Understanding. A brief moment of awe in the public when they grasp a little bit more of the Universe.

Posted in Academia

Ward Churchill? Who Cares?

Posted on July 20, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | 1 comment

I wrote this first in February 2005, then republished in December 2005. After War Churchill got fired last month, I think that this post is still relevant.

Posted in Academia, Education, Ideology, Politics, Society

Back to the Future

Posted on July 20, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | Comments Off

There is a new question in the Ask a ScienceBlogger series:

If you could have practiced science in any time and any place throughout history, which would it be, and why?…

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Posted in Academia

Original data on blogs

Posted on July 20, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | Comments Off

Natural scientists (unlike social scientists and humantities folk) are cautious, perhaps overcautious, about publishing data on blogs. So, it is really nice to see original research on a blog every once in a while. So, you should read this nifty little paper by Miss Prism. Rejected from Nature? Publish in samizdat – on your blog. (Hat-tip: Evolgen)

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Posted in Academia, Blogging, Science Practice

Great Men and Science Education

Posted on July 13, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | Comments Off

. This is a post intwo parts – the second being a reaction to the responses that the first one engendered. They may be a little rambling, especially the first one, but I still think that there is quite a lot there to comment on.

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Posted in Academia, Creationism, Education, History of Science, Science Education

Why Is Academia Liberal?

Posted on July 6, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | 23 comments

When I posted this originally (here and here) I quoted a much longer excerpt from the cited Chronicle article than what is deemed appropriate, so this time I urge you to actually go and read it first and then come back to read my response.

23 Comments

Posted in Academia, Education, Ideology, Politics, Science Education, Society

Assault on (Higher) Education – a Lakoffian Perspective

Posted on June 29, 2006 by Bora Zivkovic | 1 comment

This post was first written on October 28, 2004 on Science And Politics, then it was republished on December 05, 2005 on The Magic School Bus. The Village vs. The University – all in your mind.