What's a blog?

What's a blog? - A blog is a personal diary. Your pulpit every day. Political soapbox. News outlets. Collection of links. Your own private thoughts. Note to the world.

Your blog is whatever you want. There are millions of blogs, in all shapes and sizes, and there are no real rules.

In simple terms, a blog is a web site, where you write stuff based on an ongoing basis. New stuff shows up at the top, so that your visitors can read what's new. Then they comment on it or link it or email you. Or not.

Since Blogger was launched in 1999, blogs have reshaped the web, political influence, sharpen journalism, and enabled millions of people to have a voice and connect with others.

And we are very confident that all the approvals it has just begun.

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X-People

Perhaps you have heard the expression, "If you want something done, ask a busy person." Some people are able to get a lot done, and adding one or four more things to the list doesn't slow them down. Let's call this type of person Type W.

Then there are Type X people, and I am going to classify them, for the sake of discussion and Pseudo-Scientific Rigor, as Type X1 and Type X2. Type X people -- in general, with all other factors being equal -- don't get as much done as Type W people.

To explain the difference between X1 and X2, and to compare them with W people, I will use an academic example. I am not thinking of any particular person or people; this is a hypothetical situation. I am not (necessarily) talking about you.

Imagine 3 graduate students at similar stages of their academic program, with similar types of research and similar backgrounds and the same advisor. They are done taking classes and can focus on their research.

A Type W person would get a lot done whether they were funded by a research assistantship (RA), a teaching assistantship (TA), a fellowship, or whatever.

A Type X1 person would only make decent research progress if funded by an RA or fellowship. A TA would consume all of X1's time and energy, not because X1 is more devoted to teaching than W, but because X1 can only focus on one thing at a time.

A Type X2 person would get more done if partially funded by an RA or fellowship and partially by something requiring a bit of structured work -- for example, perhaps teaching one lab or discussion section, or perhaps doing some grading or other work like that. If funded entirely by an RA or fellowship, X2 wouldn't be able to deal effectively with the lack of structure and would waste a lot of time, making very slow progress, even if the advisor set specific goals.

Actually, I can think of one real example of W vs. X, and I have written about this before. Back in days of yore, my own graduate advisor gave an RA to another student instead of to me, saying that I would get a lot done even if I were a TA, whereas the other student would only get work done if an RA.

At the time, I felt like I was being punished for being a Type W person and the other student was being rewarded for being an X. Now, as a grad advisor doling out limited funds within the limited time frame of a grant, I can understand it better. I also want to mention that the other student in question was, and still is, my friend, and that I did not blame him for being an X-person.

Explanatory note about grad funding in my field: Many students are funded by a mixture of types of support over time; some RA, some TA, some fellowship. Advisors make decisions from year to year about the type of support for each student. If we requested 12 months of support for a student on a grant for the entire duration of the grant, the budget would explode, leaving no money for the actual research, so my colleagues and I typically ask for partial support, and make up the rest with TA or other sources of research support, or the student gets a fellowship, etc.

With that in mind, my question now is how (and whether) to distinguish between the X1's and the X2's.

I guess 'whether' is the more first-order question: In cases involving making choices for a particular grant/project, would you -- the advisor -- take into account work habits like the W vs. X scenarios described above when making decisions about support?

And if you do, would you make a distinction, like I did, between X1 and X2? Would you distinguish them by trial-and-error, or is there some magic formula you can use to predict (barring routine and unpredictable research setbacks) how cost effective someone will be? I think not, and I have mostly given up trying to guess.

My current strategy, which is not obviously better than anything else I have ever tried, is to accumulate as much grad support as possible, give students the benefit of the doubt as much as possible, distribute grad support in the way that makes the most sense for research and human resource priorities (what needs to get done when and by whom?), and hope for the best.

Nevertheless, when making some decisions and when trying to understand how people work best, I think it is useful to think about W vs. X, and more vs. less structure, and to explore ways to stretch grant funding to the maximum extent possible to cover as many students as possible for as long as possible. That is the goal. Would you also like to see me pull a rabbit out of a hat? Too bad, I can't do that either, and not just because I have no training or authorization for the use of magical animal subjects in research.

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Complaining Early & Often

While serving on a particular review committee at my university, I have seen many examples of negative comments in teaching evaluations for problems that seem like they could easily have been fixed during the course if only the professor knew there was a problem (and was willing to recognize it as such and change something about their teaching style).

Sometimes we professors can sense that something is wrong or that students are unhappy or confused. Some students will tell you directly, but most try to express their unhappiness and/or frustration in unspoken ways. Unless you ask them what the problem is, perhaps even by doing a mid-term evaluation to get anonymous comments, it can be hard to know what the problem is in some cases. Of course, if you just handed back a test and the average score was 17%, you might have some clues as to why students are unhappy.

The situations I am thinking about don't have to do with difficult tests, but more with teaching style. I have talked about some of these issues before, such as pacing vs. being stationary, having an accent and/or speaking too fast, using various formats and devices for writing, projecting etc.

Whenever I see a file with very negative teaching evaluations, I always wonder if any students complained somehow, to someone, during the course. Some of the problems seem entirely fixable during the term, when there is time for the students to benefit.

I tend to assume that no one complained because I seldom see a comment like "Although we told Professor X that we could never see his writing when he used the red marker, he kept using it." Instead, it's more common to see the complaint "I could never see the writing on the board when he used the red pen."

I can certainly understand why some students would not want to complain directly to or about a professor during a class. What if the professor gets angry and punishes them by giving impossible exams and low grades? There is surely some anxiety about the consequences of complaining.

Of course, there is a difference (or can be, anyway) between complaining and making a request. That is, instead of "I hate it when you use the red pen", something along the lines of "It would help us all see your writing on the board better if you only used the black and blue pens."

Other problems, of course, are more serious and more difficult to fix during a course; for example: comments about a professor's disorganization, inconsistency, perceptions of unfair tests or rude comments, refusal or inability to provide clear explanations or answers to questions. In those cases, what can a student do?

Don't wait for the teaching evaluation and don't be satisfied with writing negative comments on some professor-rating website. Get organized: talk to other students, find out what the issues are, get examples, and write it all down. Then ask an undergrad advisor, respected senior professor, or relevant administrator what to do. If the complaints/requests are reasonable, perhaps there are faculty or administrators who can pass along suggestions aimed at fixing problems in time to help the students. In some cases and at some places, these concerns will be dismissed or ignored, but I think it's worth a try.

In some cases (but probably not the extreme ones), there might even be a reasonable explanation for what seems like bad teaching. I one case I can think of, a professor used a lot of text-heavy slides in a class. The students complained about it in the teaching evaluations, but not one of them had mentioned during the course that they hated this. It turns out that there was a hearing-impaired student in the class, and the professor had been asked to put a lot of text on slides, and had spent considerable time doing so, out of concern for the hearing-impaired student.

There are ways that this particular situation could have been dealt with better by the professor and the students. For example, the professor could have explained what was going on, and could have found a way to present the course material without making the students feel bludgeoned by text-laden slides.

Of course I wish the major teaching problems could be fixed, but it is these easily fixable problems that I am focusing on today because they are fixable with a bit of two-way communication between professors and students.

So, student-readers: Are there any possibly-fixable issues in the classes you are taking now that you wish could be fixed during this term? If you give us some examples, the professor-readers can comment and say "Yes, you should definitely tell your professor about that" or "No, don't do it" (but here's a suggestion for dealing with it). More likely, you will get both answers for any particular example, but the results could be interesting anyway.

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Everything I Say Might Be Important

The other day, while working intensely on editing a document in a cafe, my attention wandered for just a moment (or two) and I tuned into a nearby conversation between two undergrads. One of them said something like this:

I hate Professor X. He never tells us whether anything he says is important, so we have to assume it is all important and so I need to take notes on everything he says and it is impossible to do that.

There was a bit more to the conversation, and it seems that this student is really struggling to sort out what is important and what is not important in a lecture, and therefore isn't getting much out of the class. If a lot of information is presented in each class, and all of it is theoretically equally "important", she can't possibly take it all in, she spends a lot of time feeling frustrated, and she therefore hates the class (and its professor).

One thing that interested me was the idea that it's better to assume that everything might be important than that none of it is (or might be). A famous gripe of professors is when students who miss a class or arrive late ask the professor if they (the students) "missed anything important". Would you rather have students wonder if you happened to touch on anything important in a particular class, or would you rather have students assume that you are probably saying lots of important things (if only they knew what they were) and hate your class as a result?

Not knowing anything about the professor or class or student in question, I am not going to speculate more about that particular situation, except to say that I hope that the student goes to talk to the professor -- not to complain, of course, but to discuss strategies for understanding the lecture material and thereby to alert the professor that at least one student is confused and struggling.

Overhearing this conversation made me think about how/whether I convey **What Is Important** and What Is Not, while teaching in a classroom.

Most of us are well aware that some students classify information as important (likely to be on the test) vs. not important (safely ignored). And many of us professors think that everything we say is in fact important (and could be on the test), but realistically, some of our pearls of wisdom are more pearly than others. We may emphasize a certain topic (perhaps even specifically described as important, key, critical, significant, fundamental etc.), and then some/most of what immediately follows is elaboration: we give examples, we try to explain and not just state. All of that is important, but there is also sort of a hierarchy.

I am going to try to be more aware of this in my classes, but I am curious as to how often I say "This is a really important point/concept/question" (and then, ideally, explain why it is important and not just assert it). I think I try to be clear about this and not just assume that students will automatically know, but to be sure, I do provide review questions that represent important information from each class. Or, I should say, the most important information because, of course, it is all important.

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Proto-Broader Impacts

As I've described in previous posts, I am on board with the mandatory "broader impacts" aspect of NSF grant proposals, and I think that activities beyond the basic doing-of-the-Science should be given some serious thought by researchers. I don't think the definition and review criteria for broader impacts should be extreme -- that is, I think that reviewers and panelists and program officers should re-read the examples in the NSF grant proposal guide every once in a while and not downgrade a proposal for only including a thoughtful but standard description of activities involving education, mentoring, and so on.

And I am even on board with the general idea that we don't suddenly learn how to care about Broader Impacts (BI) when we become faculty and need to put something in a grant proposal. This is something that should be learned along the way, and grad students should be aware of these other elements of research, including the importance of communicating research results to a broad audience and considering the education/training aspects of research as part of the overall "impact" of the work.

Where is this post heading? Am I about to complain/whine about getting bad reviews for the broader impacts component of a proposal? No, not this time.

Instead, I am going to opine that, although graduate students should start learning about broader impacts (what they are, why they are important), we should not expect that students will have much experience with BI during their student years. I am talking/complaining about overly severe expectations that students will have impressive BI credentials, e.g., when writing their own grant proposals to NSF or other funding agencies with BI-like components.

Certainly there are BI activities that grad students can do as part of their research, and many do these routinely (e.g., mentor undergrads, visit schools). That's great, but from what I've seen recently, it's not considered enough by some reviewers and panels.

I don't think that's fair to the students. We expect a lot from grad students in terms of research and communicating research results (publishing, going to conferences); there's a lot to learn and a lot to do. Right now, expecting serious BI participation from students seems like adding time and effort without changing the number of hours in the day. Oh yes, and we also want to get the time-to-degree statistics for grad students down at our institutions.

Is it just me, or have others noticed that BI expectations are quite stringent even for student proposals?

There should be a way to teach students about BIs, encourage them to be involved and contribute their ideas and energy (as time permits) to BI activities (keeping in mind, of course, that the students themselves are BIs for their advisors), but that expectations should be reasonable for what students can and should be doing at this stage of their careers.

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May The Blog Be With You

For some reason that I don't understand but that I really appreciate, I've recently received a number of extremely nice e-mails from readers saying that they have "grown up" (professionally) with my blog and have found it useful. I find this fascinating -- the concept that in the 5+ years of this blog, a number of readers who started reading as grad students, have graduated, postdocked (or whatever), and started faculty positions. Others, who started reading as fairly new tenure-track faculty, now have tenure. That's great.

I am fascinated because I don't know what it is like to go through those professional stages while reading blogs stuffed with advice and information and comments and debate and all those things you get in the blogosphere. Sure, I could have read The Chronicle of Higher Education to glean some news and advice from other parts of academe, except that I didn't, back then.

Somehow, back then, we managed, of course, despite having to walk many miles in the snow without shoes and having to carry large rocks on our heads, just to get from our offices to the library, and so on.

I sort of touched on this topic in a post in February 2010 when I mused about what sort of blogs we turn to for support -- positive ones to cheer us up, pessimistic ones for the comfort of a group-wallow in misery and despair, bizarre ones because we are bizarre, all of the above, or what? I wondered what I would have done had the blogosphere existed back when I was a struggling student and postdoc. But I had no real answer, of course, because for me, it is all just speculation.

Anyway, as I said, these e-mails have been very nice. They have cheered me up while I am in the final throes of my see-you-on-the-other-side ~3.5+ month vortex of travel, meetings, deadlines, commitments, and whatnot that started in late June and is still going on for a few more weeks.

But, as nice as these e-mails have been, I still don't really know how or why it helps to read this or other blogs. I am not (just) fishing for more compliments here. I would like to hear some specific examples -- not just related to this blog, but also to any and all academic blogs that you have read for awhile as you have progressed through various life/career stages.

Sure, I can imagine a few possibilities. For example, there's the how-to kind of post: if you are a student wondering what/whether/how to write to a professor you don't know, or if you are a professor wondering what/whether/how to write a letter of recommendation for someone you hate, I've given some examples (though not necessarily good ones) for dealing with those and other situations that many of us encounter from time to time in our academic lives. It can be useful to see examples of what to do, or not to do.

But what else? And again, I'm not specifically talking about the FSP blog. What is it like to "grow up" with the blogosphere as a source of information, mentoring, and news? Is it the whole cosmic experience of having all these people writing about Everything that is useful, or is there some specific aspect that is particularly helpful to you?

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Honestly..

Sometimes I forget that I also have a blog over in Scientopia. This is probably not a good thing. I am a bad Scientopian.

But today I decided to post something over there. I have been mulling this one over for a while, alternately thinking "I'm not going to touch that topic" and "But the person who wrote to me sounds really nice and I'd like to help this person, even if I can't help them with advice myself, but maybe my readers can". Today, the second opinion won out.

So here goes.

Be nice.

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