Researchers at the Université Laval in Canada have shown that conifers have evolved very little over the last 100 million years. They speculate that this may be because conifers achieved balance with their environment early on, allowing them to grow in many habitats around the world successfully. The original paper is at BMC Biology 2012, 10:84.
We mine it, but once we mine what’s there, it will take either hundreds of millions of years to make more, or we need to find a new source of Helium, such as through mastering terrestrial nuclear fusion or perhaps mining the Moon.
In the meantime, we should be aware that every time we fill a Helium balloon, we’re taking something that it took the entire natural history of the Earth to create and basically banishing it from our planet.
“Existing campuses could move in this direction by de-emphasizing or eliminating lecture-based courses, having their students more engaged in research and co-ops in the broader world, and having more faculty with broad backgrounds who show a deep desire to mentor students,” he writes.
Hmm, practical, hands-on experience with strong mentoring through relationships with faculty. Sounds familiar, but can’t quite place it.
The new version of Evernote for Mac (v5.0) is out today, and it’s excellent.
Yesterday, the Wired Campus blog reported that CourseSmart will begin piloting an analytics feature in their electronic textbooks:
The book will be integrated into the college’s course-management system. It will track students’ behavior: how much time they spend reading, how many pages they view, and how many notes and highlights they make. That data will get crunched into an engagement score for each student.
I’ve speculated about this before, but was wrong about it in two ways. First, I didn’t believe the publishers would do it because I didn’t see how it supported their business. That was short-sighted, and I’ll comment more on it later. If they did it, I predicted it would be used for something other than the current plans. On one count, I was dead on: the data will flow into the course management system.
I was thinking about it (of course) from the standpoint of a teacher, and the fundamental utility I saw for a feedback loop was to improve student learning. I envisioned a system whereby the textbook improved as students used it and were evaluated. If students show poor understanding of a particular process after studying from the book, change the book and try again. Or better yet, set up A/B testing on a chapter-by-chapter basis and do performance evaluation on the learning results. This is the approach that big internet companies use to make nearly every decision that makes them money.
But this is not the plan, at least not yet. No, the tracking will focus on collecting information on “student engagement,” allowing faculty (or administrators) to identify disengaged students before they fail out or leave the school. This is too bad, a missed opportunity to impact learning more directly. But it does answer the previous question I had about the business incentive to build this kind of system. Administrators are keenly interested in metrics for “student engagement”, and are increasingly wiling to pay for it. Integrating the data with the CMS gives the publisher a feature than can differentiate them from competitors in an increasingly competitive market for these systems. In a sense then, this isn’t about textbooks at all. The text is merely the content with which the student engages, the bait. The engagement is the thing, or more precisely, the data and analytics surrounding engagement.
Last fall, I wrote about using Numbers on my iPad to create a rubric for grading lab reports. This semester, I wanted to use the same rubric with some minor modifications to score the same kind of report. Not much has changed in Numbers since then, but I wanted to jot down what I did so I remember for next time.
The first step was to duplicate the spreadsheet on the iPad, so that I wasn’t overwriting last year’s grades. I actually like to keep these around for when students ask me for recommendation letters, as they provide a record of details about a student’s work habits that I’ve long since forgotten. I think it can help a letter immensely to be able to say, “I knew this student when she was a freshman, and she was already a shining star on her first scientific report.”
After making a new copy of the spreadsheet, I deleted all rows except the first and copy/pasted this year’s roster into it. I slightly altered the requirements for the report, so I (luckily) remembered to modify the items and point values to reflect my expectations. After that, I was off to the grading races, this time using a form to do data entry rather than entering values directly on the table. I’ve commented on this view before, but this turns Numbers into a little bit of a database-flavored tool, giving just a bit more focus on an individual student’s ‘record’ than a spreadsheet allows.
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The major change this year is that Numbers on both iOS and the Mac are both connected to iCloud, making it completely seamless to access the grade sheet back on my Mac. Like last time, I set up a ‘mail merge’ (outdated name) to generate a one-page report for each student, which required that I save a copy of the spreadsheet to my Mac from iCloud. I guess the mail merge feature isn’t iCloud-aware just yet. This year, rather than creating a separate PDF for each student, I just copy/pasted the output in Pages into the body of an email, which was cleaner than last year’s PDF attachment.
I spent the day Saturday in New Orleans at the , doing my best impression of a recruiter. My department is for a new faculty colleague whose research area (ideally) spans cellular/molecular neuroscience and microbiology. Given that there have been some splashy publications in this area lately, we’re hoping we can find a good bluehost match. Given the somewhat unusual coupling of neuroscience and microbiology, we felt it would be a smart move to go and make the case to a few hundred potential job seekers, and in retrospect it was time well spent. I spoke personally with probably a half-dozen scientists who seemed keen on our position and planned to submit their materials.
On the other hand, a few of the other conversations were, how shall I put it, less than productive. Any good teacher is always quick to point out that there are no stupid questions. While that may be true in the classroom, or at least express an honorable sentiment, it doesn’t apply to every situation. If you’ve stumbled upon this post, think of this as some advice for what not to ask about a faculty position in science at a liberal arts college.
Q: So how much would I have to teach?
Really? This is your first question? This is a little like inquiring about a job as a personal trainer and asking ‘how much would I have to work out?’ Teaching is what we do at a liberal arts college, almost everything takes a back seat to teaching. That doesn’t mean we don’t do research, but we almost never do it instead of teaching. In an ideal world, your research complements your teaching, allowing you to use it as a tool in your teaching. Most of us could probably advance more quickly working alone our own research than we can with students, but the whole point of being here is to help mentor and train students. So you have to be at least as interested in helping facilitate those A-ha! moments for students as you are in your actual research questions.
(To answer your question, we teach between 10 and 12 ‘contact hours’ — hours spent in front of a class or lab — per week. For example, most semesters that means 2 lecture classes and 2 lab sections.)
Does your department provide TA support for your grad students?
Unfortunately no, because there are no grad students, we are an undergraduate liberal arts college.
But wait, I thought you said you were expected to do research. Who does the research if you don’t have grad students?
Ah, good question (not really, just trying to be nice). Remember how I was talking about mentoring and training undergraduate students? You guessed it, they do the actual research with you. Let me sketch out the picture for you: You are in your lab, doing the research, and they are there with you, also doing the research.
Does this actually work? Do you ever publish anything?
I’m glad you asked! Yes, in fact, this does work. Of the 14 faculty members across the life sciences at OWU, all of us have at least one peer-reviewed publication within the last 3 years. Almost all of those include student authors, some of them include student first authors. Are these in Science and Nature? Not often, no. But if the thought of publishing a student-authored research paper in a respectable journal does not excite you at least as much as a publication in one of the big three, you should probably just move along, nothing to see here. To us, there is simply nothing better than watching (and facilitating) your undergraduate students on their path to becoming independent scientists.
But if I have to be in the lab actually doing the research, who will write the grant proposals to fund all the post-docs and technicians?
I can see you’re really starting to connect (some of) the dots, that’s good. You will not have to worry about carrying 7 post-docs and 2 technicians, because you couldn’t convince a post-doc to come work with you in a million years. ‘The system’ is set up in such a way that post-docs need to make as much data as possible, as fast as possible. Working with you and your undergraduate students is not conducive to fast data-making. Post-docs would take one look at your first-year students re-using the same pipette tip for both primers and the template in a PCR and run away in terror.
Given the large teaching load, how often does the neurotransmitter re-uptake journal club meet?
Even less often than you might expect, given that you would be the only one here who works on neurotransmitter transporters, or signaling in general, or does any form of molecular/cellular neuroscience at all! Take heart though, after you have been here a few years, you can start a journal club with the students you have mentored, the purpose of which will be, you guessed it, teaching.
It sounds like I’ll have to teach a lot. Will I have to teach things outside my main area of interest, which is neurotransmitter re-uptake transporter antagonist structure and function?
Only if you consider almost every other topic that has to do with cells or molecules to be outside your area of interest.
What do you mean when you say, “…and also participate in service to the department and university”?
This is really not a big deal, it’s just minor work involving questions like should this faculty member receive tenure? and which department has the greatest need for a new faculty position? and how can we work with the administration to find a way to increase salaries, which haven’t kept up with the cost of living in 20 years? And sometimes you’ll be asked to help with student recruitment by attending an event, hosting students in your classes, meeting with parents, or traveling to a college fair, but this doesn’t happen any more than once a week.
I don’t want any of this to come across as (entirely) snarky and sarcastic, everything above should be read in good humor. I do think it’s important that you know what you’re getting into with a position at a liberal arts college. Many prospective faculty members have only ever seen the academic job market from the viewpoint of their advisor at a large, research university. Those positions are great and vitally important to the research enterprise, but they are not primarily about teaching undergraduates. Here’s one way to think about it: if you want your career advancement to be tied mostly to your research productivity, don’t come to a small liberal arts college, go to a big university. But if you want your rewards and incentives to be tied to your teaching excellence while still maintaining an active research program, let’s talk. Even if you work on neurotransmitter re-uptake transporter antagonist structure and function.
I’m using my iPad to present the key points at the start of each class, and yesterday I wanted to ask some interactive clicker-type questions with , like I had done . Students could submit responses via text message, but I immediately ran into a problem with students trying to respond via the web. phentermine The was loading, but indicating that there was no active poll for them to respond to. I didn’t realize that in order to accept responses over the web you need to be running the questions from a computer with Flash. Their FAQ seems to assume this, at least, so I figured I was out of luck with the iPad.
Then I stumbled upon a blog post on their site announcing their , which perfectly solves the problem. It allows you to fully control the polling process from a tablet or smartphone just by going to a . Here you can create new polls, stop and start polls, and push polls to . This is exactly what I needed, and I’m looking forward to trying it tomorrow in class. My only suggestion for them is to add this somewhere on their so it’s more easily discovered.
Now that I’ve sent the first exam over to the copy center, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on my with the Intro Cell Bio class. In short, I set out to lecture far less, expect students to read in advance, and use class time to work problems, questions, and (small) case studies. So how’s it going, and where can I improve?
I have definitely been refraining from long lectures so far, with the longest one clocking in around 30 min (I think). I’m really trying to focus on the highlights from the text and respond to student confusion. The material thus far has not been all that challenging, so I anticipate more student questions as we move deeper into the material. It’s amazing to watch the class though, and even after 20 min of talking at them, some of them are clearly disengaging, especially if there are no slides. I have prepared slides for last two topics, and that seems to keep their interest up longer, plus I think they feel secure knowing better what to “put down” in their notes.
I can’t tell whether students are actually reading more or not. I thought with the new text being more focused on a single topic that I explicitly assigned for a particular date that they would have an easier time keeping up. I’m not quizzing them on the readings, but that might be a good way to encourage a deeper reading ahead of time. I think having a better linkage between the content in the reading and the problem/question/case for the day would also be an improvement.
The in-class work has been hit-and-miss. I feel like some days I managed to provide excellent chances for them to sink their teeth into a question, while others were much more mundane and less engaging. Several times I’ve had them focus on food as a means to apply the material (carbohydrates, lipids) and make the class more relevant for the Food adipex Course Connection. The best class by far, at least in my opinion, was one focused on a medical case study. It was abbreviated from its original version, but there was enough information in it for them to gain the background they needed to ‘solve’ the case questions. I guess I’ll find out from their first exams whether the approach is paying off.
Gravitropic 