Understanding student resistance to active learning
9 myths holding you back from stellar slides. Not as clickbaity as it sounds.
A database of grants that PIs have decided to share publicly.
If you’re on an academic job search, having a partner is a liability for women, but not for men. This has been assumed to be common knowledge, I think, but having an actual study with these findings is important. Like this one.
The New York Times is here to tell us that jobs in STEM aren’t there for all of the graduates that we’re producing, particularly in the life sciences. I’m not entirely sure what criteria were used to classify a job as a ‘STEM job,” which would involve some substantial wading into documents of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Which I’d be fine with doing, if I, you know, really wanted to.
As investigative journalists make their way through the Paradise Papers bombshells, they are discovering how universities are hiding investments into fossil fuels from students, alumni, and benefactors.
Some folks in Australia estimated how much time towards research productivity was lost to the preparation of unfunded grant applications. For one program: four centuries of effort.
Saying goodbye to the vaquita. Unlike the California condor, it doesn’t look like they can be saved by captive breeding. This is just heartbreaking.
Tips for hiring and recruiting minorities and women for faculty positions.
“A short Results section, and statistics in Excel. These aren’t signs of scientific weakness; they’re signs of exceptionally good experimental design. Let’s aspire to them.”
How do you teach students to connect concepts?
If you haven’t seen this read about creepy videos on Youtube For Kids, it’s worth your time. And really important if you have kids.
Fed up with discussions of art in academese that doesn’t reflect real scholarship or critique? Then this is for you.
The importance of showing empathy in the classroom
If you’re a biogeographer, I hope you’ll be excited to learn that Global Ecology and Biogeography and Diversity and Distributions both go double blind! They’re joining the good company of American Naturalist and Evolution, who have made the shift in recent times. Kudos to the editors.
Abuse and enablers in faculty culture: “Abuse is normalized. ‘That’s just how things are done, and if you can’t take it, you shouldn’t get a Ph.D.’ The idea here is that pain and suffering give the profession its soul. Kindness is for saps.”
What it’s like to be homeless in college.
Poverty is largely invisible among college students.
For minorities in science, building community matters.
The disappearing American grad student
Just in case you hadn’t heard: The new tax plan bill in the House, if it becomes law in its current form, is a direct attack on higher education. It’ll destroy grad programs by making students pay taxes on tuition waivers, it will tax the endowments of universities with big endowments, no longer let folks deduct student loan interest, and just to rub the salt in, they won’t let K-12 deduct personal funds they spend on supplies for children in their own classrooms. The Senate plan is a little less evil, by the way, but still high on the evil scale.
A student’s story of sexual misconduct by Stanford English professor Jay Fliegelman
Three professors at Dartmouth are under investigation for sexual misconduct
Christopher Kemp’s wonderful new book The Lost Species gets a favorable reviews in Science and a top-five-pick-of-the-week in Nature. I’ve got my copy! (I’m saving this as a reward for when I finish my current writing project, up against deadline.)
That
9 myths holding you backarticle was TERRIBLE.Some of the points were certainly valid, but the presentation was very off-putting. The visuals were pointless repetitions of summary chunks of text, emphasis was over-supplied and based on both bold and italic text together, and the colour palette was based around light blue on a white background. She refers to herself by her name in the text, but credits herself as Echorivera.com – did she change her name to a URL?
It`s hard to take better-presentations advice seriously when the advice is presented like that.
“It’s hard to take better-presentations advice seriously when the advice is presented like that.”
In that sentence, if you substitute “better-presentations” with “comments,” then this would be piece of advice from which you can benefit, too!
I thought you might like to know that I just posted the following comment to echorivera: I got pointed to this by Small Pond Science. I agree with all your points. A reason people have too much text on slide, IMO, is to provide the prompts for their speech. This can be overcome if presenters can either memorise their entire script or adequate dual screen tech is available. I have found that these are the main stumbling blocks – in addition to crap pointer clickers – to putting across a carefully assembled, attention grabbing presentation.