Has more than a month passed since I’ve done a rec reads post? My gosh. Which in 2020 time, is, like, 27 years? This is a relatively condensed list of things I’ve bookmarked since the last one. And there are no takes on the election. (Though if you do find a 10,000 word insider’s view of exactly how the Four Seasons Total Landscaping thing went down, because oh man, this will be such a hilarious and pathetic story, please let me know? Because I don’t want to miss that.)
From panic to pedagogy: Using online active learning to promote inclusive instruction in ecology and evolutionary biology courses and beyond
The science of learning vs. proctoring software
Our HyFlex Experiment: What’s Worked and What Hasn’t
Hope in practice: beyond climate anxiety
Endless forms most stupid, icky, and small: The preponderance of noncharismatic invertebrates as integral to a biologically sound view of life
NYC’s COVID-19 Outbreak from the Eyes of a Pulmonary and Critical Care Team’s Biostatistician
New blog on the block: A tale of two PhDs
How Field Courses Propel Inclusion and Collective Excellence (okay, I’m not a fan of the framing of “excellence” here or anywhere, but this is still a good paper.)
Acknowledging undergraduate labor in academic papers
Shot: Mark Griffiths: the professor who publishes a paper every two days
Chaser: Some instances of apparent duplicate publication by Dr. Mark D. Griffiths
The data on gendered career outcomes over the length of the pandemic is nothing short of an outrage. Why the hell aren’t men stepping up to fricking do the laundry, feed their kids, and reckon with constant interruptions to work? Because it’s affecting moms way more than dads, and the only explanation I see is that men are doing less as parents.
Did I mention that MY BOOK IS NOW SHIPPING?!! (publisher; indiebound; amazon – a heads up that the distributor for many independent bookstores apparently has had more demand than anticipated (yay?!) and so they might say it’s “backordered” and unavailable, but that should be remedied in a matter of days if your local bookstore still has this issue.) This is so exciting. This week, so many of y’all have shared with me photos with you copy of The Chicago Guide to College Science Teaching, which both warms my heart, but also makes me privately (and well, now, not so privately) anxious. It’s a short guide that covers a lot of ground in a broad manner, so there are a lot of coarse strokes, and I’m sure it’s got some opinions in it that you might not agree with, and it’s got some ideas that you might have tried that may or may not work for you, and there is even a short chapter about online teaching that might even have some useful suggestions too. (Anyhow, if you’ve already gotten your hands on a copy and you’re in a generous mood, it would be a kindness to provide a review on that very popular website that sells books, this is apparently a thing that matters in the publishing world, even if you didn’t buy it there.)
Why is it so hard to fire a tenured sexual predator?
How could the primary literature in education research be more accessible? “Seventy‐seven new academics… were asked to read an extract of an article on the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and mark the text according to categories of difficulty or dislike. Analysis of the data revealed six main linguistic barriers in the text: specialist vocabulary, passive constructions, pronouns, figurative language, derivations and poor editorial standards.”
TA evaluations have gender bias, too. Here’s the story in Inside Higher Ed, and here’s the paper, which is in press.
The Dean of the School of Architecture at CCNY resigned, who has a Ghanaian-Scottish background, mostly because she found it so unreasonably difficult to navigate life as a Black woman in the United States. Her statement is worth a read.
Inside the bizarre publishing ring that linked 5G to coronavirus
A historical perspective on originalism
Honeybees disrupt the structure and functionality of plant-pollinator networks
Safe fieldwork strategies for at-risk individuals, their supervisors and institutions – you’ve seen the preprint, now see the paper in Nature Ecology and Evolution
Why did colleges open during the pandemic? “But what did families think they were paying for? Classes are still happening, and degrees will still be conferred. Parents and students are miffed because they don’t really buy teaching when they pay tuition. Instead, they get something more abstract: the college experience. Some of that experience involves education—the seminar discussion in a facsimile of a medieval monastery, the cram session under the vaulted ceiling of a library, the brisk, after-class chat with a professor across a grassy quad. But most of it doesn’t, especially the stuff that can’t be done from a distance, such as moving away from home for the first time, swilling booze at a house party, touring houses during sorority rush, applying face paint for a football game, decorating the cold, cinder-block walls of a new dorm room.”
“bropenscience” is broken science
Everything I Know About Elite America I Learned From ‘Fresh Prince’ and ‘West Wing’
here’s a coup-o-meter for the United States
You want a crash course in how to DEIJ right? Here you go, this keynote from Beronda Montgomery is brilliant:
So, Terry, your bookshelf image is less diverse than it used to be. Congrats on the new book!!! I have my copy and am eager to dig into it over the Thanksgiving holiday.
Thanks, Paul! They say I’m not supposed to be too subtle about promoting the new book :)
Your lack of subtlety is noted.
Your science of learning vs proctoring software seems to take me to the coup-o-meter link. Just FYI.
Thank you! It’s now fixed. (I apparently do this regularly, because I’m usually rather slapdash about the copy/paste of it all, and I appreciate it when y’all catch it. I should get back in the habit of testing every link, I think I dropped that habit around rec reads #30 or so..)