Job Specialization in Academia

Having attended both a small university in the US and a large university in the UK for my undergraduate degree, and now studying/researching/teaching at a different large university in the UK during my postgraduate years, I've had some exposure to different styles of educational institutions, and experienced being on both sides of the desk.

One observation that has been increasingly on my mind is the nature of the dual teaching and researching responsibilities of academic staff at the larger universities. It is fairly standard that academics do both research and teaching as a part of their job description. However, almost without exception, every big-university professor I've met identifies more as a researcher than a teacher. Teaching becomes something that they appreciate the necessity of, much like committee meetings, but is often seen as just another job responsibility which must be done before they can get down to their "real" work -- research. This is a situation that appears to benefit neither the staff nor the students. To borrow an analogy from Mitch Hedberg, it is like asking that chefs also farm, and farmers also cook. Although their work shares the central element of food, requiring practitioners to both grow it and prepare it makes little sense. Similarly, researching and teaching revolve around knowledge, but generating new knowledge (research) and disseminating existing knowledge (teaching) rely on entirely different skill sets, and I cannot see why there is not more job specialization within academia. I've seen the current system produce a fair amount of both bad teaching and bad research by academics who are drawn more to the other component.

Of course, there are teaching-focused universities in the UK -- but they are generally considered a tier below the research universities. Why not have dedicated teaching staff teach most undergrad classes at all large universities? Allow the researchers to do more research, and have specially trained teachers do the actual teaching. It seems everyone would get a better deal: the students, the researchers, and those who love to teach, but do not wish to pursue research and grants. The current professors can continue to teach postgraduate classes -- this makes sense as most postgraduate work is heavily research based, and PGs are expected to learn for themselves from original source material.

These are just my recent thoughts -- there may be factors I've not yet thought of... can anyone give me a good reason why our current system is better?

Green Soc Success - And Chockas

The first Green Soc meeting was tonight, and I'd say it went pretty well. We had about 40 people show up for the meeting, and had to go to another room (ok- it was the student bar) that had room for us. Met lots of great, enthusiastic people. Our first big event is going to be at Shillingford Organics next Saturday (13 Oct). We'll get a tour and do some work - I worked for them for a weekend during the summer, and it's a great operation. About 30 people have expressed interest in going so far. Should be a great year.

In other news, Christian made a slightly disturbing poster of Chockas, in the traditional amotivational-poster style, which is now my desktop background.

Update

Sorry to be a slack blogger - things have been picking up around here. A brief update of what has been going on:

Today was officially the first day of university classes, so there have been the usual rounds of meeting with convenors, professors, and other teaching assistants during the past week. I'm helping with the usual array of stats and psych classes, plus the stats helpdesk and I'm one of the MSc mentors. It's strange to walk around campus and see other people. And of course because 12,000 students have arrived here in the past week (the city is only 100,000 people), it means the Fresher's Flu is going around campus - I got it Saturday, but it's not too bad. Other people have been pretty busy too; I went into my office at 20:00 on Saturday, and found only 1 of the 5 people (self included) who share the office was not there working. Still, it's kind of fun to have so much stuff going on after the lull of summer.

The preparations for Green Society have been proceeding smoothly. We had a get-together of the committee members last week and made a banner and posters for the Fresher's Fair (which was Sunday.) 200 people signed up at the fair, and our first meeting will be tomorrow. Still much to do there - Green Week is in November, and we have about 20 events scheduled. This is the new Green Soc website - it's a modified blog because I didn't feel like coding raw HTML like I've done in the past - it's still pretty bare at the moment.

Our bunny Cocoa is being re-homed on Wednesday. He's a sweety, but the other bunnies bully him too much for his well-being.

Oh, and our new washing machine should arrive tomorrow. Our old one has been broken for more than a week. (!)

Thoughts on Speed Reading

On Friday, I attended an all-day workshop on speed reading, sponsored by the university for all postgrad students. I'm not quite sure how I felt about it. I think some of the techniques we learned can be useful, certainly, but much of it tasted like little more than snake oil. The session was from 9 to 5, so I will only give a brief overview.

Basically, we were told that with a little practice, we should be reading at a rate of over 1000 words/minute - about 3 1/2 pages a minute, which is several lines of text every second - with near full comprehension. Now, presumably this would take a lot of practice, so I don't want to make any broad generalizations, but, what is the saying? Something like, 'if it sounds too good to be true...'

We were asked to bring unread academic material and a novel. I brought The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks. Banks' books are quite different from nearly any other book I've read. They are classed with science fiction, but this is not the neatest of fits. Without giving anything away, a common theme in the books is inverting the readers' sense of normalcy, in terms of time, space, and culture, and philosophy, all executed with incredible creativity. (The cover is purty too!) The instructor demonstrated the speed reading technique by reading from the first page of my book.

So you know, this is the first paragraph of the book:

I have a story to tell you. It has many beginning, and perhaps one ending. Perhaps not. Beginning and endings are contingent things anyway; inventions, devices. Where does any story really begin? There is always context, always an encompassingly greater epic, always something before the described events, unless we are to start every story with, 'BANG! Expand! Sssss...' then itemise the whole subsequent history of the universe before settling down, at last, to the particular tale in question. Similarly, no ending is final, unless it is the ending of all things...

She took my book and 'read' the first page in about 1 second. This was her analysis of the book: "This book is not about characters, it is all about the action! Right from the first page there is an explosion, it even says 'BANG!' and you can tell it is going to be a page-turner all the way through." Um... No.

Although I could write a much longer post on my thoughts of this session (and I've thought about it a lot), the instructor's analysis of my book really says it all. Woody Allen made a joke with the same point: "I took a speed reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia."

To be sure, there is a definite advantage in being able to read a little more quickly - and the session did help me in this - but I said a little more quickly, not impossibly more quickly. The issue that irked me the most was the attitude that super-fast reading was the only way to read, and that reading at slow (e.g., normal) rates is never appropriate - whether for pleasure reading or heavy academic material. I got the sense that the instructor was profoundly unaware of how one reads research articles - and that 'reading' several lines of methodology or statistical results every second is not desirable, at least not if you want to know what it means. The instructor normally teaches business managers (and was one previously - now she runs workshops and writes management books), and I'm not sure she appreciated how different the styles and needs are between aspiring academics pursuing original avenues of research and business managers who seek to maximize the speed at which everything is done. I think the value of the workshop would have been more appreciable if the approach had been more holistic, the needs of postgrad students were differentiated from CEOs, and the claims of speed reading benefits had been more research-based rather than like a hard sales pitch.

I found a few articles on Slate that confirm my thoughts on speed reading. One and two.

New eProfile

The Graduate School at the University has been encouraging postgrads to create eProfiles for about a year now, and I finally got around to it. Mine is here, if you wanna take a gander, though it is pretty general CV/résumé stuff.

When the eProfiles were first introduced, there was some departmental discussion about their use. I particularly liked this input from someone in the school: "There are some strange people out there who, for example, may be 'attracted' to psychologists or may be 'interested' in researchers in animal behaviour. Furthermore, I would prefer any use of photographs to be an opt-in procedure as opposed to an opt-out procedure."

I'm guessing there is a story there?

Conference

The conference today went very well. Twenty minutes seems like a long time at first, but it is actually a very short space to communicate any real sense of nuance or background. I thought that just about all of the presenters did well, especially considering that for most of them it was their first conference as well.

My talk was a (too brief) review of conservation psychology. The basic structure was 1) Why do it? 2) What are its limitations? 3) What I am currently doing

My presentation is online, for those who are curious.

First Conference

On Monday, June 4, I will be presenting at my first research conference. Admitedly, it is a small one at the university, but it will be good practice for the bigger ones. My talk is from 10:40 to 11:00 and is titled "Conservation psychology: Addressing the limitations of an infant subdiscipline." There are three basic parts: First, the limitations with the previous research; then the preliminary findings of my current research; and finally some proposals for research over the next two years, with a focus on addressing the previous limitations.

Abstract is below:

Conservation psychology, the use of psychology to understand and promote conservation of the natural environment, has only recently developed as a subdiscipline within psychology. However, despite a flurry of recent publications in conservation psychology, most of the research has been limited by a number of theoretical or methodological assumptions. These include paradigmatic isolation, a focus on immediate outcomes instead of long-term outcomes, and an over-dependence on self-reported behaviour. In this presentation, I will discuss ways in which these research limitations may be overcome, and specifically how the research studies I am presently conducting will attempt to fill these gaps in the literature by using a cross-paradigmatic approach in longitudinal studies assessing real-life behaviour.

This is the intinerary.

Sigh...

So I was marking a set of 10 practical reports this weekend, and found some suspicious paragraphs. Uh oh. I looked a little closer and found that out of 10 reports, 5 had plagiarised at least an entire paragraph. Five. Two of those contained virtually no original writing. What was the source they plagiarised? The handout they received in class describing the background of the practical. Seriously, that is really depressing. I mean... wow.

Campus Gardening

Alright, it seems like it has been forever since I've written a gardening post. So, I've got a lot to update you about.

If you remember, the Green Society held a Green Fair in April (which was a huge success, by the way). At the Fair, a few students expressed interest about the possibility of having a student allotment on campus (US translation: "allotment" = "garden owned by an institution, but given to residents/citizens to use as they wish"). Within a few days, we had received permission from the university to begin digging in a field on the edge of campus. Although the whole field is several acres, we're just using a corner of it. Still, our corner is 2,700 sq ft, which is a big corner, as far as corners go. This is a picture of our corner from the top:


And this is the same land but from the bottom:


Ok, ok, I know that's pretty boring. But these photos are about a month old, and since that time, five of us have dug up, by hand, about a third of it. This Saturday we planted the Three Sisters (corn, climbing beans/peas, and squash), as well as tomatoes, beetroot, and dwarf french beans. Last week, we planted kale, lettuce, peppers, and more tomatoes. The space we have planted so far will be communal, meaning we all work it and all share the harvest. The remaining 2/3 of our land will be split up between us in individual plots where we can grow what we like and maintain it ourselves. We're all very excited about it! In the next few weeks I'll try to get some pictures of what it looks like once dug an planted. Good stuff!

It's a great area as far as wildlife is concerned. Yesterday, we saw two pheasants, a hen and a cockerel, treading through the high grass about a hundred feet from our garden. Last week we heard the cockerel calling non-stop (pheasants are very loud), but this week he was pretty quiet. There are also two badger setts and many rabbit warrnes in the nearby trees. Hedgehogs and foxes are bound to be around too, but I've not yet seen any.

Done

Ok, so two hours before the deadline, I've handed in all my marking. Of course, that didn't stop them from asking me to do a few more late ones, but there is no immediate deadline on those so it's fine :)

Again, I would say there is definite improvement over last term. The first-years got an average mark of 65, which is 7 points above what is supposed to be "average." And considering I'm usually told I mark on the strict end, that is more like 10 points above "average." For the American translation of UK marks, add 20 points (65% UK = 85% US or a solid B.) Well done, everybody! (Except for you, Francis Quiggensworth, this is the last time I'll tell you: stop turning in assingments written in pig's blood!) Ehh... just kidding... it was actually cow's blood.

I would like to make a few "serious" overall comments though. Every generation has a name: There was the Greatest Generation, Generation X, and so on. I think this upcoming generation, if they are not called Generation Facebook, will instead be known as the Generation That Could Not Use Commas. Seriously, I don't think more than about 10% of the papers had a good grasp on how to use a comma. The quality of the reasoning and the research was excellent. The punctuation was atrocious. I'll take substance over cosmetics any day, but after enough punctual negligence, substance begins to suffer as well.

And finally, there are always typos and misnomers in any set of work, but some are more amusing than others. The one that made me laugh the most this time was a few papers on evolution of behaviour that spelled the word "ensure" as "insure." I chuckled more than once after reading things like "pine voles and meadow voles insure their reproductive strategies in different ways." Do the voles use different companies? Does the pine vole go down to the branch in town, and the meadow vole do it online from home?

Ehh, ok, perhaps it was not that funny after all.

Lines that were also fun (paraphrased): "Males on average have many more children than females." Hmm.. trying to think how that would work.

"Women are a species with a very particular reproductive strategy" This error crops up with the same worrying frequency as "Africa is a nation that..."

More Marking...

Let's say you are a student working on a paper. This paper is 100% of your grade for this particular class. Your topic is to write about a famous psychological theorist, and discuss his primary theories, and whether they have any value. It would probably be a good idea if you spelled that theorist's name correctly just once throughout the whole paper.

I'm just sayin'.

I'm in the last 100 metre sprint right now... I need to mark about 40 more of these suckers by Monday.

Marking Update

I've got to say, I'm pretty impressed with this batch of practical reports. There is a definite improvement over last term, and I'm especially impressed with the first years, whose work in many cases rivals the second years. It makes it much more readable when it's high-quality work as well. Still... some people make the strangest errors. One paper I was marking earlier in the week had some serious problems with spacing - sometimes there would be 3 or 4 spaces between words, sometimes no spaces at all - about 20 errors per page like this. Surely it can't take that much time to get just one space between each word. Sometimes I think they just do this to make us wonder...

I'm just over halfway done with this term's stack...

It Begins...

It's that magical time of year when the undergrads have just turned in their reports and practicals, and the teaching assistants prepare their coloured pens...

As of today, I have a stack of 130 student reports to mark. Each one is 2,000 words, bringing the total word count to 260,000, which is equivalent to about 850 pages from a book. They are due back, with grades and comments, in two weeks time. If I find anything truly comedic, I'll let you know, to the extent that I can while preserving student privacy.

Speaking of students, check out the best student complaint ever. I'm very fortunate to never have had to work with anyone quite like that.

Posting may be light over the next two weeks, I've got to grade and write feedback for 10 reports a day (which takes 6 to 8 hours) to keep pace... and I wanted to do so much gardening this week, too.

Update: From a paper on the personality traits Extroversion, Psychoticism, Neuroticism, Impulsive Sensation Seeking, and Risk Taking:

the independent variables were the total individual scores for P, E, N and ImpSS.

Hmm, what does that spell? I can imagine some teachers would want to mark down for that, but this person has obviously put some time into coming up with that, and I'm always inclined to appreciate cleverness.

Update II: Ok, quite a few students included the P-E-N-ImpSS acronym (the normal order is E-N-P-ImpSS.) Clever.

Overall, these papers are much, much better than the ones I marked last term. I would say about a full 10 points better. It's a good feeling to see a large group of students almost universally improve. Good job!

Gadjimation

I know some of you in the States wanted to come and see my MSc graduation, but, because of a few thousands miles of ocean, were not able to. Well, the video of the ceremony is online. The ceremony is quite long, but I walk across the stage at roughly 1:18:20 (you can just scroll ahead to that point.) Many of the people that walk across in the few minutes before and after I do are the people I work with currently.

ORSAS

I received word this morning that my application for funding to the Overseas Research Students Awards Scheme (ORSAS) was successful. This is very good news, as it means my PhD is now fully funded. This means I can squander my Fellowship grant on things like food and paying utility bills, instead of putting it all towards tuition as I did this year. Very welcome news indeed.