Gavan P.L. Watson
With Comic Sans (a font, for those not in typographic know) taking centre stage in many of today‘s web-related April Fools jokes, it’s worth highlighting some research that might have you re-thinking your derision of the font.
Earlier this year, researchers published finding that suggest that “information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than easier to read information in a controlled laboratory setting”. Of course (if you see where I’m going with this) one such “hard-to-read” font used in this work was Comis Sans. While there was no significant difference found in retention between the use of the hard-to-read fonts, the study suggests that learning (information retention & recall) is improved when students are forced into the added challenge that Comic Sans (and other crappy fonts) provides.
So the only logical conclusion to this is:
Format all your teaching material in Comic Sans!
Source: Diemand-Yauman, C., et al. Fortune favors the BOLD (and the italicized): Effects of disfluency on educational outcomes. Cognition (2010), doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2010.09.012
As part of ePortfolio week at the University of Guelph, I co-facilitated a session today on teaching dossiers and ePortfolios with my colleagues Janet Wolstenholme and Jason Thompson. My part of the session was to talk about the possibilities out there when thinking about an on-line presence to communicate about your academic self. The take-home message of my chat was, regardless of platform, it is in your best interest as a graduate student to start creating a place on-line where people can find your academic persona1. To help think a way through this, I created a matrix with the following axes:
- Professional <—> Personal, and
- Low Stakes <—> High Stakes
Choosing a platform or tool should be a process of deciding where you’re comfortable operating along the two continuums: a) how willing, able or concerned you are to share information about your personal self and b) how much effort you’re willing to commit (and this commitment might be measured in effort, technological expertise or otherwise) to the set-up and maintenance of the tool.
I should point out that while one end of the professional/personal axis is strictly personal, I don’t feel it makes too much sense talking about that end here as communicating strictly personal information would have little (intended) impact on this idea of communicating about your professional self. It’s part of the matrix, but for the sake of focus I’m ignoring it. So, it’s my belief that if you can match your own interest and intended scope for communicating your academic persona to a tool, you’ll be happier with the product.
With that in mind, I shared a range of tools and examples today. If you’re more the independent type, you can visit the bundle of links on your own but I’m going to break the tools down a bit and explain where I see them fitting along the two axis I describe above.
More Professional, Lower Stakes
An example: an academia.edu profile
Academia.edu is a social network pitched directly at those working (considered loosely) within academic institutions. By adding yourself to your school, department or college, you begin to see and can connect to others at your institution or with those academics, independent of location, that share similar research interests. You can also use the site to build your academic presence by sharing talks, papers and other forms of academic “currency.” I consider it lower stakes because you can add as little or as much detail as you like and it doesn’t really requires upkeep beyond a semesterly visit to update your activities. An added bonus is analytics; you can get an email anytime someone’s Google search brings up your profile. It’s egosurfing in reverse!
More Professional, Higher Stakes
Examples: the academic blog; D2L ePortfolio
The academic blog, which I unoriginally would define as a blog that focuses exclusively on your academic work, fits right into this quadrant. Importantly, it shares little or no personal information, which is often understood to be the mainstay of a blog. I like it because the blogging can provide an external audience with a more sophisticated understanding of your scholarly approach—in short its richer. For the graduate student, it might mean writing about stages in your dissertation or a particular challenge in your field.
I consider it higher stakes because you need to create content on an on-going basis and initially need to create the structure. Will you, for example, include a CV or a statement of teaching philosophy? Some of that structure can be static (i.e. more like permanent web pages rather than updating blog posts), with content often dictating design. It demands that you have an interest in maintaining the site, too (or having a friend or loved one who will do this for you).
More Personal, Lower Stakes
Example: about.me profile
Here’s my about.me profile; you’ll see it is one page with a quick outline of my academic interests. Visual. And a list of links to other places: twitter, flickr, linkedin and my personal blog. Creating the page took about five minutes for entering the content (and truthfully fifteen to fiddle with the look). It offers visitor analytics so you can get an idea of traffic and who is looking for you. I suggest that this profile is more personal because I’m linking to my various other presences on-line—one of which could be your lab website or graduate student page on your school / department / college website—and letting those sites do the “heavy lifting” regarding answering the question who I am.
More Personal, Higher Stakes
Examples: the personal-academic blog hybrid; informal ePortfolio
At the risk of disappearing into a never-ending self-referential cycle, I’ll cite this website as a “personal-academic blog hybrid”. While I post photographs I’ve taken well outside the academic sphere, I also do the same things I suggested for the “pure” academic blog: write and ruminate about approaches in my academic field. My site byline is “proudly muddying the line between my private and public persona” and I think there is some value to this. It’s more the real me for one—I show a balance of what informs my personal and academic practices. So, the whole is quite rich for someone wanting to know more. But I also carve out a significant portion to static pages that outline my academic training and publications. Again, like the professional blog, it is a tool that requires some more sophisticated knowledge about creating and maintaing the site. I must say, however, that that sophistication allows for more creativity in creating something that perfectly matches your goals.
Other examples
Institutional repositories, such as the University of Guelph’s atrium.
Almost sterile of the personal, institutional repositories allow you to store your academic work in perpetuity (or, at least as long as the sponsoring institution exists). So that longevity is a good thing. Possibilities do exist to share that work too as the uploaded documents get metadata and URIs for easy sharing. At the same time, it’s not explicitly designed for accruing a public persona, so it could be difficult to curate an identity. I’ve used it in conjunction with academia.edu to host academic articles I cite and link to there.
A business-flavoured social networking site, LinkedIn has started to up its academic chops by, for example, allowing you to update citations to published works. Short-term, part-time or transient work (like TAships) don’t translate that well into the structure of the on-line resume. I would say it sits higher in the stakes category as it looks best if you create a complete profile, which can take some work.
- For graduate students, the best anecdote is exemplify how important this is was my own recent job search—thanks to analytics associated with the tool I use, I was able to see the kinds of visitors I had to the academic section of my homepage. Clearly employers were out there looking for and at me. [↩]
A special resting place for your graduate thesis., originally uploaded by Ricardipus.
I stumbled upon this photograph of a wall of PhD dissertations collected at U of T’s Gerstein Library. Especially appropriate, given the events of last week and my need to submit the final version of my very own dissertation to FGS sometime over the next few days.
photo credit: clydeorama
I achieved a personal milestone yesterday with the successful defense of my PhD dissertation (What is the link to picture above? I “scored” a personal “goal” yesterday). Even more exciting than the “Congratulations” from the chair as I re-entered the room was the word that my work required no revisions and it was being submitted for consideration of a thesis prize. Unexpected (the no revisions and thesis prize part, not the successful defense) and pretty freakin’ awesome.
I’m still processing the fact that I’ve reached the termination of a terminal degree and that, largely, I’m done. I think it will take a day or two for me to fully process that fact.
I was especially lucky, however, for all the support I received yesterday and along the way. That Heather was able to watch the event was especially great—not only is she my love, but we’ve been graduate student co-workers for the length of my PhD. Having her share the culminating moment was great. Also observing the defense were my Dad and PhD friends. My father has been an unabashed champion of getting the PhD done, especially during the dark moments about mid-way through where it just doesn’t seem like it might be worth it to finish. Nadine and Josh—Nadine a friend from undergrad and a member of my PhD student cohort; Josh a fellow environmental education scholar, conference co-conspirator and the “piano guy”—stayed for the three hour event and their interest and presence was inspiring. The tweets and Facebook messages from friends near and far really helped too!
I also need to thank my examination committee: my external, Dr. Janis Dickinson, travelled to Toronto over American Thanksgiving to attend the exam; my internal-external Dr. Steve Alsop; FES Dean’s representative, Dr. Martin Bunch; Exam chair and committee member Dr. Jennifer Foster; and my other committee members, Dr. Ray Rogers and Dr. Alice Hovorka. The questions in the defense were thought-provoking, fair and challenging; I look forward to engaging with these in future work.
Finally, I have to recognize the support, friendship, critical thinking and mentorship of my supervisor Dr. Leesa Fawcett. We’ve been working together since I arrived on-campus at York in the fall of 2002 to start my Masters in Environmental Studies and I feel like we share my success yesterday.
OK, as I tweeted yesterday, I’m off to add “, PhD” to everything I own.
As you may or may not know, I’m in the middle of looking for a job. One of those positions is an Educational Developer at the University of Guelph. In preparation for the interview, I was asked to prepare a 15 minute talk on “The Future of Educational Development in Higher Education” (a topic that was initially overwhelming given its breadth). I’m delivering this presentation in person at the University this morning. Through the power of scheduled posts, you can follow along below (minus my narration).
So, it turns out that most people who have visited the homepage of this website since late May have seen the same homepage. Or, in other words, it would have looked like I hadn’t updated the website since May. Not the case! After noticing this and doing some troubleshooting, it looks like a caching plugin I had uninstalled left a copy of its cache to serve to unsuspecting visitors. None the less, the cache has been deleted and everything should be back to normal.
Enjoy five months of fresh content!
In my dissertation, I take some time to talk about the use and adoption of recently-available technologies (specifically digital cameras to take pictures of birds, nexrad radar to predict migration and the Internet to share bird sightings) by birders. I call the products of these technologies (so, the digital pictures, radar images & postings) “digital objects” that mingle with us (thanks to the recent proliferation of Smart Phones, for example) in more and more places. This movement to digital objects promises to change (and already has) how birding is done.
I enjoy the interpretation of New Jersey radar images that David La Puma does at Woodcreeper during the spring and fall migration. It was his website that really got me thinking about how birders might use these images in their practice. David recently posted that this work is, at best, interpretive after (it appears) some birders on the New Jersey birding listserv suggested that his forecasts were imperfect.
This back-and-forth neatly illustrates my concerns with the forecasts. As I write in the dissertation, field birders try hard to predict the unpredictable nature of birds. In my work, this meant that many field birders that I chatted with often spoke about winds from the north and cold-fronts associated with migrating birds. In this regard, birding connects the humans doing it to the world beyond the simple presence / absence of a bird. In short, its a kind of ecological knowledge. But it’s not perfect. And birders can go out and see nothing, or go out expecting nothing and stumble into some migratory bird biodiversity bonanza. The unexpected nature of the activity, birders reported to me, was part of the appeal of birding.
I, however, write:
Access to these radar images subtly re-frames the field birding experience. Now that birds’ presence can be predicted, there can be less motivation to go out birding on a morning that the radar shows has had little migration activity. While radar is not a discrete enough tool, if you will, to identify the species of birds that are migrating, it is one step towards removing the unexpected. Radar’s use as a prediction tool is an attempt to domesticate—bring further under human control—part of the act of watching birds. Figure 5, the radar image posted at Point Pelee [National Park, located in Southern Ontario and a migratory hotspot], is [hand]-titled “Image of the BIRDS”. That emphasis on birds (underlined and in caps) gives the impression that somehow these images are offering an objective truth about migrating birds.
And this is where the New Jersey birders appear to have got confused. As David writes in the post, “you begin to understand that predicting birding conditions based on weather and radar is both an art AND a science (with art trumping science under conditions where the predictive properties of weather or radar decline).”
I would further David’s caution about the interpretive nature of nexrad images by encouraging birders, if they are interested in using this tool, to learn to make interpretations of the imagery themselves. Again, from my diss:
While interpreting radar images is not beyond the ability of any birder with an interest, it requires cultivating something of an expertise in reading these radar images to discern just what is being seen. Thus, birders unfamiliar with these details can turn to websites, like Woodcreeper, to get that forecast. This moves the responsibility of interpretation elsewhere, erasing what is involved—cognitively, technically—with making the forecast. This recognition of interpretation and technological limitations can foreground that these images are not a new vision of BIRDS but a mediated version of the more-than-human, filtered through microwaves, antennae, websites and our own judgement about what is out there. While rendering something that previously was mostly invisible to us, it cannot provide, as promised, a whole version, or perfect vision, of the phenomena.
And that’s the kicker. Often it is understood that these technologies give us access to a better truth (i.e. Nexrad will tell me if there are birds present or absent, better than my own experience). The truth, however, is something different. While birders, prior to the deployment of Nexrad radar, couldn’t “see” migratory birds on the move, it isn’t the whole picture. The danger here, and here’s where I get somewhat philosophical, is what gets lost if we decide not to go birding on a particular day or we begin to ignore our first-hand experience of what predicts a “whizzer day” for birding.
photo credit: @andrewghayes
I’m back from Buffalo, having attended a two day research symposium organized by the North American Association of Environmental Education (NAAEE). Held before the annual NAAEE conference, the research symposium is meant, as I understand it, to be an opportunity to talk meaningfully about “meaty” research issues and meet with a cross-section of researchers in the field. I had a good time, intellectually, academically and personally.
Some thoughts from the symposium:
Quantitative vs. Qualitative…
From the presentations and posters I attended, a high percentage of the quantitative work was being conducted by researcher working at US universities, while the opposite was true of those working at Canadian institutions.
I’m a qualitative researcher, so clearly I have something of a vested interest in the framework. I also know, living with an health researcher steeped in quantitative methods, that done well they are powerful tools for making knowledge claims.
So both paradigms have their place. I was struck, however, by the number of times I looked at completed work and thought to myself, “Boy, this project, conducted under a qualitative framework, would have really improved its quality.” In some cases, I saw work that seemed to cling to a quantitative method for the sake of clinging (e.g. the impression that quantitative methods will give you a “better” truth—less ambiguous, more objective, perhaps easier or faster to collect).
…often maps to U.S. vs. the rest of the world.
Conventional wisdom would suggest that researchers objectively match the “best” inquiry method to the question they’re trying to answer. Given that I noticed, however, something of a cultural difference between researchers in the US and other countries, I wonder if this dichotomy between quantitative and qualitative has less to do with “best” method for the inquiry and more to do with inertia behind long-standing research trajectories.
I’m not arguing that these approaches are wrong or misguided. I am, however, fascinated by my observation of the quantitative work being driven by US-based scholars. Incidentally, I just did the quickest of lit reviews looking to see if there is work that has been done on how researchers choose their methodologies. Lots of “how to choose your methodology” type work, but nothing (not much?) on why researchers choose a particular framework.
Perhaps its worth looking at environmental education researchers to ask them how they came to choose their particular methods. I suspect that it has a lot more to do with the culture of their institution, former supervisor or impression of funding bodies than we might acknowledge. Which might be why, in part, I see such a dichotomy between the way work is done in the US and the rest of the world.
Content © Gavan P.L. Watson, Some Rights Reserved.
