Formation Continue du Supérieur

Two weeks ago the University of California system-wide Faculty Senate announced that they have passed an open access policy for all 10 campuses. The policy covers 8000 tenure-track faculty, and as many as 40,000 papers annually, making up 2-3% of the worldwide scholarly journal content. More details (and some videos of me looking really tired) are here.
This is a major success. It’s a huge university system, with an unusually powerful federal faculty governance system, and getting any organization that large to do anything forward thinking is itself a triumph, and I’m proud to have been part of it. The policy commits faculty to making their work available using the California Digital Library’s eScholarship platform, or any other open access repository. It will begin on Nov. 1st, and will roll out first at UCLA and UCI, in addition to UCSF which passed a policy in May of 2012.
There has been some attention to this policy in the news media (at the Chronicle, Reason, the Daily Cal at CDE, and a nice Atlantic article that makes the point that open access is crucial to making Wikipedia more reliable). More...

By Adrianne Wadewitz. When professors teach, they teach what they love. What they are experts in. What it is easy for them to learn. Thus, it is easy to forget what it is like to be the student who struggles in the classroom. In fact, many professors may never have had the experience of struggling to learn--they probably effortlessly got A’s or at least easily understood how to teach themselves a topic. How can they, then, sympathize with and, more importantly, effectively teach students who do not intuitively understand their subject matter? More...

By Dr. Crazy. My name is Dr. Crazy, and I have never recommended an article for publication.  One time, I suggested that a revise and resubmit was appropriate.  That felt pretty good.  But just the once.
In every other case, in the eight or 9 years that I’ve been serving as a reader for a handful of journals, of greater and lesser prestige and selectivity, I have said that the articles that I have read are not acceptable for publication.
And honestly, that really hurts my feelings.  I fantasize about the day when I get an article that I recommend to accept without changes, or to accept with only minor revisions.  You think (or at least I thought) that when you finally get the chance to serve as a peer reviewer that it will be this exciting experience wherein you discover the next new most awesome ideas in your field, and you get to support them.  But yeah, so far, not so much.  And according to my Fb friends, they have similar experiences to report. More...

I am feeling particularly down about my science these days, owing to a combination of professional events mixed with too little sleep and probably too much salt (darn you, Cheetos and beef jerky). So I am cranky and thinking nobody cares about any of this and it's been ages since I heard anything at a conference that makes me go "Wow! I wish I had thought of that." It's crushing boredom and disillusionment all around. But it's not like this blog has ever been all rainbows and unicorns, so no surprises there.
Here's an off-the-top-of-my-curmudgeony-head list of things that suck about being a professor as well as those I still realize are great despite my advanced grumpiness.
The sucky:
1) It is hard constantly facing criticism and rejection. Even acceptances don't come without criticism and a ton or work. Sure, we are all fighting the good fight for the accuracy of science, so sloppy or incomplete work should not get a pass, but, after what I have seen as an author, reviewer, and associate editor in the past month, I am finding it really, really hard not to start getting disillusioned by the peer review. There are a lot of douchebags with too much ego and too much time on their hands, ranging from obnoxiously nitpicky to downright malicious. More...

By Christopher Tucker. Some of you may have walked past those bulletin boards covered in red and white notices in search of participants to ingest this, or attach themselves to that. Perhaps you’ve gone so far as to take one of the tear-off tabs home with you. It always comes down to one question: “Can it really be that bad?”
Medical research for academic studies has so many variations and degrees of invasiveness. All of it comes down to one thing: a way to make money that requires no previous skills, education, or experience.
I’ve found myself scanning those flyers and considering the possibilities. Sometime before the winter of 2012, I decided science could have its way with me. I found out that it wasn’t free money, but it wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever been through, either. Presented now are my experiences and reflections. Hopefully, this can help guide you in the future, when you’re standing in front of those bulletin boards wondering, “What if I did this?” More...

By Matt Reed. Textbook costs have been a major issue for decades. I remember being shocked at the cost of books when I was a student, back when they were printed on papyrus and delivered by dinosaurs. Students then sometimes had the option of trying to find used books, but that was pretty much it. In the age of electronic resources, I’ve become a booster of Open Educational Resources. I think we’re at or near the inflection point where it becomes possible for students to get through a majority of classes without actually buying books, assuming the faculty are on board. Free options have become markedly better over the last few years, and I know many professors are concerned about book costs for their students, so I’m optimistic that we’ll get there. From a student perspective, money saved on books is the equivalent of a tuition cut. Read more...

By Dayna Catropa. LinkedIn’s big announcement was covered by multiple sources (LinkedIn blog, USAToday, NPR, and TechCrunch to name a few). To summarize, LinkedIn now has “university pages” that include information about a school and its alumni base who use LinkedIn.  Profiles display helpful statistics, such as the geographies and industries in which alumni work. This has the potential to help strengthen the link between school and career for students and young alumni. It’s another great resource for information and connections. Read more...

By Joshua Kim. This past year my institution engaged in a (faculty led) LMS evaluation process.  We looked at the usual suspects.  Blackboard.  Canvas.  Moodle.  D2L.  Sakai.  
Pearson's OpenClass was not even on our radar.
That is why I was so interested that Abilene Christian University (ACU) had chosen to go with OpenClass. I'm a huge fan of ACU. Back in 2009 I wrote:  "If the MacArthur Genius Program gave awards to institutions I'd bet that Abilene Christian University would be a shoo-in."
ACU was way earlier than the rest of us in innovating around mobile learning, launching a one-to-one iPhone / iPod Touch program back in 2009 to experiment with what can happen when all student and faculty are on the same mobile platform. Read more...

By Matt Reed. How do you use the red pen? As a student, especially in K-12, the red pen was the authority indicating error. There, I learned that you measured the quality of writing by the number of errors it contained. The upside of that method was that it forced me to learn my grammar. The downside was that it tended to reward a certain predictability. (Five paragraphs, topic sentences...) In college, the red pen came very late, when it came at all. It tended to be more cryptic than in high school, sometimes to good effect and sometimes not.  But I had grown to fear it less. In grad school, the red pen was mostly used to indicate ideological objections, as opposed to “errors” in the sense that most people use the term. Read more...

By Kaitlin Gallagher. As a lab citizen, you may be responsible for supervising undergraduate senior/honors thesis projects. With all of your other work that needs to be done, this can seem like an extra burden—another project to work on with a student  you think you’ll have to micromanage because you are unsure of how well of a job they can do with their limited (no) laboratory experience. As the supervisor of an undergraduate student, your role is not only to ensure that the student does the study properly, but also to teach the student about general research practices, scientific rigour, independence, and critical thinking. When first starting out, it’s easy to take the micromanager role because we are used to things running at a certain pace. But an undergraduate project likely will not go as quickly. As a result, we may overextend ourselves into the project. This, however, is not good for your students. Not only should they be doing their own work, but they are missing out on important lessons that can be taught through these projects. Read more...