Academic resolutions

New year's resolutions time!

Last year I resolved to read #100papers (a more modest version of Jen Nycz's #365papers) and I didn't. A combination of just not being disciplined about reading enough so work got in the way (the whole point was to make time to read because it often gets pushed out for other stuff) and not keeping records when I did read things because I was reading them for a specific reason when I was writing an article or whatever.

I also had a couple of others that I didn't do much about, and some that I did: I swam in the sea, which was rolled over from 2016, and I *just* kept a resolution that I made some years ago to go abroad at least once a year by going to Belgium just before Xmas.

This year, I'll have a mixture of work ones (submitting a proposal I'm working on, for instance) and personal ones (e.g. learn to enjoy cheese). Here are a few academic resolutions that I think are worth considering if you're an academic too and you don't already do them.

• Read regularly. Maybe 365 papers is way too ambitious. Maybe even 50 papers is. But if you only find time to read when you need to find something out, try to fit in a bit of keeping-up-to-date time during each week. 
• Create permanent links that won't die using a service like webarchive (I got this off twitter the other day but can't find the tweeter to link to their advice. But it was basically that)
• Cite your own data properly and link back to the original. Make your work reproducible, accountable, checkable. 
• If you publish in a journal that allows you to include a load of meta-information about methods etc (CUP can do this, for instance), do so. 
• Practice inclusive teaching. Disparities in society exist, and yes they are created before our students come to university, but they worsen while they're with us and it is your problem and your responsibility to try to fix it. It is up to you personally to do something about it. Don't say that it's spoonfeeding or that students will have to get used to inequality in the real world. Those things may well be true but they're spoken from a position of power. Why not try and make things a little bit less horrible? 
• Be a role model. Find students who might benefit from a bit of guidance and offer it without them asking. Suggest opportunities to people who might not think they're good enough. Be an academic 'life coach'. Model good academic behaviour. Show your PhD students how to have a good work/life balance. 
• Respect professional services staff. They're humans. They work hard, they're not stupid, and they don't work for you. They also aren't creating bureaucracy just for the sake of it, I promise.
• Be a genuinely good citizen. Don't just make a token effort. Don't just do the minimum possible so you can tick the box on your promotion application. If you do, you're pulling up the ladder behind you for someone else who has to take the jobs that you won't. Remember that it's not as easy for other people to say no as it might be for you. They may be on probation and feel under pressure, or they may have to work twice as hard because they're female/black/disabled (and don't say that's not true or that it's their own choice - it is true, for an awful lot of people). If someone asks for a favour, say yes now and again, so that the same few people don't always end up doing it. (If you're the person who always says yes, say no now and again so that someone else has to do it.) But see below if you're not full-time. 
• Take time off. Don't make yourself ill working. If you're getting ill then talk to someone, because your job is not right. See if you can scale something back or if you're doing something too thoroughly. If you're in precarious employment and have no choice but to work all the hours for no money, talk to your union and see if they can help - and cut corners, skimp where you can, and say no all the time, to everyone. Saying yes to free labour will not get you a permanent position (sorry). 
• Do extra-curricular things that you don't get credit for, but that add value. Go to your students' events to create a bit of departmental goodwill. Organise staff drinks. Be in the office and be sociable now and again. Organise some extra events for undergraduates. 
• This turned into a bit of a grump. Enjoy your job. It's a good one, despite efforts to erode the good parts. It really is. Try and remember that and be grateful for all the nice things. 

Building sites is dangerous

There is a building site at my work (show me a university that doesn't have at least one building site on campus at any given moment) and it has this sign:

'Building sites are dangerous; Keep out'

Every time I walk past it (a couple of times a day at least) I think to myself 'Building sites is dangerous'. This is a sort of in-joke that me and approximately one other person in the world will find amusing, and he probably doesn't read my blog, so I'm going to explain it to you all instead and tell you about the moment I decided to become a syntactician.

It wasn't exactly the moment I decided to do it as my job, but it was the point of no return. It was in my very first syntax lecture, in September 2004, when aged 21 I had decided to go to university to do Linguistics. Why linguistics? Not sure. I don't think I was specially bothered about English Language in 6th form, but I did do three languages and enjoyed the grammar. (That's why I signed up to do Latin as my optional outside subject, and it's why I'm currently learning German.)

Anyway, back to the syntax lecture. The lecturer was Noel Burton-Roberts. I can't remember what else he said in that lecture (I've got the notes so I can look it up) but he used an example to show that syntax is a thing, and that words aren't just strung together in order.

Flying planes are dangerous (=planes that are flying are dangerous)
Flying planes is dangerous (=the activity, flying planes, is dangerous)

The verb has to agree in number (be singular or plural) with the subject of the sentence, and specifically the head of the subject. The subject of that sentence is flying planes both times, but in the first instance flying describes planes, so planes (plural) is the head and we have are, while in the second example it's flying that's the head, and planes could be left out (flying is dangerous), and flying is singular so we get is.

Such as simple example, but upon seeing this something just clicked in my mind. It's a cliché, but it's true. It was as if I had suddenly discovered this whole secret world, where the language we speak every day had proper structure and rules and could be explained. Everything from that point on just made sense.

I suppose that makes me a bit weird. But it's why I'm a syntactician now.

Linger with Laura

It's election season at the university: the students are voting for their union officers for next year. This means that the campus is covered in scruffy handwritten cardboard signs in support of one candidate or another. There are some common themes.

Some are old-fashioned and simply go with this format:

[Name] for President

Many, however, have chosen an alliterative slogan which functions as an exhortative speech act:

Rely on Ruth
Stand with Stuart
Make it Millie

And one candidate had instead chosen a (near) rhyme and an alliterative nickname:

Only Sam can / Super Sam

She has a superman outfit to campaign in as well.

I don't know if these things go in fads, or what. The most effective signs by far (in my opinion) didn't have any of these gimmicks, but had the same logo (a green pharmacy-style cross) and the candidate's name and one of her sensible policies, a different one on each poster, clearly written. The others don't put their policies on their signs, apparently assuming the alliteration will be enough.

MOOCs

There's an article on the Guardian today (one of several recently) about free online university courses. These are offered by companies like Coursera, Udacity, and EdX, and the content is provided by 'proper' universities. They don't charge, and they allow thousands and thousands of people, from all over the world, to follow a module from a respected institution, without having to be in the country or paying the fees. Free education for all!

Obviously there's lots of practical issues, about all aspects of this. These thousands of people can't have their work marked by a human, so it only works well for subjects that can be marked by a computer (unless you go the crowdsourcing route, as one of the pioneers of this method suggests). It's only possible to offer this for free because the academics are paid by universities which are funded in part by students who do pay fees. You miss out on the other aspects of being a student. Et cetera.

The biggest difference between this method and actually attending university is of course the quality - it's never going to be the same watching videos as it is having a real human expert to talk to and learn from, and face-to-face class time. But there are some aspects of it which are worth looking at. One obvious benefit is that people who are otherwise unable to attend university or pay Open University fees can still get access to university-level education. For them, it doesn't matter so much that it's not quite as good as the 'real' thing, because anything is better than nothing. If it became the normal way to learn, well, then it's not up to scratch. But is that right? Is it OK to say 'anything is better than nothing so it's all right that it's not as good'? The pioneers of this learning paradigm have an ideal in mind of free  education for all. Those people who can't pay for university or can't physically attend should have the same opportunity as those who can, assuming equal ability.

That's another thing - there's no entrance requirements for these courses. That's not necessarily a bad thing, because entrance requirements are only really useful if you need to limit intake, and you don't when it's online (a Massive Online Open Course: MOOC).

One aspect I like is similar to how Open University works: you can just take one module if you want to, rather than a whole degree. With OU you can build them up into a degree or diploma, which is not yet the case with MOOCs, but give them time. It means that a person who just needs or wants an introduction to a subject can have it in a structured way with no obligation.

Most interestingly for me, at the moment, is the implication it has on the way we teach in universities. This MOOC thing allows a potentially lot better use of class time. At the moment, we give lectures and seminars. Lectures vary from lecturer to lecturer, from a simple stand at the front of the room and read out your notes, to a more interactive experience for the students when they have to do more than just sit and listen. Lectures have been around a long time and they've never gone away, partly because you need to be able to impart a lot of information to a lot of people at once and it's the most economical way to do that. You could tell them to go and read, but what do they read? Most of the time you need to explain the complicated stuff that written in books and journals, and even introductory textbooks just seem to make more sense if someone explains it to you. The reading is supplementary to the lecture, giving the student more information which they can go and understand after having the 50-minute explanation of the basics. But all the same, lectures seem slightly wasteful.

Even if you try and make them as interesting as possible, and make that there is some benefit to actually being there rather than just reading the slides, an alternative is to combine the MOOC idea with the current system. What if we did video lectures, and then used the class time for something else? Explaining difficult concepts, working through problems, that sort of thing. Of course the extra 50% teaching time and preparation would need to be factored into teaching loads, or teaching hours adjusted, but we can do that. Many classrooms are equipped with the technology to record a lecture, or with YouTube we can do it from our desks. Sites like TED, and people like RSAnimate, have shown that people are really super keen to watch videos in order to learn stuff. We might as well embrace it before it overtakes us.