Tag Archives: Profession

The Up Goer Five Text Editor

Posted on by

No matter how regular your writing practice, it’s possible to get stuck. When you’re stuck, sometimes what’s helpful is not motivation, but just a change in perspective. And what could offer a bigger change in perspective from the complexity of most academic writing than a text editor that restricts you to the thousand most common words in English?

As with most great things, the idea originated with an xkcd strip by Randall Munroe, “Up Goer Five” (Click for full size):

The Up-Goer Five

The idea, then, is to describe complex ideas or projects only using the “ten hundred” most common words in English.

Theo Sanderson realized that this might be a fun way to think about one’s own writing, so he created The Up-Goer Five Text Editor, which checks your prose against a list of the thousand most commonly-used words. As Sanderson explains, the list is Wiktionary’s index of word frequency in contemporary fiction.

As you can imagine, people have started describing all kinds of things using The Up-Goer Five Text Editor, from parliamentary democracy to the moons of Saturn. There’s even a tumblr devoted to scientific explanations, Ten Hundred Words of Science. On Twitter, there’s also the excellent hashtag, #UpGoerFive.

There’s already an Up-Goer 6, which will color-code your text based on how common the words are.

As the comic makes clear, it’s pretty hard to imagine a situation where one would actually want to use text written in the Up-Goer Five Text Editor. On the other hand, the challenge it offers (which as Jim Dalrymple notes, can be incredibly frustrating) can help you think about your writing in a new way, especially if you’re stuck.

Do you have a toy or game that you use to help with your writing? Let us know in comments!

Photo “Saturn V Rocket” by Flickr user / Creative Commons licensed BY-2.0

 

Your Voice: How Much Math Proficiency is Needed to Succeed in STEM?

Posted on by

survey
This post is a little different than our usual tips and reflections about the professoriate. But at the heart of ProfHacker is an emphasis on the power of technologies such as social media to spread information about the good work being done in academia. We think that a project being conducted by the Wisconsin Center for Education Research (WCER) matches that heart, and so we share the following with you.

The WCER is currently conducting a study that asks one simple question: What level of math proficiency do STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) faculty consider a good indication that a student is likely to succeed in a STEM major? The study, entitled called “Talking about Leaving, Revisited: Exploring Current Patterns of Undergraduate Persistence in the Sciences,” is a follow-up to Elaine Seymour and Nancy Hewitt’s original study and book 15 years ago. For that work, Elaine and Nancy asked faculty what minimum SAT math score would be an indicator of sufficient math readiness for an undergraduate to succeed in a STEM major. The answer in 1997: 650. For the follow-up study, they are using a very short two-item survey to see whether this indicator has changed.

Mark and his team would love to see the input of ProfHacker readers in their survey results, and so they encourage you to answer the two very short questions.

Social media is gaining some leverage in the STEM world, and it is hoped that by sharing the survey with ProfHacker readers it will get a bigger audience. Along those lines, physics blogger Rhett Allain posted a recent reflection of the role of Twitter in the recent Winter American Association of Physics Teachers conference, which could perhaps serve as more fodder for considering the role of social media in STEM. 

Have you had any success in leveraging social media to assist you in the work of improving STEM education? Let us know in the comments.

[Image Creative Commons licensed / Flickr user Sean MacEntee]

Open Thread Wednesday: Do You Use Shame in Your Work?

Posted on by

An illustration of a pig with staring eyesRecently, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about shame. Some of this comes from the Freakonomics podcast, which I’ve become enamored of. (If you’re looking for something to listen to, ProfHacker readers have previously chimed in about their favorite podcasts.) An episode from January 2012 discussed the problem of hand-washing among doctors who—contrary to what one might guess—tend to have the worst hand hygiene practices at hospitals. The solution to the problem: shame. Public announcements of those who have not been following hand sanitation procedures at staff meetings led to a dramatic increase of hand-washing at L.A.’s Cedars Sinai Medical Center. Shame, as the Freakonomics team likes to point out, is a tremendous incentive to change behavior.

Changing behavior is also something that my wife and I have been thinking about: specifically that of our children during dinner time. When placed at a table and served food, each of our three kids has one or more tendencies that we would like to eradicate before they be seen too often in public. We have tried numerous approaches, but we recently came up with something that works: the Shame Pig.

The Shame Pig (SP)—which you can see in my lead image—is a little cardboard stand-up that we made with some cardboard, construction paper, and a Google image search. If you misbehave during dinner, the Shame Pig comes and sits in front of you. The Pig will move if someone else commits an act of brazen rudery. Not only does he look at you with those baleful eyes (and as Bethany Nowviskie tweeted, the eyes make a difference) but whoever ends the meal with the SP in front of him or her has the responsibility of clearing and washing the table and loading the dishwasher. We have found that the Shame Pig has resulted in immediate shifts in behaviors of our kids (and ourselves, I must confess). We all have a visual reminder of the standards of manners and there is immediate feedback when an infraction has occurred. The kids actually kind of love the schadenfreude of the SP and are on the lookout to catch others—especially their parents.

When I shared the idea of the Shame Pig a few weeks ago with Jason, Kathleen, Bethany and some other friends of ProfHacker, Jason immediately suggested that there might be some pedagogical applications of the Shame Pig. [NB: Jason remembers this conversation differently, and is pretty sure he thought that this would get a phone call from a crabby dean or provost.--The Editors.] In particular, Jason opined that  a “Participation Pig” could be put in front of the student who enthusiastically talks so much in class that his peers don’t have a chance to get a word in edgewise. (Confession: I was / am this student.) [That really *was* Jason's idea.--ibid.] I really like this idea, and if I was teaching this semester, I would put it to use. I’d also work to encourage my students to place the Pig in front of me if I talked for more than 3 minutes at a time. (I’ve thought about using a chess clock for this too.)

Now. There are clearly some important reasons to think carefully about how to use shame productively in our careers. But I also think it’s an idea with some merit to it. Jason has more or less made this argument when he wrote about how “bad meetings are your fault.” And Dan Cohen’s terrific post yesterday about open access and the tragic death of Aaron Swartz suggests that we should employ shame as one incentive for academics who do not make their work publicly accessible.

So I’d like to turn the question to you, ProfHackers: what role can you see for shame in your work? Could you use it to improve your teaching? Your meetings? Your commitment to write those next three pages? Let us know in the comments!

Lead image: shame pig2 / Brian Croxall / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

Open Thread Wednesday: Scheduling a Department’s Courses

Posted on by

As one semester or quarter is coming to a close, a ProfHacker’s s thoughts inevitably turn to the next. Unless that ProfHacker is a Chair or Director of Undergraduate Studies who is responsible for planning the courses and schedules for the entire following academic year.

As a new, alt-ac faculty member in my department, I’ve recently become acquainted with how we go about this scheduling process. The DUS sends out a Word document as an attachment with six questions, ranging from asking about which core course the faculty member would prefer to teach, to graduate seminars, and the preferred time slots in which that teaching will happen. Faculty members type up their responses on the form and then return them electronically or printed out to the DUS, who then gets to work planning the schedule.

Someone in our department recently suggested that there could be a more efficient way of at least collecting the data. And I think that’s true and easy to do. A tool like Google Forms (which we’ve written about on more than one occasion) or Survey Monkey could make the data entry and collection faster for everyone involved (and who doesn’t want to be done with such things as quickly as possible). Survey Monkey even has a tool that will help you send reminders out to the people who haven’t yet filled out the form. One more obvious incentive for using electronic means to collect these data is that it comes formatted ready for a spreadsheet (one of my favorite tools), which means it will be easier to sort and then see the masochists outliers who really DO want to teach that 8:30am class on MWF.

But once the data has been made more accessible, there’s still the problem of sorting everyone and making those assignments. And that’s the question that I want to pose (perhaps somewhat selfishly) to the ProfHacker community this afternoon: does your department or program have a really great way for making those assignments once you know what people’s preferences are? Do you have a meeting with everyone? Do you have any tools (besides chocolate, coffee, or some other comfort) that help make this process any easier? Let us know in the comments!

Lead image: Bar Camp Schedule REBCPHX 2010 / Dru Bloomfield / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Build Your Own Open Access Journal: An Interview with Rob Walsh of Scholastica

Posted on by
This is the seventh interview in a series, Digital Challenges to Academic Publishing, by Adeline Koh. Each article in this series features an interview with an academic publisher, press or journal editor on how their organization is changing in response to the digital world. The series has featured interviews with Anvil Academic, Stanford Highwire Press, NYU Press, MIT Press and the Penn State University Press. 

Want to start your own open-access journal? Find out more today as I speak with Rob Walsh of Scholastica, a new journal publishing platform. Scholastica aims to make open access feasible for existing and new journals by charging a small $10 fee when an author submits to a journal. This fee can be paid by the author, journal, or an institution that would like to pay on behalf of its authors. The article, if accepted and published, will be made freely available on the web. Scholastica now works with the University of Chicago Law Review, the California Law Review, and smaller journals such as the Strategic Leadership Review.

AK: Thanks Rob for talking to me today. To begin: is Scholastica a “publisher” per se? 

RW: Scholastica is an end-to-end platform for publishing journals, so not a publisher itself but rather a tool to improve scholarly publishing. You can think of Scholastica as a tool for journals like WordPress or Tumblr is a tool for blogs. Our mission is to put control of scholarly publishing back in the hands of scholars, not large corporate publishers.

Want to make your own PeerJ? You can do that through Scholastica. Don’t have the technical know-how to install or update a version of Open Journal Systems? Scholastica is ready for you out of the box. Want to try out a new peer review idea? We love building new models for peer review and publication, so give us a call. We support scholarship by making it easy to run a top-notch peer reviewed journal from submission to review to publication.

Running a journal is complex in terms of communicating with authors and reviewers, managing file versions, gathering reviews, and making published content easily discoverable online. Scholastica provides ready-to-use infrastructure so journal editors can focus on finding the best content and not have to worry about updating software or managing reviewer deadline calendars or keeping track of email attachments – our software does all of that for them.

There are lots of great ideas about how to improve scholarly peer review, and lots of desire to decrease the role large corporate publishers like Elsevier play in scholarly publishing, but scholars need tools to help their ideas actually gain traction.

We’ve spoken with many scholars who love the idea of starting new Open Access journals, but the logistical challenges of setting up the technological infrastructure needed to support a scholarly journal quickly balloon and eclipse the original goal of publishing qualified knowledge to the world. But with a tool like Scholastica, you can start a journal in minutes and have a powerful suite of scholarly journal tools at your fingertips.

AK: What is the history behind Scholastica?

RW: Scholastica was started by a group of friends who met in graduate school at University of Chicago – Brian Cody (Sociology), Rob Walsh (Political Philosophy), and Cory Schires (History). We had individually worked with academic journals, and through our own experiences and our academic colleagues we got a feeling for the problems that journals faces internally.

We all had tech backgrounds, including working in the software startup scene in Chicago, and we felt that giving scholars the infrastructure they need to manage academic publishing themselves was something we could do that would benefit scholarship.

Our team then spent months talking to editors of journals, authors, and reviewers in a variety of fields about problems they had, and got feedback on the software solutions we were building. Fast-forward to two years later and we have a great platform that is helping journals large and small – from the California Law Review to the Strategic Leadership Review.

AK: What is the funding model that Scholastica uses?

RW: Scholastica is a platform for journals, much like WordPress is a platform for blogs. Authors don’t pay to publish “with” us – rather, journals use Scholastica as a tool to manage their journal, so authors and editors use Scholastica to interact with journals.

Journals create accounts on Scholastica, and fees are charged for each article submitted to that journal. The fee can be paid by the author, the journal, or that author’s institution. The latter two options, by the way, result in the journal itself having great software at no charge.Scholastica has a pricing model that scales to fit journals of all shapes and sizes, and this fee supports our team to constantly add new features and improvementsto the software. We have a flat $10 fee per article submission – period. No other fees, no setup costs, no extra costs to publish Open Access articles.

Niche journals that receive only a handful of articles each year get the same powerful features as a journal receiving hundreds of articles a year. Law reviews, which allow authors to submit to multiple journals simultaneously, pay a $5 per submission fee, which they traditionally pass on to authors’ institutions and individual authors.

We’re proud that our $5-$10 per manuscript fee is worlds apart from the thousands of dollar flat fees charged by traditional peer review software providers like Editorial Manager, or the $1350-$2900 in per-manuscript publication fees an author might find with PLOS journals. Our small submission fee allows us to continue creating great software that can be used by journals regardless of discipline.

AK. What is your take on the traditional peer review process, and new forms of peer review? 

RW: In general, our philosophy is to “not the throw out the baby with the bathwater”, meaning that we should preserve the valuable aspects of traditional peer review while also seeking to improve the process through experimenting with new models of review. We believe peer review is a diverse ecosystem of needs and goals that requires a wide range of solutions rather than a one-solution-fits all approach.

With this in mind, Scholastica supports traditional peer review while also giving editors the option to experiment with new, innovative ideas. For example, in Scholastica there is a pool of potential reviewers made up by anyone who has ever signed up for a Scholastica account, so journals are able to invite qualified reviewers from a wide-range of disciplines. Users gain reputation by demonstrating expertise in their fields in the Conversation portion of Scholastica, which helps editors quickly identify the best reviewers. There are gamification elements to writing reviews in Scholastica, which increases incentives and accountability for on-time and high-quality reviews. We are also working with journals to add more alternative peer review process elements, so keep an eye out for more to come!

One thing that we don’t like about many of the new peer review models is that they are either still in the idea phase and so dismissed as pie-in-the-skyhypotheticals, or they require so much technological know-how and time that they are dismissed as being impractical. Scholastica makes it easy for journals to try out these new models in the real world.

AK. How do you look at web metrics as alternate forms of recording scholarly impact? 

RW: We think the altmetrics movement is great, and plan on incorporating various alternative impact measures such as ImpactStory into Scholastica. Not to beat a dead horse, but our opinion is that scholarship is searching for ways to improve the traditional process, and we need both lots of experimentation and to preserve the aspects of traditional impact factors that are valuable. Scholastica as a platform can make it easy for journals and authors to “try out” these alternative impact measures through a one-click interface.

We’re looking to see what new models stick, with stickiness a factor of:

1. impact on the hiring and tenure process;

2. scholars being convinced that the measures correlate with their own sense of which works they think are “hot” or important;

3. widespread adoption within a sub-discipline or across academia;

4. being methodologically respected by the scholarly community

 

AK: Do you think that there is a space for the scholarly monograph in the current and future economy, given that they are expensive to produce and are almost never profitable? What do you think is the future of the monograph?

RW: We work exclusively with journals. That said, from an armchair analyst perspective, monographs are so important for displaying a scholar’s extended or nuanced argument and are so important for hiring/tenure in many fields that it is hard to think of them going away.

It seems like monographs have a potentially bright future via e-publishing, in that e-books can maintain coherence of the monograph (length, structure, etc.) while radically reducing production costs. Promotion might need to fall more on the author and secondary outlets such as book reviews in journals or discussions at professional conferences rather than traditional publisher-led promotion, and we can also imagine new filtering mechanisms, such as more journals dedicated entirely to self-published scholarly monographs or scholarly e-books, cropping up to help increase awareness of e-published monographs.

AK. What do you think is the future of the university press?

RW: We think university presses will continue to play an important role in the future of academic publishing. To continue to be a leading force, however, presses need to be agile and open to new ideas. Some presses are already doing a great job leveraging new technologies and leading innovation, like Stanford and their partnership with Google Book Search. University presses should be the primary force in academic publishing – not corporations like Elsevier.

At Scholastica, we support university presses by offering them a better way to manage their journals. We’re actively working with a few university presses to develop new features that help leverage position of presses as established leaders with the mission to promote good scholarship.