Gosh, doesn't time fly? It's the end of another academic year, and time to call for posts for the July Scientiae Carnival.
Summer is a good time for day-dreaming and thinking Big Thoughts, free from (some of) the stream of student enquiries, emails and phone calls that disrupt our time during the semester. So for this carnival, I thought it would be fun to revive an old game we played in my grad-lab, 'Fantasy Institute'. The rules of the game are simple - you have been selected as the Director of a newly endowed research institute. It is your job to decide where the institute will be based, its codes of conduct, its structure, and who you will hire. Dream away! Tell us what would make your institute a haven for scientists. A 'everyone must leave by 5pm' rule? A woodland setting with squirrel feeders? Daily shipments from your favourite supplier?
Please submit posts on this, or any topic related to women in science, by emailing the permalink URL of your post to scientiaecarnival [a] gmail [dt] com by 11:59 pm GMT on Wednesday, June 30th. The carnival will be posted by July 1st.
Showing posts with label Fantasy Institute. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fantasy Institute. Show all posts
Monday, June 14, 2010
Sunday, February 22, 2009
I should probably be working
Thank you all for your supportive and useful comments on the whole Talky-DrN thing. It's always helpful to realise that these situations aren't that uncommon (if sad, for all the students and for all the young, hopeful, enthusiastic people who get turned into monster advisors (some of 'em are probably born like it, such as my colleague BabyProf who is quite proud of not knowing the names of any of the undergrads, or Dr Chatterbox who regards teaching as 'the price you pay for getting a regular salary' - not that I know that either of them IS a toxic supervisor, just that those attitudes seem far more ingrained and natural than DrN's controlling-unhappy-aggressive-defensive affect and actions)). I wish I knew how to protect myself better, but I'll just carry on doing what feels right and then angst-ing about it here!
Last night I stopped at the supermarket for some cat food and ended up buying a DVD of Love, Actually, a lasagne and a mini box of fancy truffles, and having an indulgent evening. Furball enjoyed it too, spending the whole movie draped across me and purring. Definitely an effective way of distancing myself from some of the work nonsense.
What I actually meant to write about today was the start of a response to tig's University of Utopia post. That's not a game I've ever played, but as grad students we played Fantasy Institute. In this game, you are in charge of the spending of a very large bequest for the furtherance of your discipline. You get to choose where the institute will be, plan the building, and also decide who will be given the wonderful posts that you are able to offer, and who will be turned down... BenchMate and I often played this, and our building always had a really nice big tea-room by the entrance, with comfy chairs and a fire in winter and doors opening onto a terrace in summer, with a library on the other side which also had lots of comfy chairs. We thought staff should probably be required to spend a part-day per week flipping through all the latest journals in the comfy chairs, so that there would be informal little journal clubs happening all the time when someone commented on something cool they'd come across (this was pretty much pre e-journal. and I now expect academics would sleep in those chairs. But still, I like the concept of paper reading). It was usually in a period building near the sea (although now I've spent time in Scandinavia and had the chance to visit places like SAMS in Oban and the Heathland Centre in Norway I want a modern, thoughtful, Scandinavian style building of local stone, full of light even in midwinter and terribly energy efficient and so on - still near the sea!). I still occasionally think "well, YOU'RE never getting a job at FI, but we'd interview you so you'd know what you were missing" when I'm displeased with someone in my field, or fantasise about how I would craft rejection letters saying things like "whilst we were impressed with your c.v., your arrogant and dismissive demeanor to graduate students at the last three conferences, the drunken pass you made at one of them in the bar late at night, and your 'humourous" comments about how female professors might lighten up if they "got a good shagging" were frankly disappointing and cause us to doubt your supposed intelligence"...
So what would undergraduate degrees look like at FI, assuming we offered them?
Unlike UoU, at FI we do have 4-year integrated undergrad masters, and we take students with a slightly wider range of A-level results (A-C: and we select on results first, not on which subjects they studied). We allow for part time and full time students, and have mechanisms which easily allow students to take a break, switch between part time and full time, or spend a semester at another university, but have rigid rules about extensions and the like.
Students all start on a three year degree programme, and they have the option to transfer to the 4-year before the end of year 2. In order to transfer, they have to be holding a good mark average (60-65%+) - so we are aiming to give students who were badly taught at school or college or are late developers the chance to prove their ability to work at university level (which, pace school teachers, A grades at A level no longer seem to guarantee).
Students start every module with a guaranteed mark, maybe 50%. If they turn up and turn in work, that's guaranteed. Absences and missing work reduce this mark - better work raises this mark. The final exam for each semester (see later) is marked across the full scale. A student who turns up, turns work in, and does an acceptable job on the final exam gets a basic 2:2 degree; in theory, this safety net will help students explore a bit and take a few risks.
All modules are taught via lectures, some kind of practical work (referred to hereafter as labs, but may well involve a range of hands-on activities), small-group teaching and at least one field day.
At FI smaller pieces of assessment are marked as fail/pass/good pass/excellent. In a discipline like mine where we don't just have nice clear problem sets where a marking scheme can be easily followed, but expect a lot of report writing, essays, presentations etc., that would reduce the stress of grading for the academics and let them concentrate on actually teaching. These grades each generate a number of points to add/deduct from the basic 50 (pass = 0).
The mark for the semester would not just consist of marks for the single modules. Students would also take a final exam - which would cover all the modules available at that level in that semester. This exam might be take home but I prefer the old 'sit in a room and write'. However, given the increasing lack of handwriting practice and therefore lack of speed of handwriting, students would be offered the choice of using a basic word-processor programme on a terminal or handwriting their work. Questions on this exam could cross several modules or focus on one, but would all require demonstration of understanding of material as well as regurgitation, and additional materials would be available giving summaries of memory-materials (e.g. periodic table, stats equation sheet...), meaning that a good memory would not be as much help as being quick-thinking.
As at UoU, sport happens in weekends or in early mornings or evenings, no timetable disruption, and classes are deliberately spaced to encourage students to study between classes. Classes are scheduled between 10am and 5pm.
I prefer a two-day-a-week schedule so students don't encounter one subject per day once a week - If students take four modules in a semester their weekly timetable looks like this:
M: A lecture, C lecture, A small group
Tu: B lecture, B small group, D lecture
W: labs, am A, pm C or am B pm D in alternating weeks
Th: A lecture, C lecture, C small group
F: B lecture, D small group, D lecture
This also makes it easier for students to take a degree part time: they always know that they will have classes MTh or TuF plus every other W, depending on the year. In first year, each degree programme has common courses which all students take. In second year, there might be a modicum of choice. In third year, students on a 3 year programme do independent projects in both semesters, only taking 2 modules per semester. There are options available, although some degree programmes will continue to have a core. Students on the 4 year programme will do a some project work, some advanced modules, along with 4 options as for the 3 year students. In the fourth year, students will do a big piece of research, present the results at a one-day conference, and take a couple of 'graduate seminar' type modules or do a work placement.
Hmmm, I had more ideas than I thought I had when I started. Back to teaching prep and grant writing now.... :-(
Last night I stopped at the supermarket for some cat food and ended up buying a DVD of Love, Actually, a lasagne and a mini box of fancy truffles, and having an indulgent evening. Furball enjoyed it too, spending the whole movie draped across me and purring. Definitely an effective way of distancing myself from some of the work nonsense.
What I actually meant to write about today was the start of a response to tig's University of Utopia post. That's not a game I've ever played, but as grad students we played Fantasy Institute. In this game, you are in charge of the spending of a very large bequest for the furtherance of your discipline. You get to choose where the institute will be, plan the building, and also decide who will be given the wonderful posts that you are able to offer, and who will be turned down... BenchMate and I often played this, and our building always had a really nice big tea-room by the entrance, with comfy chairs and a fire in winter and doors opening onto a terrace in summer, with a library on the other side which also had lots of comfy chairs. We thought staff should probably be required to spend a part-day per week flipping through all the latest journals in the comfy chairs, so that there would be informal little journal clubs happening all the time when someone commented on something cool they'd come across (this was pretty much pre e-journal. and I now expect academics would sleep in those chairs. But still, I like the concept of paper reading). It was usually in a period building near the sea (although now I've spent time in Scandinavia and had the chance to visit places like SAMS in Oban and the Heathland Centre in Norway I want a modern, thoughtful, Scandinavian style building of local stone, full of light even in midwinter and terribly energy efficient and so on - still near the sea!). I still occasionally think "well, YOU'RE never getting a job at FI, but we'd interview you so you'd know what you were missing" when I'm displeased with someone in my field, or fantasise about how I would craft rejection letters saying things like "whilst we were impressed with your c.v., your arrogant and dismissive demeanor to graduate students at the last three conferences, the drunken pass you made at one of them in the bar late at night, and your 'humourous" comments about how female professors might lighten up if they "got a good shagging" were frankly disappointing and cause us to doubt your supposed intelligence"...
So what would undergraduate degrees look like at FI, assuming we offered them?
Unlike UoU, at FI we do have 4-year integrated undergrad masters, and we take students with a slightly wider range of A-level results (A-C: and we select on results first, not on which subjects they studied). We allow for part time and full time students, and have mechanisms which easily allow students to take a break, switch between part time and full time, or spend a semester at another university, but have rigid rules about extensions and the like.
Students all start on a three year degree programme, and they have the option to transfer to the 4-year before the end of year 2. In order to transfer, they have to be holding a good mark average (60-65%+) - so we are aiming to give students who were badly taught at school or college or are late developers the chance to prove their ability to work at university level (which, pace school teachers, A grades at A level no longer seem to guarantee).
Students start every module with a guaranteed mark, maybe 50%. If they turn up and turn in work, that's guaranteed. Absences and missing work reduce this mark - better work raises this mark. The final exam for each semester (see later) is marked across the full scale. A student who turns up, turns work in, and does an acceptable job on the final exam gets a basic 2:2 degree; in theory, this safety net will help students explore a bit and take a few risks.
All modules are taught via lectures, some kind of practical work (referred to hereafter as labs, but may well involve a range of hands-on activities), small-group teaching and at least one field day.
- Lectures are not compulsory; but if a student misses a lecture, they either have an absence penalty docked from the module mark or they take an online quiz to demonstrate that they have studied independently and have grasped the key material covered by the lecture. So if a student prefers to learn by reading, or wants a duvet day, no hassle, no excuses, they just take quizzes (the quiz is only available for 7 days from the date of the lecture, but can be repeated during that period until it is passed).
- Labs are recommended but not all are required - a number (about half the total number of labs) of labs generate marks for the module, and students can choose whether to attend the others (and therefore get the best of their marks across all the labs counted) or skip them. Therefore they can miss a couple due to illness or personal stuff without a significant penalty (or complicated paperwork or replacement practicals - reduces work for staff!). If a student skipped a lab (rather than missed one due to a small number of good reasons such as illness - don't want them sharing germs around!!), then that may restrict their choice of independent project. Labs can be assessed by write-ups, by keeping a notebook, by product (i.e. if practical = build a microscope, assessment = can lecturer get a good quality image of a test slide), or by a practical exam (identifying specimens, carrying out analysis of data, doing a simple titration or other routine skill that has been practiced in multiple labs etc.).
- All courses have seminars/tutorials/problem classes/PBL components - i.e. all have associated with them a type of small group class, chosen to suit the material and the preferred pedagogy of the lecturer. These are compulsory, and lack of preparation also leads to loss of marks off the starting point. Being prepared and taking part doesn't gain marks - it's assumed that not doing this affects the student's learning and therefore they suffer anyway.
- Field days happen during a once-a-semester field long weekend, when the whole year group decamps to a nice field study centre somewhere, and a series of half day and day activities are offered, with repeats if groups are large. Students have different timetables for the weekend, which includes evening sessions, and field notebooks are also assessed.
At FI smaller pieces of assessment are marked as fail/pass/good pass/excellent. In a discipline like mine where we don't just have nice clear problem sets where a marking scheme can be easily followed, but expect a lot of report writing, essays, presentations etc., that would reduce the stress of grading for the academics and let them concentrate on actually teaching. These grades each generate a number of points to add/deduct from the basic 50 (pass = 0).
The mark for the semester would not just consist of marks for the single modules. Students would also take a final exam - which would cover all the modules available at that level in that semester. This exam might be take home but I prefer the old 'sit in a room and write'. However, given the increasing lack of handwriting practice and therefore lack of speed of handwriting, students would be offered the choice of using a basic word-processor programme on a terminal or handwriting their work. Questions on this exam could cross several modules or focus on one, but would all require demonstration of understanding of material as well as regurgitation, and additional materials would be available giving summaries of memory-materials (e.g. periodic table, stats equation sheet...), meaning that a good memory would not be as much help as being quick-thinking.
As at UoU, sport happens in weekends or in early mornings or evenings, no timetable disruption, and classes are deliberately spaced to encourage students to study between classes. Classes are scheduled between 10am and 5pm.
I prefer a two-day-a-week schedule so students don't encounter one subject per day once a week - If students take four modules in a semester their weekly timetable looks like this:
M: A lecture, C lecture, A small group
Tu: B lecture, B small group, D lecture
W: labs, am A, pm C or am B pm D in alternating weeks
Th: A lecture, C lecture, C small group
F: B lecture, D small group, D lecture
This also makes it easier for students to take a degree part time: they always know that they will have classes MTh or TuF plus every other W, depending on the year. In first year, each degree programme has common courses which all students take. In second year, there might be a modicum of choice. In third year, students on a 3 year programme do independent projects in both semesters, only taking 2 modules per semester. There are options available, although some degree programmes will continue to have a core. Students on the 4 year programme will do a some project work, some advanced modules, along with 4 options as for the 3 year students. In the fourth year, students will do a big piece of research, present the results at a one-day conference, and take a couple of 'graduate seminar' type modules or do a work placement.
Hmmm, I had more ideas than I thought I had when I started. Back to teaching prep and grant writing now.... :-(
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