Category Archives: Research and Academia

Is the 21st century class room a virtual one?

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I recently came across this excellent TED talk by Peter Norvig entilted “the 100,000-student classroom”. The popularity of online education should probably not be a big surprise. Instant knowledge, facts through online encyclopedia and so on was certainly a first step. The power of internet clearly bring with it the idea of learning when ready concept. In manufacturing, they would call it “just in time” production. A great example of this can be found in the growing popularity of the Khan Academy (see for example Let’s use video to reinvent education).

This brings numerous questions. Namely:

Will the virtual classroom be limited to tutoring in order to supplement traditional teaching or as a replacement option?

Is there still place for one on one teaching / learning?

If I look at the graduate courses I teach, they tends to be slightly different from one year to the other because of student / teacher interaction. The virtual classroom removes real-time interaction!

Maybe it will force teachers to redefine teaching as to provide a plus-value in order to get students in a dedicated room at a fix time every week for 15-17 weeks in a row (a semester)…

What do you think?

(Note added: While scanning my usual blog lists today, I found that Organizing Creativity also as a post on the virtual classroom)

Digital Office part IV: Inboxes and various tips

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In the previous posts, we went over the hardware requirements and selection, software and finally mobile software. It is now time to address the sources of digital documents, the true inputs of the digital workflow.

Not so long ago, there was a single inbox for all incoming “stuff” that requires your attention. Stuff is here define as anything that needs for you to decide what to do with it, including throwing in the garbage. In the analog world, that single inbox was the good old paper tray: correspondence, various documents, business cards, memos, telephone notes… everything ended-up there for further processing.

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A single advice about publishing your first scientific paper…

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I always wondered what would be the single, most important advice I could give a new graduate student who is looking forward to have his or her work published at some point.

Sure the usual work hard, pick cutting edge topics, chose your advisor carefully and so on are the obvious suspects. But what about a single advice that would put in motions the necessary behavior to essentially “groom” the graduate student in being ready to publish?

After many years of mentoring, mine is read! Read published scientific papers in your field as much as you can and from day 1 on the “job”. Read for journals you are expected to publish in, from journals at the periphery, from more difficult journals to publish in (higher impact factor). Read also outside your field.

Make an habit to scan the usually suspects (for your field at least) once a month and read.

Not only will you know what is state-of-the-art but this will provide you the structure of a scientific manuscript, the language, what is accepted or expected. Note the good to excellent manuscripts, those that are easy to read i.e. that flows and tell you a story. What make them better than others you’ve read?

By the time, you are ready to talk to your advisor about publishing your results, you should have read hundreds of previously published articles.

As theory is not practice, you will also need to write as often as possible. The more you write, the easier it gets. But that’s my second advice 😉

Digital office part III: mobile software

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Previous installments:

Part I: Introduction and hardware

Part II: Mac Software

Part III: Mobile Software

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Digital Office II: Mac Software

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For those who might not have read the first post in this series about the hardware side of things, please have a look: Digital Office I

Here is a list of the main software that I used regularly on the Mac as part of my digital workflow, including links to the most important one:

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Emotion and story telling in a scientific talk?

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During a recent group meeting, one of the student was making a comment regarding the document really bad powerpoint by Seth Godin. Her point was how can one impart emotion to a scientific talk. Clearly, when you have 7 or 8 minutes to get to the point it could indeed be difficult to make time for humor…

Yet emotion can still be generated in term of response of the audience to your data, figure or conclusion: raising eyebrows, smiles, figures looking at you making yes (or no) motions. Of course in longer presentation, these could be much more involving.

Here is an example of a great presentation of data by Hans Rosling. He used this technique numerous times but you will get the idea: Hans Rosling’s new insights on poverty | Video on TED.com.

Now, story telling is of course at the heart of what you should be doing. It is sometimes easier said than done (sometimes it works and others it don’t, unfortunately). Again, here is a great link to a talk on story telling and getting the message across on TED: Nancy Duarte: The secret structure of great talks | Video on TED.com.

Hope these inspire you.