Undergraduate Research

Let’s face it; research and teaching are in conflict in the university. Despite all the talk about connecting research and teaching there are few models for how to do it systematically. For most of us it is a matter of time. Time to teach is time away from research. It’s that simple.

So what are the models for connecting the two?

  • Scholarship of teaching is the model where faculty do research about teaching. (See my entry on the Boyer Report). This model has the advantage that it can legitimize those interested in teaching and learning as researchers. If systematically deployed it also would mean that there are teaching scholars accessible to those who are interested, but not devoted. The down side is that it doesn’t make sense, except in small undergrad institutions, for all to be teacher scholars.
  • Undergraduate Involvement in Research is a second model where undergraduates are involved in research. See Mitchell Malachowski’s opinion piece “Undergraduate Research as the Next Great Faculty Divide”, in Peer Review, Vol. 8, No. 1, Winter 2006. This is done informally by many of us where there are opportunities. McMaster has an Applied Humanities course which is an inverted form of an independent studies course. The researcher proposes the topic and tasks and then recruits students to join them. Unfortunately, as Malachowski points out, in many disciplines where solitary research dominates, there are few opportunities to involve students in anything more than glorified photocopying. (See quote in the Extended Entry.) To involve students systematically, by which I mean across the curriculum, we need to adapt our research. I can imagine a discovery-centred university that values the learning through research of both students and faculty (and staff) where the structures encourage learning and research to adapt to each other.
  • Undergraduate Led Research is a related model where undergraduates are given credit or funding for imagining and conducting their own research. Senior undergraduates interested in continuing to graduate school are often ready to run with projects on their own and they can be given opportunities structured like a research culture with poster sessions, mini student conferences, and so on. This is not for all students, however.
  • Researchers make better Teachers is the standard answer we give, but I don’t think it stands up. Top researchers rarely see undergraduates, they get endowed chairs with little teaching or release to run projects. If we believed this the last people we would give teaching relief to would be the top researchers. Instead teaching release is treated as an incentive, especially today when teaching means large classes that need to be entertained rather than the conversations where research experience could make a difference. No, if we want student-centred programs it is best to not hire too many superstars.

Are there other models then?
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The Fog of Memory: Eco and “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanna”

mysterious.jpgWhat if you only remembered what you had read? In Umberto Eco’s latest novel, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanna, the narrator Bodoni wakes from a stroke with no memories other than the cultural ones – what he, an antiquarian book collector, has read. The first two parts of this novel dramatize the personal (and its loss) in memory. What if memory were only a hypertext of associations like Bodoni’s memories? What makes a memory meaningful? What gives it the “mysterious flame” of immortality?

The novel draws its name from a comic book from Eco’s youth that was based on a novel She by H. Rider Haggard (1886). The narrator tries to recover his memory returning to his grandfather’s country estate in the town of Solara and reading through the adventures and comics of his youth. Eco uses this to trace Italian fascism through its impact on popular youth culture, reproducing through the novel illustrated images, especially comics, from his youth.

In the third and final part Bodoni has another stroke and in his coma trys to see the face of his first love, Sibilla (Sibyl). Eco is playing with myths, both those of comic books and the Greek ones of return. The Cumaean Sibyl leads Aeneas into the caverns of Hades to see his father just as Bodoni is led into the caverns of memory where he finds his childhood with his father. Bodoni, named after the type designer Giambattista Bodoni, seeks but cannot recover, the memory of his Sibilla – he has no way back. He is lost in the caverns of what can be read and can’t find his way back to the sun – Solara. The novel ends with the smoke of memory eclipsing that sun.

I feel a cold gust, I look up.
Why is the sun turning black?

Eco’s novel, like Baudolino before, also feels like it doesn’t know when to return. Both begin well and then get lost in antiquarian detail. Eco doesn’t know when to stop, when to return home and leave the loving details to others. Is this the curse of scholastic writers?
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No Dead Air!

Listening to chosen music enables these iPod users to focus in on themselves. In
these situations the music enables users to clear a space for thought, imagination
and mood maintenance. (p. 349)

No Dead Air! The iPod and the Culture of Mobile Listening is a good article by Michael Bull that gets at the how the iPod gives users control over mobile times and places (gives them a musical bubble when filling in time.) This article recognizes that an imporant chronotope is the “in-between” space of commuting, walking, taking the tube, or jogging. These spaces are typically public, but the iPod gives one a way of personalizing it, creating a private auditory space out of the public space.

Thanks to Sean for this.
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Online Petitions

A colleague sent me a link to a Recall David Emerson Petition which got me thinking about online petition software. Can one set one up easily? Do they work? What are the ethical issues? How do you know you really have signatures? Here are some preliminary answers:

What sites offer online petition systems? I looked at three that seemed reasonable, PetitionOnline.com, iPetitions, and PetitionThem.com.
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Digital Pens, Again

About a year ago I posted a note about Digital Pens (Anoto, io2, and Fly). An old friend Terry Jones came across the entry and says this about his experience:

The paper is about $8 cdn delivered to your door so its expensive but compared to the cost of a tablet you can buy a LOT of paper.

The really cool thing I like about it is that each page is unique. So in my notebook when I update a page here and a page there and go back to this page and then crerate a new page etc… when I park the pen each of the documents I updated on paper gets updated online. There is also a timeline function in the viewer that lets me see when the various pieces of “ink” appeared on the pen page! I like to be able to write someone a note while I am working on their computer and then when I get back to the office I have a copy too (in the pen) even though I have left them the paper copy. I like the fact that on the subway I don’t feel like a total geek and a target writing on a tablet. I am just writing in a notebook with a pen that is only a little fatter than some modern pens. I like the fact that a notebook boots instantly so to jot down a quick reminder is NOT a 5 minute process of booting a tablet PC, making a note and shutting down.

I bought mine cheap on eBay ($51) and since then bought 3 more at around $60 on eBay and so far every person that has tested them out isn’t giving them back. They come back after a couple of office with their wallet instead of the pen… its been quite funny!

Terry, besides being organizing barefoot waterskiing competitions, is one of the most intuitive experts I have ever worked with. What he describes is ubiquitous computing the way it should be – not about what toys you show off or how you should change for technology, but developing technologies that fit our workstyles.