Tag: academia

I wrote a thing. Over there –>

I haven’t written here in a super long while.  But Hannah and I wrote a thing, published In that Library with the Lead Pipe place.

Sparking Curiosity — Librarians’ Role in Encouraging Exploration

Lots of you know this has been a long time coming — we first talked about it in public, I think, at Online Northwest in the 2014 Snowpocalypse.  I thought it might be fun to pull together all of the posts about it here:

Online Northwest 2014 (with Chad Iwertz)

(Which also led to the Curiosity Self Assessment Scoring Guide)

Library Instruction West 2014

Oregon Library Association Annual Conference 2016

LILAC 2016

European Conference on Information Literacy 2016

This work has also been a part of a lot of the professional development workshops I’ve taught, and Hannah and I have taught, in the last five years.  In fact, we’ll be teaching on this topic (and others) the day after tomorrow at Colorado Mountain College, and we’re very excited.

AMICAL 2015 — It Takes a Campus: Creating Research Assignments that Spark Curiosity and Collaboration.

University of San Francisco 2015 — Fostering Curiosity and Inquiry with First-Year Students

 

 

Sloppy statistics – steroids for scholars?

Reading this article next to #overlyhonestmethods – well it’s not all rosy.

One reason I like the hashtag is because it humanizes a process that I don’t think is humanized very often – finding out that, yeah, we ran that for this many hours so we could not get up at 2:00 am – that’s a nice reminder that scientists and scholars are real people.

And some of the rest, well it humanizes the process too, but in a different way.  Instead of a reminder that scientists and scholars are real people who need to eat and sleep and interact with others and have fun and the rest of it – some of it shows scientists and scholars as real people who know exactly where their professional rewards are coming from, and who (no matter what Forbes may think) feel pressure to do the things that will earn those rewards.  And there are consequences there, and no bright line to separate the shades of grey.

Simonsohn stressed that there’s a world of difference between data techniques that generate false positives, and fraud, but he said some academic psychologists have, until recently, been dangerously indifferent to both. Outright fraud is probably rare. Data manipulation is undoubtedly more common—and surely extends to other subjects dependent on statistical study, including biomedicine. Worse, sloppy statistics are “like steroids in baseball”: Throughout the affected fields, researchers who are too intellectually honest to use these tricks will publish less, and may perish. Meanwhile, the less fastidious flourish.

Christopher Shea (December 2012). “The Data Vigilante.” The Atlantic.