Etikettarkiv: learning

Against question and answer time

Publicerat i english, the practice of science av

Here is a semi-serious suggestion: Let’s do away with questions and answers after talks.

I’ll preface with two examples:

First, a scientist I respect highly had just given a talk. As we were chatting away afterwards, I referred to someone who had asked a question during the talk. The answer: ”I didn’t pay attention. I don’t listen when people talk at me like that.”

Second, Swedish author Göran Hägg had this little joke about question and answer time. I paraphrase from memory: Question time is useless because no reasonable person who has a useful contribution will be socially uninhibited enough to ask a question in a public forum (at least not in Sweden). To phrase it more nicely: Having a useful contribution and feeling comfortable to speak up might not be that well correlated.

I have two intuitions about this. On the one hand, there’s the idea that science thrives on vigorous criticism. I have been at talks where people bounce questions at the speaker, even during the talk and even with pretty serious criticisms, and it works just fine. I presume it has to do both with respect, skill at asking and answering, and the power and knowledge differentials between interlocutors.

On the other hand, we would prefer to have a good conversation and productive arguments, and I’m sure everyone has been in seminar rooms where that wasn’t the case. It’s not a good conversation if, say, question and answers turn into old established guys (sic) shouting down students. In some cases, it seems the asker is not after a productive argument, nor indeed any honest attempt to answer the question. (You might be able to tell by them barking a new question before the respondent has finished.)

Personally, I’ve turned to asking fewer questions. If it’s something I’ve misunderstood, it’s unlikely that I will get the explanation I need without conversation and interaction. If I have a criticism, it’s unlikely that I will get the best possible answer from the speaker on the spot. If I didn’t like the seminar, am upset with the speaker’s advisor, hate it when people mangle the definition of ”epigenetics” or when someone shows a cartoon of left-handed DNA, it’s my problem and not something I need to share with the audience.

I think questions and answers is one of thing that actually has benefitted from a move to digital seminars on a distance, where questions are often written in chat. This might be because of a difference in tone between writing a question down or asking it verbally, or thanks to the filtering capabilities of moderators.

If research is learning, how should researchers learn?

Publicerat i english, the practice of science av

I’m taking a course on university pedagogy to, hopefully, become a better teacher. While reading about students’ learning and what teachers ought to do to facilitate it, I couldn’t help thinking about researchers’ learning, and what we ought to do to give ourselves a good learning environment.

Research is, largely, learning. First, a large part of any research work is learning what is already known, not just by me in particular; it’s a direct continuation of learning that takes place in courses. While doing any research project, we learn the concepts other researchers use in this specific sub-subfield, and the relations between them. First to the extent that we can orient ourselves, and eventually to be able to make a contribution that is intelligible to others who work there. We also learn their priorities, attitudes and platitudes. (Seriously, I suspect you learn a lot about a sub-subfield by trying to make jokes about it.) We also learn to do something new: perform a laboratory procedure, a calculation, or something like that.

But more importantly, research is learning about things no-one knows yet. The idea of constructivist learning theory seems apt: We are constructing new knowledge, building on pre-existing structures. We don’t go out and read the book of nature; we take the concepts and relations of our sub-subfield of choice, and graft, modify and rearrange them into our new model of the subject.

If there is something to this, it means that old clichéd phrases like ”institution of higher learning”, scientists as ”students of X”, and so on, name a deeper analogy than it might seem. It also suggests that innovations in student learning might also be good building blocks for research group management. Should we be concept mapping with our colleagues to figure out where we disagree about the definition of ”developmental pleiotropy”? It also makes one wonder why meetings and departmental seminars often take the form of sage on the stage lectures.