What I describe is anodyne. Like many, if I read anything on the web, especially if the post or writing is good, I skim through any comments others have made. Sometimes the comments are more meaningful (to me) than the article. Seemingly, most of the time I must compartmentalise my behaviour, because most ‘serious’ journals don’t follow these norms, and I must sense what the culture norms are as I read. This is just one reason amongst many, why ‘serious’ journals matter less and less in the spread of ideas. So, there I was reading an article in the Annals of Internal medicine, only to forget ‘where’ I was. A frantic 30 seconds of trying to navigate to the comments section, only not to be able to find it. Then the penny dropped: this is old and ‘serious’ media. As Sam Shuster said, paraphrasing De Selby, ‘Serious science takes over from relevance’.

“TED has done more to advance the art of lecturing in a decade than Oxford University has done in a thousand years.” Err.. <expletive>.

[simnor_button url=”http://www.economist.com/news/business/21599057-ted-has-revolutionised-ideas-industry-part-putting-old-wine-new-bottles-ideas” icon=”double-angle-right” label=”The Economist drunk on kool-aid” colour=”white” colour_custom=”#fff” size=”medium” edge=”straight” target=”_self”]

There is an interesting article by Cory Doctorow in the Guardian, in which he draws parallels between public health and computer security. It is worth reading in conjunction with some of Bruce Schneier’s stuff (the security guru, as the Economist calls him). If only medical education was a little more agile, this topic would form a great module for some students. I suspect however that students just get a ‘professionalism fix’ on using encrypted USB drives on NHS machines (yes, those ones running IE6). We are missing the chance to talk about big issues: the apparent data breaches by the English NHS (see letter from Ross Anderson and others here);  and the inability of the Wellcome Trust—amongst others—  to understand the limits to anonymisation, nor the fact that research does not trump all other values. So students, if you wanted to hack medical information, whether paper or digital, how would you go about doing it? I suspect students would find such an approach interesting, and those running the NHS might learn something too (I am not of course suggesting they try to breach security, merely that they are forced to think about some of the tradeoffs involved —scale, security, ease of use etc). For all of this to fly, we need genuine ‘core’ and ‘options’, something that seems as likely as a  system immune to hacking. And we need to educate them, so that they do not think data security is something they get told about in a FY1 induction pack. (And of course, we might ask them to appraise some of Doctorow’s metaphors re typhus, cholera and the importance of water in disease spread)

Teaching was so enjoyable it felt “wrong to be paid for it”

John Carey

Hennessy noted that universities are conservative institutions and are often reluctant or slow to change. But, he said, “They must reduce the costs of education or risk being eliminated. Can they be imaginative and reinvent themselves?”

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Rebecca Schuman at Slate, ‘Powerpointless‘ via Audrey Watters at Hackeducation

A long, long time ago, I was sitting in the biochemistry coffee room in the medical school in Newcastle. Roger Paine, a professor of biochemistry came and sat next to me. I knew of him, but he didn’t know me. He was a FRS, I was a dermatology research registrar taking my first steps in learning some wet bench science in the Medical Molecular Biology Group there. Coffee rooms work, as do Aeron chairs. Sometimes you need to talk, and ramble around what interests you; and sometimes you have to sit alone, and dream. If you don’t, you will do ‘kit’ science, or act out being an administrator by conducting randomised controlled trials.
We got chatting—we shared a mutual colleague—and he expressed his puzzlement to me about how medics managed to do any research. He pointed out what with seeing patients, and some undergraduate teaching and postgraduate training, how on earth could you hope to do any meaningful research. I listened, not wanting to hear what he said. And I should point out, he was a keen collaborator with medics,  nor stand-offish in any way.

Many years later, in another setting, I was talking to another successful scientist, a geneticist, also a FRS. We knew each other reasonably well, and by this stage I had been working in wet-bench science for a dozen years or more. Some modest successes, and plenty of failures. He told me that because he knew the details of many clinical medics research careers very well, he would be loathe to ever approach any of them if he needed medical care. He had the highest regard for them as academics, and researchers, but he too couldn’t see how they could carry on all the various activities expected on them. (And no doubt be able to go to the cinema once in a while: Steven Rosenberg, a one time Chief of Surgery at NIH, in his autobiography, describes how he would struggle to leave Sunday evening free of lab and clinical duties, so that he could go to the cinema with his wife).
(more…)

‘Why do scientists’ presentations all look the same?” said a teacher to me during the break. “It’s like you guys all get the same template.” Her words struck me like a 10-tonne anvil. She was right. Where was the creativity?

[simnor_button url=”http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v507/n7490/full/nj7490-131a.html” icon=”double-angle-right” label=”Yoshimi Rii in Nature” colour=”white” colour_custom=”#fff” size=”medium” edge=”straight” target=”_self”]

I am really enjoying Derek Bok’s most recent book, ‘Higher Education in America‘. The tone is always mild and diplomatic, but he points out truths that the academy prefers to ignore. I have frequently quoted an earlier statement from him:

‘some faculty members will cry foul, claiming that teaching is simply not comparable to a piece of merchandise. But protestations of this kind cannot hide the fact that very few universities make a serious, systematic effort to study their own teaching, let alone try to assess how much their students learn, or to experiment with new methods…’
[Universities in the Marketplace, Princeton University Press, 2003]

The problem is not that there are not lots of people in universities deeply concerned about student teaching and learning, rather that the multiversity drowns out the energy and commitment needed to improve things. I have not finished this most recent book but there are lots of thoughts worth mulling over (and no, I do not think things are better in the UK). Some examples:

In subsequent decades, increasing numbers of undergraduates have taken part-time jobs to earn the money to stay in school while also devoting more time and attention to extracurricular activities, computer games, and other forms of entertainment. To accommodate these pursuits, they have exerted a quiet pressure for easier grading and less homework. Because of their extensive freedom to choose which courses to take and their power to pass judgment on their instructors through published course evaluations, they have had some success in realizing their desires. Over the past forty years, the time undergraduates spend on homework has markedly diminished while the grades they receive have gradually risen.

On the tendency of university leadership to undermine core values

Moreover, although some presidents would disagree, experience suggests that professors frequently have a clearer appreciation of academic values than the top leadership and are less tempted to sacrifice these principles to raise more money or gain a competitive advantage…

On teaching:

With very few exceptions, however, faculty members were not conversant with the growing body of literature on undergraduate education.

One topic close  to my heart is that universities are often too big and not selective enough in how they expand. The result is growth that comes at a large administrative and academic cost. The problem is that they spend far too much time on activities that are probably better done outwith the academy. In medicine, there is far too little high risk, high reward research, but far too much humdrum routine activity that does not belong in a university. All of this routine activity, comes at a cost, not least because medical research is often not fully funded, with funds being taken from other sources to make up the deficit. Bok writes:

Other profitable services, such as testing drugs for pharmaceutical companies or giving instruction to entry-level management trainees for corporations, bear the added disadvantage of forcing instructors and investigators into routine teaching and research of little value to the university or its faculty aside from the generation of additional funds.

 

This chimes with an article about Caltech, a few weeks back, in the Times Higher. Much of what passes as ‘research’ in medicine, would I suspect 40 or 50 years ago, been described as the ‘D’ of ‘R+D’. Inventing new statistical methods to analyse clinical trials is research; using them to analyse trials is not. I guess it is the Steve Jobs line about learning what not to do. Or, as others have said, what is required for research, is a fount of ideas, and a large waste bin to throw most of them into.

It is a good book.

Unlike corporations, military organizations, and government agencies, universities cannot be guided and controlled hierarchically.

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