Since 2021, my Ph.D. students have been able to submit cumulative dissertations for promotion rather than the traditional monographs. A cumulative dissertation is a set of published research papers, logically stapled together, and lead by an introduction that puts the research papers into context. This way, a graduate-level researcher can work incrementally towards their dissertation, one paper at a time.
Continue reading “Documenting a Lead Author’s Contributions for a Cumulative Dissertation”A Short Critique of CRediT
CRediT is a system for classifying contributions to research with the goal of documenting who did what for a given publication. Ann Barcomb, formerly a Postdoc in my research group, now a professor at U of Calgary, pointed me to it.
The system may or may not be used by journals. As a long-time modeler, I have some misgivings though.
Continue reading “A Short Critique of CRediT”Making Your Theory Practical
The output of research is theory, initially just proposed, later validated (or invalidated). A theory is a description or model of phenomena of interest, and its main value is to make predictions about these phenomena. No predictions, no theory. Predictions are turned into hypotheses to put a theory to the test.
Continue reading “Making Your Theory Practical”The Role of a Literature Review in Grant Proposals
Christmas is coming up, so what’s a professor got to do? Hide from the family and work on grant proposals, naturally. Right now I’m upset about the misunderstanding of the role that literature reviews play in grant proposals (by way of reviewer comments).
Reviewing literature is just a general activity, but one that can serve many purposes. Depending on the purpose, different review techniques are more or less suited to help achieve that purpose. I’ll focus on the two main purposes, related work and theory building.
Continue reading “The Role of a Literature Review in Grant Proposals”How I Work With Industry Guest Speakers
I bring in guest speakers from industry into my courses, a lot. The benefits of doing so are are mostly that (1) industry speakers can cover some topics better than me and (2) the change of pace in teaching keeps students interested. In general, I don’t save time, though, because engaging industry in my teaching requires extra work.
Continue reading “How I Work With Industry Guest Speakers”How to Not Cite Related Work
The State of Digitization in the State of Digitization
Some impressions from today’s home office work (for the state).
How Not to Organize Written Exams
The traditional and efficient way for setting up and grading written exams is to have a professorship create the exam, supervise the actual exam, and then also have them grade it. They will usually use a team in the supervision of the exam and the grading, where work is split by exam question: One person (or a team in the case of a large exam) gets to grade one question across all exams. This ensures fairness, consistency, and speed.
Enter the Bavarian Ministry of Education. It invented a wholly different approach to creating and grading written exams. Here, it applies to students aiming to become informatics high school teachers.
Continue reading “How Not to Organize Written Exams”Why Soft is Hard v2 (in Teaching)
I previously discussed why “soft” research (qualitative research) is so much harder than “hard” research (quantitative research). The main reason is that there is less and later feedback, which can be incredibly frustrating for the impatient researcher. A similar argument applies to teaching “soft” skills, which is much harder than teaching “hard” skills.
Continue reading “Why Soft is Hard v2 (in Teaching)”The Student, the Researcher, and the Professor
The student:
Continue reading “The Student, the Researcher, and the Professor”I can’t access the research paper; it is behind a paywall.