I’ve discovered a remarkably inexpensive way to time travel back to the academic conference presentations of the 1990s: at the next conference you attend, sit in on sessions in which PowerPoint presentations feature prominently. Over a period of several days, you will forget that it’s 2024 (or 2025 or 2026…) as you sit through presentations whose format has changed remarkably little in four decades: too many slides crammed with too many words read at a breathtaking pace by someone looking
As an experiment in seeing whether ChatGPT4o could build on a classic book in political and social history by Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), I posed the following question to it: “it seems to me that Benedict Anderson’s thesis could be extended to help people studying entrepreneurship understand how a business/industry could emerge, such as a social media platform, that could be socially constructed to appeal
Please join us at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management in Chicago in our symposium on “Early Stage Entrepreneurial Action in Maker Spaces: the Habitats, the Inhabitants, and Their Social Impact,” Tuesday, August 13, 2024 11:30 – 13:00 CT (GMT-5/UTC-5) Location: Hyatt: Skyway 272).
Here’s a preview:
In our paper, “The Thrill Is Gone,” Russell Browder, Jacob Conley, Stella Seyb, and I analyze the evolution of the US makerspace population from its start in 2005 until the
Educational methodologies often emphasize the value of self-reflection and assessment among learners. However, when it comes to evaluating their own academic progress, college students might not be the most dependable judges. In his 2005 book, Self-insight: Roadblocks and Detours on the Path to Knowing Thyself, David Dunning noted that individuals with limited knowledge or competence in a domain are ill-equipped to accurately assess their own performance or understanding. This phenomenon,
Incorporating surprises into college classrooms can significantly enhance students’ learning experiences by capitalizing on the brain's release of dopamine. By employing thought-provoking experiments and demonstrations, unexpected questions and discussion prompts, and guest speakers and field trips, you can harness the power of surprises to cultivate active engagement, critical thinking, deeper understanding, and long-lasting motivation among your students.
With my students & co-authors, I have embarked on a long-term project to bring concepts from historiography into research & writing on entrepreneurship. Papers are now available via Research Gate.
Stephen Lippmann and Howard E. Aldrich. 2003. “The Rationalization of Everything? Using Ritzer’s McDonaldization Thesis to Teach Weber.” Teaching Sociology, 31, 2 (April): 134-145
Howard E. Aldrich. 2009. “Lost in space, out of time: how and why we should study
Crafting topic sentences and follow-on sentences, rather than just content labels, economizes on your writing time. Instead of having to rethink what it was that you intended to write, you’ll have your intentions embedded in the topic sentences and they will pull you into the writing process, giving you the momentum you need. When completed, the bold topic-sentence driven outline will also help you decide whether this is the story you wanted to tell.
Hillel the Sage is quoted as having taught, “A quick, impatient person cannot teach.” Why might that be? In this essay I offer five reasons, having to do with benefiting from thoughtful pacing, the calming effects of silence, and the insights allowed through taking time for reflection.
First, in designing their course syllabi, expert instructors often display impatience as they try to cover too much material. In their desire to deliver as much knowledge as possible to novices, they forget the
In the sociology course I am redesigning on teaching, I have a limited amount of time to get my story across. But I consider myself fortunate because unlike Hollywood producers, I’m not limited to around 120 minutes. I have the students for two and a half hours per week for an entire term. In the past, the multitude of possibilities opened by having so much time would’ve paralyzed me with indecision. What to put in and what to leave out? But over the past few years, as I’ve embraced the “backward course design” approach to creating courses, I’ve learned that I can skim much of the multiverse, rather than giving it a starring role. My job is to figure out where I want to end up and then create a structure that gets me there.
Donald T Campbell once told me, “Academic life is the struggle for citations.” More prosaically, the person who dies with the most citations wins! But is it sensible to set your writing goal as achieving fame through citations reaped? I think it is an unrealistic and distracting goal, and in this post, I’ll argue for a different approach.
For decades, I have taught workshops on social science writing to graduate students and junior faculty. In those workshops, I have focused on the
Professor Courtney Page Tan has compiled a list of powerful literature mapping tools. You can use these tools to increase the scale and scope of the literature for your projects. Many provide stunning graphical displays of search results (Edward Tufte would approve).
Here is an in-class exercise for our post-pandemic world. It illustrates how sociological concepts can increase a student's understanding of the social world and supplement individual explanations.
[Excerpt] As a first-time experience, I would have to admit that there was much about the virtual AOM that I enjoyed. Regarding the issues I raised in my introduction, I would say that my education was enhanced. I was reminded of ideas that had lain dormant and I was introduced to new ideas that were easy to find in the online format. I truly enjoyed being able to jump in and out of sessions. I think the two-dimensional nature of participants’ involvement was a great equalizer. When managed well, I think this meant that organizers were able to give voice to many participants who otherwise might not have attended or might’ve been implicitly shut out of the discussion. By not having to spend money on traveling to the site and paying for meals and accommodations while there, I believe that many people participated who otherwise would have been found it prohibitively expensive. As for sustainability, I believe that the AoM’s carbon footprint was much reduced, compared to what would’ve happened if we’d all converged on Vancouver in August.
[Excerpt] Anne Vorre Hansen and Sabine Madsen have published a book summarizing their interviews with eight leading scholars in the organization studies’ field on how to make contributions to the field. Based on their interviews, they identified two common threads: whether it truly was possible to expect that an author could identify a research gap, and whether trying to fill such perceived gaps constituted too narrow a focus on what a scholarly contribution should be.
The COVID 19 pandemic has transformed the teaching and learning environment. We are still discovering the many ways in which student and faculty interactions are affected by being mediated through facial coverings and spatial distance. Although faculty and students are now moving back into the classroom, they have lost a key piece of information that humans rely on to understand others’ meanings and read their emotions. We are accustomed to encountering masked others mainly in situations that make us anxious or afraid. Now, it is the new normal. Similarly, online teaching and learning can deprive us of the facial expressions and body language that helps us assess whether others understand and agree with us. Online teaching cannot replicate what occurs in a classroom, even when participants are unmasked. So, we have our work cut out for us!
Simulated examples don’t force people to face the pain and regret involved in making life-altering decisions. Instead, we need to tackle real cases in which we must make decisions with tangible consequences.
This blog lists a small sample of the makerspaces contributing their community’s time, energy, and resources to making products that help health care workers in their attempt to contain the COVID19 virus.
I met Chick when he presented a seminar at the University of Michigan back in the mid-1960s. I kept in touch with him through occasional letters and meetings at regional, national, and international conferences over the next six decades. How does one encapsulate all those years with just a few observations? I’ve chosen to pick out a few things that came immediately to mind when I thought about what the world has lost.
To start, he’s indirectly responsible for the intellectual turn I took in
When I discuss a term paper assignment with my students, I explain that readers need to understand a paper’ s purpose and the logic of its organizational structure. To prepare them for writing a rough draft, I ask them to write a detailed outline, with section headings, introductory paragraphs, and prospective topic sentences. Despite this request, when I read their drafts, I still find that I have a hard time understanding how they got from their opening problem statement, through their
My syllabi for undergraduate students almost never include any professional journal articles. In contrast, many of my colleagues choose many of their readings from journals such as the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, or the American Journal of Sociology. When I challenge my colleagues about their choice of reading material for undergraduates, they offer three rationales.
First, they argue that undergraduate students ought to get it taste of what our field is like by reading the best
Instructors and students face much heavier cognitive demands in discussion-based class sessions than in more straightforward lecture or structured discussion classes. They face the problem of managing their working memory: being able to hold multiple elements in their minds while actively processing them. In this post, I offer some strategies for easing the burden on working memory by externalizing much of the discussion.
Free flowing discussions enliven classrooms and make college teaching gratifying
To be clear: the reason for asking instructors to reveal the structural principles of the course is that it explicitly acknowledges the role that students’ comprehension of the design will play in their performance.
In reviewing a performance of the Dorrance Dance Company, a New York Times critic praised Michelle Dorrance, the company’s founder and lead choreographer. The critic commented on their excellent collective work as well as the virtuosity of their solo performances. After noting that Michelle was the most prominent and ubiquitous tap dancer in America, he pointed out that it was easy to
Rose Bowl float in Pasadena City Park
After 15 minutes, the teams began trickling back into the classroom, with a surprising message. They had found lots of stuff! How much wasn’t clear to me until I asked the teams to report their observations and I began recording them on the board. I had a column for each of the five teams and had left space for more than enough reports, I thought.
However, I quickly ran out of space! As I went serially around the room, with each team reporting one thing during their turn, my initial excitement turned to dread as I realized that their interpretation of what constituted “nonhuman technologies” was far more expansive than mine. With the inclusive definition that they were working with, they’d come up with at least 30 examples.
I looked at the clock – – 45 minutes to salvage what I was hoping they would take away as the lesson for the day. Or, not.
I thought back to the last time a lesson plan had blown up on me. I remembered that I had candidly told them that things hadn’t gone as I’d planned. That’s what I did this time. Without going into more detail, I can report that it turned out to be an eye-opening and enlightening 45 minutes.
What lesson did I take away from this? First, don’t abandon ship when things move in a direction other than what you had planned. Instead, see what you can salvage. Second, using open-ended questions, find out how the students interpreted the assignment. Rather than lecturing to them on what I’d expected, I listened to their interpretations of the readings and their explanations of why their views fit the conceptual scheme of the text. I found myself agreeing with them. I recognized that their explanations were a valid and logical extension of what they read, whereas I’d had a preconceived notion that was narrower than it should’ve been.
Third, to give yourself time to think through how to deal with the unexpected answers, record their answers on the board. I wrote each answer in the student’s own words, as much as I could, and stopped often to make sure that I was getting it right. This gave me time to recover my composure. As I probed to make certain I’d understood what they were getting at, it also showed me their thought processes.
Fourth, after listing their observations and hearing their explanations, repeat what you had expected and explain why you were surprised. And by “surprised,” I mean in a good way. In my class, I explained that I found their more inclusive view a better way to read the text than what I had prepared.
Fifth, follow up the “blown” lesson with a posting on the course management system, going into more detail on what you said in class. This shows students that you take their views seriously.
Six, and perhaps most important for the future of the class, after returning to your office, make detailed notes on what you’d planned, what “went wrong,” and how you can change things the next time you use that lesson plan.
I still haven’t decided whether I will give them more expansive instructions, anticipating that next year’s class will otherwise go in the same “wrong” direction as the class this year. That is, I could “fix” the lesson plan to deliver the expected outcomes. Another option, and likely the one I will take, is to give them the same instructions as this year, prepare to be surprised, and just go with whatever happens!
Because she was interested in learning how to play the guitar, as well as to learn more about the craft, Dudley got to meet some of the key players in the industry as she conducted her fieldwork throughout the first decade of the 21st century. She attended meetings, went to trade fairs, and thus learned first-hand the vicissitudes of being a craft worker in a machine age.
Like Matthew Crawford in his New Atlantis article, “Shop Class As Soul Craft,” her book celebrates the materiality of craftwork and the intrinsic satisfaction craft workers get in producing beautiful artifacts that other people want to own. She emphasizes that almost all the craft workers she studied were drawn to the occupation not because of financial considerations – – until the collecting boom hit the market in the 1990s, many lived off the wages of their spouses – – but rather because they just wanted to make something.
What makes her book relevant to the maker movement is her depiction of the struggle in the industry between craft workers who are happy with low-volume production and a penurious lifestyle versus those who discovered that they can earn a nice living, but only if they scale up production by using modern technologies, particularly CNC machines. Beginning in the early 1990s, the cash value of vintage guitars soared, surpassing wine and fine art. The pursuit of collectible high-end guitars spilled over into guitars made by contemporary guitar makers, raising their value as well.
Some makers had the surreal experience of selling one of their guitars for less than $2000 and seeing it subsequently auctioned off for 5 to 10 times that amount. $100 guitars suddenly became $1000 guitars, and more. The economic incentive to produce at a higher volume was irresistible to many, but not all. The arrival of wealthy collectors, many of them who made their fortunes and the high technology boom of the 1990s, benefited only some of the guitar makers. Those who were able to get their guitars into the hands of celebrity guitarists and onto the performing stages of concert halls or clubs gain the reputation that radically boosted the value of their products. As in other winner-take-all markets, the number of people who could do this was inherently limited, and so other guitar craft workers had to be content with continuing to earn money with refurbishing and repairs on guitars, with the occasional sale of their own work.
A large part of the narrative in this book concerns the struggles in the guitar-making community over the issue of automation, scaling up, and potential destruction of the sharing ethos which guided early and mid-20th century guitar makers. Just as Richard Ocejoe’s book, Masters of Craft, describes the dilemma of distillery owners who received huge offers to sell out to big distributors, so too does Dudley portray the dilemma of guitar makers, living out their golden years in semi-poverty or buying CNC technology, scaling up, and reaping the rewards of large-scale production & distribution.
In case you were not aware, CNC machining refers to a manufacturing process in which pre-programmed computer software dictates the movement of industrial tools and machinery. This process can be used to control a range of complex machinery, including grinders, lathes, mills and, routers. There are even 5 axis cnc machining tools that can produce a variety of complex objects that would be impossible to make without this tool. Moreover, thanks to CNC machining, three-dimensional cutting tasks can be accomplished in a single set of prompts. You can learn more about CNC machinery by taking a look at some of the resources over on the Tsinfa website.
Hanging over all this are the CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) regulations designed to prevent the importation of rare & endangered wood products, making it very difficult for makers to get the materials they need.
To scale or not to scale, that is the question facing skilled artisans today.
First, if you ask students a question, listen to their answers. We all know the research showing that most instructors wait two seconds or less before answering their own questions. Don’t do that! Ask a question, count to 10 silently, and if no one has responded, ask the question again. Still no response? Paraphrase the question and ask it one more time. I find I almost never need even the first 10 seconds, as sooner or later, one of the students “cracks” and volunteers. To do this effectively, however, you’re going to have to learn to appreciate silence. Trust me, it is actually refreshing in the classroom to sit silently and contemplate something, rather than coping with a constant wall of words.
Ryōan-ji Temple, Kyoto, Japan. Only 14 of the 15 rocks are visible from all vantage points
Second, instead of jumping right into asking for responses, give students time to jot down their thoughts. This will probably take no longer than a minute or two, but it does wonders for freeing up the blockage that students often encounter when they are immediately asked for an oral response to a question. I’ve use this technique successfully in many countries, especially in Southeast Asia, where students are often reluctant to speak. The very act of writing down their thoughts seems to show students that they do, in fact, have something to say. You can then ask them “read me what you’ve written on your papers,” if they’re still reluctant to speak off the cuff.
Third, use the board to list the answers that students offer. Writing on the board has a number of benefits. It slows you down, giving you a chance to process what the students had said and come up with follow-up question, if need be. It also gives you a justification for probing a student response, as you can say that “I’m not sure I completely understand what you said – – could you elaborate?” Writing on the board, in the student’s own words, shows the students that you take them seriously. It privileges their voice, especially when you resist the impulse to pre-edit their responses and write down what you were going to say anyway. Seeing their own words on the board seems to embolden the students and encourage them to volunteer to answer the next question. Finally, writing in the board also gives you a written record for later review, either in the class or – – if you photograph the board – – later, when you decide on what should be covered in the next class session.
Fourth, put students in groups to work on your questions or problem sets. Tell the group that you will be calling on a member of the group to give an oral response to your question and then walk around the room, coaching them as needed. When you ask groups to report, you don’t need to run through every single group. After a member of the first group gives an answer to the question, you can ask other groups if they have amendments, revisions, objections, supplements, and so forth. Refrain from commenting yourself until you given the students sufficient time to hash things out among themselves. Often, you will find that everything you would plan to say yourself has now been voiced by the students.
Colleagues sometimes object that using these techniques means you can’t cover as much. My response? First, who cares! Second, and more substantively, if the goal is to teach for understanding, there’s no better way to find out if your students are learning their lessons than to hear it in their own words.
Trout picture from Livingston MT
As others have pointed out, there is a potential downside to such questions: they emphasize what has not been learned, rather than what has been learned. Accumulating evidence suggests that when students repeat something, even if it is wrong, it gets reinforced in their thinking. For example, wrong answers on tests can pass into long-term memory as received wisdom. In his book, The Art of Changing the Brain, Zull argued that it was futile to bring up and then try to correct misunderstandings and mistaken impressions. He said that such practices only reinforced the very knowledge that an instructor was trying to stamp out. Zull suggested that a better strategy was to focus on the positive and reinforce “correct” answers.
In that spirit, it would seem better practice to end a class by asking students to reflect on “what is the most important thing you learned today?” or “what will you take away from today’s class?” The task can be made slightly more complex by asking students how what they learned in today’s class builds on a previous class or what new ideas they might go online to follow up, given what they learned in today’s class.
An affirmative approach to what’s been discussed in class reinforces a growth mindset by showing students that you are making an assumption not only about that they already know something but also that they are now capable of building on that knowledge and integrating and synthesizing new information. Thus, rather than ask students for their “muddiest point” at the end of your next class, why not try asking them “what have you learned today and what will you do with that knowledge?”
But then I stopped.
Harvey Littleton glass sculpture (Courtesy of Steven P. Aldrich)
Why tell them anything? They had done the preparation for the presentations. They had sat through all of them. Each presentation was between 10 and 15 minutes long, and so there was quite a bit to observe. During the presentations, I noticed they were taking notes, just as I was. I recognized that by this point in the semester, they had surely developed their own critical eye and should have the ability to judge the presentations for themselves.
So, instead of telling them what I thought they should have learned, I just said “okay, what did you learn from your preparation for your own presentation and from listening your peers?” I then went around the room, soliciting responses, and wrote on the board – – in their words – – what they said.
As usually happens when I follow this format, I learned a few things. First, compiled, their list was longer than mine. They had noticed more than I had. Second, some of the things they noticed had never occurred to me. Thus, I learned something new. Third, I was much more relaxed, just listening to responses and writing them down than I would’ve been had I tried to perform my authority role and tell them what I thought. Fourth, through this process, I reinforced the principle that “talking is not teaching,” and that sometimes we play the role of teacher best when we just listen.
Consequently, they create presentations with massive walls of text, few visual aids, too many embedded references, and so many slides that they can’t finish in the time allotted. Because they are afraid of leaving out essential points, slides are crowded with text from top to bottom. Some even copy whole paragraphs from their papers onto the slides. Inevitably, two things happen. First, to assuage their fears of overlooking something, students use slides as their scripts, mindlessly reading the slides to us, word for word. Second, audience members who try to read what’s on the slides while at the same time listening to what the student says – – after all, it is possible that presenters will slip up and say something unplanned – – find the task impossible. Our brains are not wired to listen and read at the same time, regardless of what some people believe about “multitasking.”
With so many slides to cover, students soon find that they are running out of time. What to do? Should they omit some of their precious slides, pushing past minor slides to get to the major points? Or, should they just talk faster? Nine times out of 10, “faster” wins because they hadn’t prepared for the possibility that they would need to edit on the fly. Consequently, they can’t do it. Their only option is to talk faster.
Raven Discovers Humans, by Bill Reid, UBC Anthropology Museum, Vancouver
I suggest a better design process. First, tell the students to organize the presentation as if there were no paper. Ask them to put the paper away and not consult it again until they have a first draft. If they have read the literature, created a paper outline, written the paper, and then copyedited it, they should know the story by heart. No need to continuously consult the paper while preparing the slides. Second, they should find out exactly how much time they will have for the presentation. In a typical 15-minute presentation, presenters can probably cover six or seven slides, or maybe a few more if they are just graphs and pictures. If it is a seminar presentation and they have 20 or 30 minutes, they can add a few more slides, although I prefer to add more words to my oral presentation than slides to the slide deck. Regardless of much time is allotted, presenters should practice the entire talk at least twice.
Third, using as few slides as possible gives presenters flexibility in how they use their time. With more slides, each of which must be displayed/described, presenters’ hands are tied when they realize they are running out of time. (Or in exceptional cases, they discover a time surplus!) Having a small number of slides, from the very beginning, means that presenters prepare to talk more and consciously work harder to maintain their connection with the audience.
Fourth, presenters should reflect on the story they want to tell. How will it begin, how will it end, and what needs to go in the middle to justify the ending? I emphasize again: do this without going back to the paper!
Try this experiment: Imagine yourself in a conversation with a friend. Explain to them the problem you set out to address in your paper, what motivated you to take it up, what previous work was critical in shaping your own thoughts, how was your research designed, where did you get the data, how did you do the analysis, what did you find, and what does it all mean?
Fifth, plan the flow of the presentation. For a 15-minute presentation, presenters should lay out six or seven blank sheets of paper on the table and moving from left to right, write down the main point they will make with that slide. These slides will be the script, but not a script is read. Instead, the slides, and especially the graphics on them, will be their cues as to where they are in the story. Think of the slides as analogous to the story-board that movie directors use to plan their shots. Some of the slides might just have a title and a picture or two, whereas others might have a few bullet points. Full sentences are deadly for PowerPoint – – they encourage people to read, rather than listen.
The Internet allows access to thousands of images, and under the Creative Commons licensing system, if you give credit to the originator of the image, you’re free to use it however you choose. Find relevant images that convey the point of the slide. Ideally, they should advance the story and comment on it.
Finally, when presenters have finished the first draft of the story, with each slide having a title and possibly an image, consider turning on the built-in design assistant from PowerPoint. I found it makes great suggestions and you can create eye catching graphics by following its advice.
No amount of fancy design work will make up for a poor story, but many a good story has been ruined by poor design. Help your students get a leg up on the process by telling them to put the paper away and craft a story from their own understanding and imagination.
Meeting at the Centre, by Robert Davidson
In contrast, Derek Lidow points to “bedrock entrepreneurs” as the true foundation of economic prosperity in the United States. Every year, hundreds of thousands of ordinary businesses are started in the United States, many by people who have no idea what they are doing and who are not prepared for the challenges they will face. Martin Ruef and I wrote about these “mundane entrepreneurs” in our book, Organizations Evolving, and Paul Reynolds has diligently documented their existence through large scale representative samples of business starts. Lidow offers sage advice to would-be entrepreneurs, suggesting that many of them would be better off taking wage and salary jobs. But, for those who are willing to prepare themselves for the challenges, he recommends going for it.
But, “going for it” does not mean in the reckless way encouraged by entrepreneurial self-help books, but rather in a mindful, reflexive, and experimental way. He shows that successful entrepreneurs are not differentiated from the rest of us by any inherent talents, but rather by their willingness to learn from their experiences. He recommends that entrepreneurs continue experimenting until they either get it right or realize that the venture they’ve planned will not work.
This is a delightful book, written by somebody who has had a productive career running a family business, starting his own business, being CEO of a listed company, and then transitioning to a university position. He has the life experiences and educational training, including a PhD in applied physics from Stanford, to offer valuable advice. He readily admits his mistakes and is humble about his successes.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who’s contemplating entrepreneurship and to anyone who is consulting, teaching, or otherwise involved in the entrepreneurial community.
Ghosts in the trees
In the fall of 2017, for the same course, I tried a simple modification: papers were “due” at 9 PM the night before and then “accepted” until 9 AM the next morning, before class. Papers that came in “late” were not penalized. The difference between the two semesters was dramatic: across the four papers, only 15% on average came in after midnight. And that number was inflated because on the fourth paper, six of the students chose to review their papers once more before turning them in, and so they came in between 8 AM and 9 AM, not during the midnight hours. For the first three papers, 85% of the papers, on average, were turned in by 9 PM the night before.
With this simple modification in the due dates and times, students stopped “maniacal binging” (Boice 2000), completed their work well before midnight, and presumably got a good night’s sleep in the bargain. Using a simple tactic of signaling that papers were “due” at 9 PM, I gave the students a hard constraint that they used in planning how they allocated their time. They didn’t want to be “late,” even though “late” carried no penalty. (And no one ever asked me if there would be a penalty.)
I now use this technique on all my assignments, whether they are graded or just checked off when submitted. Having assignments due the night before not only gives students the opportunity for a good night’s sleep but also, if I so desire, gives me an opportunity to review their work and to make modifications in my lesson plan, if the submitted papers reveal any misunderstandings that I need to clear up. What is particularly attractive about this technique is that it works without the imposition of any penalties for “late” assignments. Following Lowman’s (2000) lead, I behave as if there will no such a thing as a “late” assignment and the students make my words come true.
Interested in learning more about late assignments? See this post.
We believe the key to successful collaborative relationships lies in preparing for them ahead of time, rather than attempting to deal with problems as they arise. In fact, some research suggests that the effectiveness of collaborative work is determined before any of the work is carried out. Collaborative work could be made easier using software solutions that adapt existing Microsoft software so that it can be put to more productive use – to find out how SharePoint technology can be improved further, read this to learn how Bamboo Solutions can provide a centralized, searchable, and secure knowledge management system in no time at all. We have identified four structural elements that increase the likelihood of creating and sustaining collaborative relationships.
At the start, the parties to a collaborative relationship should agree on a project’s scope and logic of inquiry. The researchers should ask themselves a few questions that will ensure that they are all on the same page. For example, will the project be open-ended, continuing until all possible avenues of interpretation have been explored and as many papers as possible published? Or, is the project more self-contained, with target journals or conferences identified and the project ended when a paper is accepted? Is the relevant data for the project already in hand or clearly identified, or will building a new dataset be a major thrust of the effort? Sharing “mental models” of the work to be done and how it should be carried out leads to effective teamwork.
In addition to being able to answer these questions, the types of goals a team comes up with will likely affect how well the collaboration goes. Although “write a paper together and get it published” is a common goal for academic collaborations, the success of the research project may depend on having a compelling goal. Is the research question challenging and (by academic standards) somewhat consequential? And, is the goal focused enough so that researchers are working toward a final product but open-ended enough that researchers have some level of autonomy and can be creative when the need arises? Interdisciplinary teams need to communicate with one another the reward systems of their disciplines, as some may place higher values on books than journal articles, or may value certain kinds of journals over others.
Teams should also be deliberative and explicit about each researcher’s responsibilities. External factors often dictate how well an organization (or group) does, but individual interventions, especially by team leaders, can lead to more effective team performance . Teams should decide whether one person will be identified as the “leader” of the project, ultimately responsible for taking major decisions (after consulting with the team) or whether leadership responsibilities will be rotated. In either case, a leader can increase effectiveness by ensuring that the research team comprises individuals whose skills and competencies complement each other and all contribute to the overall goal of the project, designing tasks that give everyone enough autonomy to make their contributions personally fulfilling and meaningful to the project and establishing norms of how the group will work and interact . Teams should identify each team member’s competencies, clarify what that member will do to move the project forward, and make sure everyone on the team knows the others’ roles.
Failure to meet deadlines often sinks collaborative relationships. However, failure to even set deadlines is probably a bigger headache. Without deadlines, members have no way of holding one another accountable for holding up their end of the relationship, as a member can always say that they’re not quite finished yet or they will have their part done “soon.” To receive the benefits of collaborating with people who have complementary skills, team members must be ready to comment in a timely fashion on intermediate products produced by others. First, team leaders can make sure that all researchers on the team are kept in the loop about how the project is going. Second, leaders can try to encourage everyone on the research team (and model ways) to provide good, timely feedback, e.g. by scheduling regular feedback sessions. This can be assisted by using project scheduling software so that everyone is on the same page.
Coordination and communication challenges can hinder the success of collaborative research. Although email and video conferencing services such as Skype have become ubiquitous, these technologies do not necessarily ensure that collaboration is successful. For example, although email and video conferencing allow researchers to communicate more easily, these kinds of tools may not be the best for task coordination, information sharing, and intra-project learning. One of the main challenges for teamwork is juggling multiple and simultaneous work tasks. Researchers, therefore, should use tools that help them manage these multiple tasks, allowing them to know what’s expected of them and see changes to the project almost instantaneously. A plethora of programs and software now allow for this. We recommend that researchers start with one that has low start-up costs-both in terms of time and money-and not be lured by fancy features, as they can be a time sink. Sometimes, investing in innovative technologies is worth the time, but teams should be deliberate about whether the investment is worth it for their project.
Summary
We have identified strategies for mitigating or eliminating collaboration problems in team-based research. At the beginning of a project, face-to-face meetings can establish the ground rules and expectations were all members of the team. Free riding, shirking, and social loafing are much harder when team members agree on responsibilities and create monitoring and enforcement mechanisms. Candid and timely feedback limits the damage that emergent problems can create, but requires strong leadership and commitment by all members to be effective. Finally, as in other collaborative efforts, state-of-the-art coordination and communication technologies facilitates effective team governance.
Garden in Kyoto
When asked what they most dislike about teaching, many instructors put grading at the top of the list. They find the process time consuming and stressful, topped off by demands from students that their assessments be logically justified. Of course, this feeling is the same for the students themselves. Although we hate grading, students also hate writing these assignments and essays. Who hasn’t found themselves in a situation of confronting a student who feels treated unfairly in the grading process and whose persistent questioning reveals that a grade does not stand up to scrutiny. Indeed, upon close inspection, the grading seems arbitrary and hard to defend. What to do?
Grading needs to be done well to give students the feeling that they are being treated fairly in the assessment process. Instructors need to use the same criteria of reliability and validity in designing assessments that they use in their empirical research. Just as they might be called upon by reviewers to defend the quality of data used in an article, so also must they have an answer to students’ queries about the rationale for their marks.
From my perspective, “implicit bias” constitutes a threat to the integrity of the assessment process. Instructors need to take every possible step to reduce the possibility that grades reflect less the merits of the answers than the personal characteristics of the student or the arbitrary whims and fancies of the grading process. Race, class, gender, sexual identity, social capital, and other student characteristics can affect grading if instructors haven’t created a process to limit their effects.
In addition, I believe instructors’ overconfidence in their grading abilities constitutes another form of implicit bias that hampers their ability to assign grades fairly. Keeping the process opaque and not sharing grading criteria with the students emphasizes the unequal power between students and instructors, and is another source of student cynicism about the educational process.
What steps might instructors take?
First, grade all assessments blindly. This means making sure there is no identifying information available while grading the assignment. You can do this by having students turn in blue books with the cover page turned back, by having identification numbers instead of names, by having students fold over the top of the page on which the name is written, and so forth.
Second, prepare an answer key beforehand for all answers. Some instructors call this a “rubric.” The answer key should not be simply bullet points, but rather a fully written out answer, of the kind you would expect to earn full credit on the question. You could also have a list of characteristics or features you’d expect in the question, but the sample answer – – which should be posted or handed out to the students – – should be complete and in prose form.
Preparing the answer ahead of time lets the instructor know that a question can, in fact, be graded. In addition, it prevents “bracket creep” in which an implicit and unwritten template for an answer subtly changes as the instructor reads through the answers and subtly changes the criteria for a grade. If you aren’t certain as to whether your template is too tough, you should read a sample of the answers ahead of time, before grading them, and revise your template if necessary. The rubric should not be changed, once grading is underway.
Third, write out the comments necessary to justify your mark. Don’t just write a simple one or two-word phrase, such as “good job,” or “not complete.” Write enough information next to the answers so that you can explain to students, when they come to you for advice, why you gave that particular mark.
Fourth, grade all of one question before beginning to grade the next question. For example, if your exam consists of four essay questions, you would grade all of question one first, going through all the exams, and then shuffle the exams and grade all of question two. And so on throughout the four questions, in order. This ensures that you are using the same standard throughout your grading and that your grading is not influenced by marks that you have given for previous answers.
You must ensure that a student’ s grade on a previous question is not visible to you. Otherwise, that grade is likely influence the grade you give the current question. Turn over the previous page so that you cannot see it.
Firth, take breaks while grading, and do not attempt to binge on finishing the grading in one sitting. Mistakes are much more likely if you continue grading to the point of exhaustion!
Working to ensure that your assessments are graded reliably and validly requires a bit more preparatory work on an instructor’s part, but the extra work returns huge dividends. When students realize that you are taking great care to grade their work fairly, they take a much more positive view of the assessment process. By the time they get to college, many have become quite cynical about the way instructors exercise their power in handling assessments, and they will appreciate the extra effort you take to make the process as transparent as possible.
However, there’s no denying that trade associations have hugely benefitted many businesses. To be in a trade association, your work and products must be of the best quality, ensuring that all businesses work at their highest standard. Additionally, to be part of an industry that requires effort in multiple areas, like the cannabis industry (cultivation, manufacturing and distribution) to develop safe and responsible procedures. Many trade associations for marijuana allow you to network with other businesses and build trust with your customers, as with other industries too.
M.C. Escher “Drawing Hands”
Historically, business managers and owners could attempt to exert influence at four different levels in the system. First, they could get involved as individual executives, contributing money, lobbying officials and agencies, and so forth. Second, representatives of their organizations could do the same, especially through board interlocks with other firms in different industries, through which could diffuse general business practices as well as practices aimed at producing public goods (Davis & Greve, 1997; Galaskiewicz, 1985). Third, firms could participate in specific industries’ trade associations that favored policies and practices they favored (Ozer & Lee, 2009). Fourth, and perhaps most important, a handful of peak associations sat above the previous three levels, cutting across firms and industries, and claiming to speak for the business community as a whole. For example, the now-defunct CED (Committee for Economic Development) advertised itself as offering “reasoned solutions from business in the nation’s interests.”
Mark Mizruchi argued that after World War II, American business leaders, working individually and through peak associations, were voices of moderation and pragmatism as the American economy expanded and the US became a global power. Foregoing narrow self-interest, business leaders accepted the legitimacy of organized labor and some federal oversight of the economy. By pursuing a policy of what the CED referred to as “enlightened self-interest,” they made it possible for the federal government to pass significant legislation that took account of national collective interests, such as the construction of the interstate highway system and improvements in the Social Security system, as well as the expansion of Medicaid. For people who have limited income and resources, Medicaid has provided them with a lifeline when it comes to affordable healthcare. Thankfully, places like this medicaid california service are able to help people who are in desperate need of this assistance, and hopefully, it will only grow from here. However, all this changed in the 1970s, as businesses were buffeted by global competition, rising inflation, and strong public pressure to do something about the environment, public health, working conditions, and so forth. That pressure led to the creation of many new federal agencies in the 1970s, such as the Environmental Protection Agency. What Mizruchi characterizes as a relatively harmonious working environment prior to the 1970s — involving government, business, and labor — changed into a much more confrontational system. The financialization of American corporations in the 1980s intensified pressures on executives and diminished their enthusiasm for pursuing collective solutions (Davis, 2009; Mizruchi, 2013). The corporate scandals of the early 2000s and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 further disrupted the formerly cozy relationships between members of the corporate elite (Chu and Davis, 2016).
Changes in patterns of mergers and acquisitions, initial public offerings, and the growing importance of private equity firms have led to the slow disappearance of corporations from the American economy over the past two decades (Davis, 2016). Previously, publicly held corporations might have felt some obligation to temper their self-serving actions with more public-regarding actions, to the extent that shareholders and activists could hold them accountable (King). However, privately held corporations have no such watchdogs and thus can act with much more autonomy and disregard for collective and societal interests.
Because of these changes, the business elite has fragmented over the past three decades and lost its ability to act cohesively (Walker & Rea, 2014). Unlike in earlier eras, when presidents and political leaders could call upon business leaders in peak associations to help them push for policies that might involve some sacrifices on their part, elites pulled back into policies reflecting more narrow self-interest. Mizruchi argues that many of the problems plaguing US politics – – extreme partisan polarization and inability to enact needed legislation, such as improvements in national highway infrastructure – – stem from the damages done to social and political consensus by developments since the 1970s. Consequences can even be seen at the state level, where efforts by public interest associations to expand Medicaid, under the Affordable Care Act, ran into strong opposition by conservative nonprofit advocacy organizations that mobilized public opinion against expansion (Hertel-Fernandez, Skocpol, & Lynch, 2016). Traditional general business interest associations like the Chamber of Commerce, as well as associations of hospitals and doctors, were unable to overcome special interest lobbying against expansion.
Today, with the loss of elite cohesion resulting in fewer class-wide constraints on businesses pursuing narrow self-interest and lobbying against policies purported to be in the public interest, strong trade associations are much better positioned to pursue their own interests. In the past, they might have been constrained by networks of ties between firms and their membership in strong peak associations. However, in the changed political and economic environment of narrow partisan self-interest, they now have much more room to fight for industry-level benefits against more comprehensive cross-industry solutions, as in issues such as environmental protection. Moreover, in this new environment, big firms are not as constrained by class-wide norms as in the past, and they can use their dominance within trade associations to push for their own interests (Barnett, 2009). Whereas in the past special interest associations — such as the American Legislative Exchange Council or Americans For Prosperity — might have been restrained by needing to justify their actions to more moderate peak associations, that is no longer the case (Jackman, 2013).
The United States is entering uncertain political times, with political parties polarized, and collective action in the public interest extremely difficult to achieve. To the extent that the decline of elite class cohesion and moderate business peak associations weakens the forces of conciliation and compromise, strong trade associations may actually step into the void and make matters worse by pursuing policies favoring their own industries. Of course, as Walker and Rea (2014) remind us, we should not conflate business unity with business power, and each case must be assessed on its own merit. Nonetheless, the possibility worries me – a lot.
You WILL answer my question!
I pointed out that even I might be afraid to answer such a question. Such questions pose a severe challenge to the confidence of undergraduate students, because the instructor clearly knows the answer and they don’t. The answer is a “fact” which the instructor clearly thinks the students should have already known before they came to class. When it comes to answering questions about “facts,” there are many ways to be wrong, but only one way to be right. When faced with this dilemma, students are understandably silent.
I suggested that he come up with nonthreatening questions: questions that didn’t put a student’s self-confidence and reputation at risk. Trying to begin a discussion with questions for which there is a “correct” answer makes salient the asymmetrical relationship between instructors over students. No one wants to look bad in the eyes of peers and so it is safer to say nothing and wait till somebody else answers or instructors give up and answer the questions themselves.
Is there a better way? What types of questions could you ask to begin a discussion? First, you could ask about something that everyone has seen or experienced. For example, in a class on the sociology of work, I asked students what is the best job they ever had and what were its characteristics? Everybody can answer such a question. Second, you could write a concept or principle on the board and then ask students to suggest examples. For example, you can ask for personal examples of a principle identified in the readings, rather than asking students to define the principle itself. In a class session on organizations and bureaucracy, I asked the students which aspects of the ordering process best exemplified what George Ritzer identified as the rationalization of fast food restaurants. It is critical in this process that you do not comment on the examples that are offered. Instead, simply compile the list. Third, you could ask students which previous class sessions or readings the day’s assignment reminded them of and why. Again, simply compile the list without editing it. Later in the discussion, after students have gained some confidence in participating, you can ask more difficult questions.
In addition to choosing questions for which there is no clear right or wrong answer, I follow several guidelines in getting discussions started. First, if at all possible, I use the whiteboard to keep track of student responses. Otherwise, trying to control the discussion process while at the same time keeping track of what is been said creates a high stress situation. You could also use an interactive polling system, such as Poll Everywhere. Writing responses on the board clears your short-term memory and also gives you a few seconds to collect your thoughts while you decide on follow-up questions.
Second, I take care to make sure that if I’m writing answers on the board, I write them in the students’ own words. I rarely edit student responses and when I do, I always ask their permission. Writing the responses verbatim sends a strong signal that you are going to privilege student voices in the discussion, rather than just looking for confirmation of what you are going to tell them anyway.
Third, you should follow-up short or incomplete responses. Probe for more information by telling students that you need to make sure that you understand their meaning and thus you need a sentence or two from them. Point out that the few words you’ve written on the board might make little sense in a few minutes, when the discussion turns to assessing what’s been written in response to your original question.
When you are satisfied that you have responses that adequately cover the readings assigned for the day, then turn to editing what you’ve written on the board. This is a dangerous stage in the process, as it is here that instructors often hijack the process and begin selectively drawing from the writing on the board to give the lecture they had planned in the first place. Although the impulse to “correct” the unedited responses may be strong, don’t do it. Instead, turn to the students and ask them for suggestions for improving or simply using the list. For example, after I’ve written down the responses to my question about the characteristics of the best job students have had, I asked students if they see any pattern to the responses. The discussion naturally leads into various ways in which the dimensions of jobs can be analyzed. In another example, after listing all the comments about ordering systems in fast food restaurants, I asked if the list reminded them of any of Ritzer’s principles and why. Note that it is okay at this point to begin probing for relevance to the day’s instructional goals, because you’ll have shown the students that you are listening to them, that their words matter, and that you take their views seriously.
The next time you find yourself stumped by why students are sitting passively in the classroom, seemingly unable or unwilling to answer your questions, take a hard look at your questioning strategy. Rather than sparking a discussion, the very questions you’re asking may be shutting down the process.