This is the second installment in my learning to learn series; the first explored four tips to study better. When, as teachers, we assign group work, we often hear you grumble1. Group work often gets a bad rap. And there are (some) good reasons for it. But there are also significant benefits arising from group work. So, why do we assign you to work in groups? I will start with why you have good reasons to grumble and then will cover the advantages of working in groups.
This is a review of the book Ultralearning by Scott H. Young. Summary The premise of the book is that one can learn vast amounts, and master subjects reputed difficult through intense practice. The book presents some of the principles, tools and techniques to achieve this. It is written in an accessible style and is well-paced. While the book might first appear as a charge against higher education, this is not the case.
Remembering what you learn is essential if your learning effort is to amount to anything. Ideally, you want to build both short-term and long-term retention in order to pass the class but also be able to use the knowledge in the future whenever required. We know that a lot of what feels like studying is inefficient in helping us retain information long term. For example, rereading notes and highlighting does not lead to retention (Dunlosky et al.
I recently finished teaching three MSc classes online. Here is what I learned. First, online can be as good as in person, and better in some cases. Second, getting there is challenging and it is to be expected that one does not achieve full proficiency on one’s first try. One of the main criticisms of online learning I have heard is the fact that students prefer in-person classes, and so do faculty.
I read Helen Sword’s Stylish Academic Writing (Sword, 2012) on a recent flight. The book surveys major style quirks plaguing academic writing. It is both entertaining and concerning: some of the examples are hilarious, but a look at one’s own writing yields many sentences as wonky as the examples in the book. For me, writing is the single most difficult part of being an academic: I am a slow writer and need heavy editing to get my first draft into shape.
In the November issue of the Strategic Management Journal, the editors write about a new initiative, which aims to increase the availability of management data (Ethiraj, Gambardella, & Helfat, 2017)1. As part of this initiative, the editors will contact authors of impactful papers in SMJ to suggest they contribute the data. Additionally, SMJ will adopt a badge system to identify articles that make their data available. The editors’ goal is to both facilitate replications and, crucially, increase the ability of researchers to build on previously collected data; therefore increasing the cumulativeness of management research.
I decided to redo my old and ugly wordpress website using blogdown and Hugo. Thanks to the great theme for academics by George Cushen and the blogdown book by Yihui Xie, Amber Thomas and Alison Presmanes Hill, it was a breeze. In a few hours, I have a better looking website than I thought possible, without having to do too much fiddling. Once more, I am amazed by what can be achieved thanks to the open source software community.