Computers, creativity and learning

The monster of all journal papers

Eeee! I have just resubmitted a MS to a (prestigious but nameless for now) journal, having about doubled it in size to about 49 pages. I had two journal papers rejected in the Autumn, and weirdly one thought I had written too much (>20 pages) and slated it on those grounds, and in the other the editor wanted more detail (and a lot more background lit) even although it stood at 28 pages. Papers in this latter journal routinely run to 50 pages. What can I conclude from this humbling yet contradictory experience?

• Check the average page count of every damn journal before submitting, thus saving months of heart ache. They differ radically it would seem even if they don't advertise a page limit.
• Make sure you do a lit review for related articles in the journal you are submitting to, lest the editor feels your work is not a good fit for the journal. Doh! I knew this. Why didn't I just do it at the time?
• If you are punching above your weight, prepare for rejection until you get the standard right. I am attempting to publish slightly out of my field in a journal with a high impact factor which increases both the risk and the payoff if it gets accepted. Luckily the editor was really helpful in telling me what to do to fix the problems with the paper, so hopefully it will do better this time although I anticipate another hair pulling chain of edits based on reviews.

Anyhow, with that paper resubmitted judy.children[0] can arrive on his due date on Thursday. Assuming his poor dad has finished painting the hall.

PS Those of you wondering why I am writing papers so close to the due date have missed the obvious: I am an academic. Miss a chance of uninterrupted blissful writing time? Are you kidding me?

Massive con perpetrated by academic publishers

Not an original thought, I know, but how come academics put up with this situation?

You try to get hold of a journal article when writing a paper. You hunt it down through your university library only to discover that the library doesn't have a subscription. You can pay at the time (£25 or more) to download it, or wait for the library to get an inter-library loan, thus delaying your train of thought. You might try to be cunning and go to a bigger university library in person where you have borrowing rights. If you did this, you would no doubt discover that reciprocal library borrowing arrangements don't extend to electronic articles and that the library has more or less stopped stocking paper copies of key journals. Why? Because the publishers want the libraries each to buy subscriptions to their wretched journals. (As an example, Computer & Education costs around $2000 dollars a year for institutions.)

Ok, so publishers gotta earn their humble crusts? Not at my expense they don't! Should anyone want to read an article I published in Computers & Education, which took me months of work, and they didn't have  a subscription from a university they would have to pay their hard earned cash to read work which was publically funded. And I wouldn't see a penny of it.

Who writes the articles?

<academic chorus> We do!

Who edits the journals?

<academic chorus> We do!

Who reviews the papers?

<academic chorus> We do!

Who gets paid for these contributions?

<academic chorus> We do! Errrr....no, hang on! We DON'T!

As far as I can see, the reason we put up with this is that academic prestige and promotion prospects are bound tightly to publications in respectable journals. Who do you think compiles statistics like impact factors? You want to get a good rating in research assessment exercises and you need to publish in mainstream high quality journals, and there aren't that many free ones which have this status, in my field anyhow.

Just how stoopid are we to put up with this?

Aaaak!

Third journal article rejected in a row. This is not a career for the thin skinned...

 Lots of re-writing for me, then.

New grant = breathing space?

A few months back my super-productive colleague Prof R and I wrote a proposal to EPSRC to get a research network on Effective Research Spaces funded. Well, it just got funded for £150K.

Effective what, you may wonder? Well, higher education academics might be familiar with the fashion for effective learning spaces, by which I mean designing the layout of classrooms to help people learn better. Someone somewhere in EPSRC must have thought it would be a good idea to look at how to design places which would help people to research better. Hence their call for proposals. Hence me doing a very rapid literature review about it in the summer and guessing at how you would develop a network of people who are all interested in that topic. (Hence a grumpy old reviewer complaining about a "patchy and rambling" literature review. Hee hee. That reviewer had obviously not been on the "two stars and a wish" training session on how to give feedback! :-) ).

So now I am relieved because I have brought some more research money into the department and I can breathe freely for a bit. Prof R got another project funded from the same call, so she is particularly popular in the department just now. I think she may have some kind of pact with the devil. She is Queen Midas of funding.

Below is the summary from the proposal if it means anything to anyone.

"The EPSRC Digital Economy theme seeks to investigate how the use of innovative ICT can transform both lives and work. SPIRES arises from a Digital Economy sandpit held in July 2009 on Effective Research Spaces and is a network proposal that aims to bring together currently disparate groups interested in the design of effective research spaces and environments in order to create a new research community. Through a set of focused workshop and outreach activities it will bring together the three perspectives of physical spaces, novel technology, and social interaction to support a new synthesis of ideas and new conversations between groups currently not in contact with each other.

1.1 Objectives

·         To form and support a multi-disciplinary community of researchers with expertise in enhancing physical, technological or social aspects of research environments;

·         To develop a deeper understanding of the ways in which effective research can be fostered;

·         To document and disseminate the current state of the art in nurturing effective research spaces, both from a UK and international perspective;

·         To generate new methodologies for designing and evaluating effective research spaces."

OMG - IEE teaching award

OMG! I just got a phone call from a very nice american lady telling me I have won the IEEE computer society Computer Science and Engineering undergraduate teaching award!

I am very pleased about this, but also deeply astonished because I don't recall entering for it. Apparently one of my colleagues nominated me. From this point forward I resolve to stop moaning about my colleagues. I love them all! I get some prize money and a certificate and to go to Denver in June to collect the prize. I will get more info today in an email.

[Edit: due to my obsessive habit of email archiving, I have tracked down the mystery. My boss nominated me in July 2008 but one of the reviewers must have missed the deadline, and my app was carried forward to the next year I think. And Flexible Learning Pal wrote me a lovely and eloquent recommendation which must have stunned the committee into giving it to me. She is the Bard to All Teachers and has been duly rewarded with animal biscuits.]

[Another edit: IEEE press release about the award: http://www.computer.org/portal/web/awards/undergraduate]

Rough with the smooth

My last hope of getting the Wretched Crush Area Refurb done before Christmas has just vanished into nothingness at the dire words "inadequate ventilation" intoned by our Estates Office. It turns out that building regulations have changed since the building was first built, and now any improvement work has to fix the lack of ventilation in the space. And as this work and the new ceiling will take at least 4 weeks, we can't do it in the Xmas period. We then have to wait until Easter because there are adjacent teaching rooms which can't be disturbed by noise during the semester 2.

That's the rough. The smooth is that they will pay for the additional building works. So it's hard to say no, especially if the students might perk up with a better oxygen supply. :-)

Why do universities work on such geological time scales? We had our first meeting about this in June 09.  By the time the work is finished, Judy.Children[0] will be born. Apparently it's quicker to gestate and deliver a baby than it is to refurbish one room in a university. I'll let you know which is more painful at the end of April! :-)

Made it!

I is senior lecturer! Which goes to show hellish interview and several months wait paid off after all.

Made it!

I is senior lecturer! Which goes to show hellish interview and several months wait paid off after all.

What is effective research?

I have the somewhat odd task of putting together a proposal for a network on Effective Research Spaces. (Yeah, I know, it's one of these things I just gotta do for work, but not my idea in the first place).

"Spaces" seems to mean either physical buildings or technology environments.

The problem is, no-one seems quite sure what "effective research" means. What do you think? Comments please!

Here are my first thoughts on the topic. Can you add to my list?

Effective research is:

• original
• creative
• advances the state of knowledge in the field
• challenges current thinking on a topic
• methodologically sound
• honest

 

Interviewee reduced to a slug

This is me after my promotion interview. A slug.

I find it typical that in academia you have to write your own promotion application, which requires serious work (at least a day of writing). It's as much effort as applying for another job. The interview is an hour of slimy goodness out of which you emerge as a slug. And then you have to wait the rest of the summer to find out if you were successful. Having been interviewed, I now realise my research area is worthless and that I am simultaneously too ambitious and not ambitious enough. Clearly I am lucky to have been employed by them as a lecturer in the first place. Starting proceedings with the question "Can you explain why your research area of "softer than soft computing" has any merit?"  kind of put me off. And the panel stared blankly when I told then about the computational crafts project. Just as well I didn't tell them about plants with personalities. (Remind me to tell you about them sometime. Very cool.)