Prepping students for class discussions

Thanks to a lot of help from geobloggers and other friends, I was able to give my students some interesting examples of proposals yesterday. Tomorrow, I'm hoping for a good discussion of the various ways that proposal-writers pitch their ideas to people with money. I've told students how to write proposals before - for eight years, actually - but I'm never fully satisfied by what goes on in class. I've told them about the typical structure of an NSF grant, but none of my most recent grants (from a local non-profit and from the college's small pot of money) have followed that model, and neither have successful student grant proposals. So I'm trying to have a different discussion this time, and I need the students to read and think about the proposals if the discussion is to be useful.

I am terrible at leading discussions. If the students come into class ready to ask questions and argue, things go well; if they aren't, I don't know what to do. Sometime in the mid-90's, I got a useful suggestion from Barb Tewksbury at a GSA workshop: give the students some kind of pre-discussion exercise, something to focus their thinking. Not the discussion questions themselves, but some kind of springboard. (There's an explanation of one technique for doing this at SERC: Just in Time Teaching.) But I'm not very good at applying the advice.

This semester, I want to make better use of all the writing examples I've collected, so I'm trying to do various pre-discussion assignments. In this case, I wanted students to read both the calls for proposals and the proposals themselves, so I asked students to think about the audience, and look at what was included or left out of each proposal, and then to look at the proposal's structure. When we get to class on Wednesday, I'm going to pair students up - each proposal (or set of short proposals) was read by two students - and ask them... something. Maybe, rather than asking them the same questions I asked as preparation, I'll ask something different: who is the audience for each proposal, what does the audience care about, and how does the proposal sell its idea to the audience. There are six groups of proposals total, so there should be time for each of the teams to report back and for the class as a whole to try to make generalizations.

I didn't ask the students to write anything down before class, and that may hurt the discussion. (If the students have to turn something in, even if it's just part of a participation grade, they're more likely to take the assignment seriously.) I thought about doing all this online - I can set up discussion boards in our course management software - but I decided not to. (I like the idea of online discussions, but my students don't all have good internet connections at home. Things that work where students live in dorms with wifi don't work so well for rural commuter students who have dial-up, if anything.) So we'll see whether I made a mistake by not planning any kind of obvious accountability into the pre-class assignment.

I hope I learn something from this - my own ideas about what makes an effective proposal are as vague as definitions of obscenity: I know it when I see it. At the very least, maybe my students will learn to recognize what works before they send off a proposal that doesn't.

(Of course, the best way to teach students to write is to make them write (and give them lots of feedback), and believe me, there's plenty of that in this class. I'm just tweaking things to try to make it more effective.)

Citing references outside academia/government?

Here's another question on writing done by geoscientists outside academia. How do you give credit for work done by others?

In academia (and anywhere else where research is done, including government and industry), citing references is necessary both to put work in context and for ethical reasons. And in classes, it's a huge deal. But the typical citation styles used by geoscientists (whether the USGS style, AGU, or other journal styles) can be pretty distracting - you're reading a perfectly clear sentence, and then it's broken by an entire line of parenthetical references:

(Hatch, 1987; Hatch, 1988; Moench et al., 1995; Rankin, 1996)

My students frequently complain about this reference style - the names don't mean anything to them. So I wonder about other audiences, especially in industries where your audience wants to get to the point, as quickly and clearly as possible.

There are plenty of cases beyond academia (and government or industry research) in which a geologist is likely to rely on work done by someone else. New field work is expensive (and drilling holes even more so); if you can use existing maps, published geochemistry or structure or stratigraphy, I imagine that a good mining or petroleum geologist could identify likely targets. There might be useful information in USGS maps, state survey data, dissertations... all sorts of places besides proprietary data. And if demand for a commodity makes new types of plays profitable (such as is going on now with shale gas or coal-bed methane), then I imagine that all sorts of old studies could become valuable (such as dissertations on joints in the Marcellus Shale, or old proprietary data about areas that weren't economic a couple decades ago). So, if you're working in exploration, and you're writing an internal report about an area that deserves further exploration, how do you cite the old studies? (Do you write an executive summary that management can skim, and give references in documents aimed at other geologists?)

(If you haven't guessed, I'm still thinking about justifying the academic writing my class is doing. I've become more and more aware that I'm not training academics, for the most part, and my own experience just isn't adequate.)

Want to share proposals with my students?

In the comments on my post yesterday asking about non-academic proposals, Suvrat asked if I was going to show my students examples of successful proposals. The answer is yes... and I'm looking for help in showing students a wider variety of proposals, both from academics and non-academics.

I've written proposals and gotten them funded, from NSF, from internal pots of money, and from local foundations. But I'm just one person, writing proposals for my pet projects, and I know from reviewing for NSF and from serving on a foundation's grant-awarding committee that there are many styles of proposals that work.* I'm planning to ask other members of my department if they would be willing to share their proposals with my students as well, but there are only six of us, and we're at a teaching-intensive institution. And my students already know a lot about what we do, because they're talking to us about possible senior thesis topics.

So I'm asking around for other examples. For academics, would any of you be willing to share a successful proposal (from any organization, large or small) with my students? I'm willing to hide any part that you don't want to share, and I promise not to steal research ideas - I don't have time to steal ideas from other people, honestly - or to tell my colleagues about work you plan to do. In return, you get to sell your research to 15 juniors who may want to do graduate work someday. (And I've found that students can really be influenced by examples of research that they see. That's another reason to avoid focusing on my work - I don't want my students to feel pushed to become my clone.)

For non-academics... well, I imagine that it's trickier to share proposals or bids for contracts, especially for people doing exploration work. So don't offer anything that would be against the policies of your employer. But if anyone has examples, or ideas for how to create my own, or would be willing to replace identifying information with imaginary places, I would love to show students something non-academic and realistic.

For everyone: here's how I'm thinking of using examples. I want students to think about what proposals have in common, and what's different depending on the type of work and the audience. So I'm thinking of assigning pairs of students to look at different proposals, and asking them to figure out who is the audience, what's the proposed work, how the work is justified (or what kind of details are offered as supporting evidence), and what things are left out. (Any ideas about what else the students should look for?) Then I'm planning to spend one class discussing the similarities and differences between proposals.

The students will have the opportunity to write their own proposals to different audiences in any case - they need to get their advisor's approval for their thesis proposal, and they get a grade from me, and if they need money to complete their project, they have to write proposals for funding, as well. (The college has some money for undergraduate research, but it's awarded competitively, and the committee that reads the applications includes people from all over the college. The differences between successful departmental research proposals and successful funding proposals can be an educational experience. Also frustrating, as learning experiences frequently are.)

Thanks to anyone who is willing to help. If you want to share materials privately, my e-mail address is shearsensibility AT gmail DOT com. (Replace AT with @, DOT with . , and take out all the spaces.) Or alternatively, you can find my work e-mail by googling my real name.

*There are also many that don't work. I've learned a lot from my own rejections (and from reviewing).

Proposals (etc) outside academia?

If you're working as a geoscientist outside academia - in oil & gas, in mining, as an environmental consultant, for a government agency, for a non-profit organization, or in some other career - do you write proposals? Not NSF grant proposals, like your professors constantly did, but some kind of writing to get permission or funding to start a project?

I'm asking because I'm about to start teaching my department's writing class again, and the class is designed to develop writing skills while writing a proposal for a senior thesis. When I arrived here and took over the class, it was a general education requirement (writing within a discipline). That's changed recently, but after I tried to make it more relevant by using it to prepare students for their research, the department decided that the class was too important to drop from the major. So I'm still teaching it, but I want to make it as valuable as possible to all my students - not just those who plan to go on to graduate school.

Thus my question. I tell students that writing is a skill that they will be able to use regardless of what they do. (My usual line is "If you can write, do math, and think critically, you should be able to do a lot of different jobs, not just the ones you think you're training for.") Part of my argument is that people have to write in all sorts of different careers. Geologists have to write reports discussing what they've found - even recent grads have told me that they spend a lot of their time writing reports. But I also tell students that writing proposals (or maybe bids, in the case of consultants) might also be part of their work. But I don't have direct experience with them, so I don't know much about the details.

So, for those of you who work outside academia: do you write proposals? At what level - are proposals written by people at a certain level of the organization, but not by the underlings? For those of you who have written your own proposals (which would probably include anyone who has been to graduate school), have you been able to translate your experience to the professional world? What kind of advice would you give to undergraduates who are learning this kind of writing for the first time?

Geology, fiction, and science fiction

A post of links, because I'm trying to get some intro exams graded:

Magma cum laude has a great post discussing the portrayals of volcanoes in several books. And Biology in Science Fiction and Almost Diamonds are asking scientists and science fiction writers some questions in preparation for a panel at the ScienceOnline 09 conference. I think the discussions could be linked, easily.

Meanwhile, Erik Klemetti reminds us that real volcanoes can be as dramatic and tragic as fiction in his remembrance of the 23rd anniversary of the destruction of Armero, Colombia. And for science fiction writers who want to put a good subduction zone into their books, Brian Romans has a detailed three-part debunking of subduction denialists, which has led to a call for posts about geologic pseudoscience.

Students plagiarizing blogs

Christie has had one of her blog posts used in a lab report by a student from a neighboring institution. She wonders what she can do, other than add a threatening notice in her sidebar. Check out her post for the discussion.

I've got a couple related questions.

1) If one were to, say, deliberately stick an oddball word into science-y posts to catch the attention of a grader, what would you suggest? Gnamma? Random use of British spellings (or American spellings for Chris, Julia, and anyone else who tends to use extra vowels)? Off-hand references to various offspring or to being born before Mt St Helens erupted?

2) Would you allow students to use blogs as cited sources in a paper? Under what circumstances? And how should a blog post be cited, anyway?

(My take on question #2: when I make my intro class do background research before field data collection, I'll let them use any sources. When my juniors are doing background research for their senior theses, however, I tell them that they can't use more than one internet source - though that doesn't count USGS open-file reports or open access journals or any other formal publication that happens to be on the net. The juniors are supposed to be learning to read and understand the formal scientific literature; I don't allow them to use The Roadside Geology of X as a major source, either.)

Two posts I don't need to write

Maria at Green Gabbro writes about geology terms that should be brought back from the dead. (That means I don't need to write a sequel to my post about retiring outmoded terms. Plus she knows some really good words. I'm going to have to find a way to use tiphon and gnamma in conversation this week.)

And Chris at Highly Allochthonous writes about a discussion of science blogging in this month's Nature Geoscience (which, amusingly enough, also featured letters from Julia and me that were, at least in my case, requested by the editor after he read my blog). One of the opinion pieces is by Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate, and argues for the usefulness of blogging. The other one - the one that made me want to blog - was by Myles Allen, who argues that discussions of the scientific literature belong in comments and replies. (I might still have to write about this, from the perspective of a teacher... but Chris has some interesting things to say, so maybe I'll just stick to commenting there.)

Geology terms overdue for retirement?

In the last couple weeks, I've heard a number of comments about geology terms that are unnecessary or outmoded. The Cordilleran tectonicists at the Las Vegas GSA meeting kept making jokes about how they weren't supposed to use "miogeocline" (which means essentially passive margin, and which replaced "miogeosyncline" after plate tectonics became accepted). "Greywacke" also seems to be on its way out. In the geoblogosphere, Olelog asks whether we need the word euxinic. And then there's this wisecrack from Ammon Shea, who is writing a book about reading the Oxford English Dictionary:

For instance trondhjemite is defined as ‘Any leucocratic tonalite, esp. one in which the plagioclase is oligoclase’. I have my doubts as to whether anyone has ever thought to themselves ‘I wonder what trondhjemite means?’ But if someone did, and went to look it up in the OED, it seems unlikely that this definition would clear things up much.

I disagree with Shea. I know what a tonalite is, and I know what oligoclase is, but I often need reminding of the precise definition of "trondhjemite." I've got even more problems remembering the definitions of other igneous rock names ("alaskite," "pantellerite," "hawaiite," "benmoreite," etc.) but that's partly because I've worked in Precambrian rocks, and lots of Precambrian geologists talk about trondhjemites. So I think the definition in the OED is useful, but I'm not so sure that the term itself ought to remain in active use. (By the way, if Shea wants a really impenetrable geologic definition, he should see the definition of cactolith.)

So I'm curious. If you could get rid of five geologic terms as unnecessary and/or outdated jargon, which ones would you choose?

summaries for non-scientists: what should they contain?

Chris Rowan had a very thought-provoking post a couple days ago based on a suggestion by Propter Doc: that all scientific journal articles should include (possibly on the web, rather than in a print version) a lay statement written by the authors of the journal article. The basic idea is that the statement could be used by all sorts of people who are interested in the science, but don't have the time or the background (or the access to the journal) to read the entire article. Chris makes the point that these statements would solve some of the problems with press releases that result from not understanding the science in the paper. (And Chris has some great examples of press releases that needed help, too, and great discussion of them.)

I think this is an interesting idea. But, as the person who teaches my department's writing course, I would add that writing for a lay audience is a skill that needs developing. (I make my students write one paper as if they're writing for an audience of non-scientists. It's amazingly difficult to do well.) So, if this is a valuable skill... then students need to practice it.

As luck would have it, right now I'm trying to put together a new Advanced Structural Geology course. I'm going to run it as a semi-seminar (not as individually motivated as grad school seminars generally are - I only teach undergrads), and we'll be discussing journal articles. And I thought: ah-ha! There's a new idea for an assignment! So I'm going to have each student choose one article and write an "executive summary" for it.

But I need to give them some kind of guidance. So, geoblogosphere: what do you think an "executive summary" or a "lay summary" (or a press release, for that matter) would need to do, in order to be successful? How is it different, in your mind, from an abstract? Is its goal to catch the attention of the audience, like a journalist would need to do? Is its goal to accurately summarize the research? Is its goal to explain why the research is interesting and important? All of the above? None of the above?

My students thank you in advance for helping me clarify my assignments before I grade them. :D