Palaeontology 2.0

I have been reading a bunch of articles lately on education, and how to improve it. It’s been making me think a lot about my own education, especially in university. I just want to know if the major universities are ever going to give education more than a fleeting thought. Obviously, research is very important, but at what point should it be to the exclusion of teaching? If you never take the time to teach others what you know, then what? Knowledge not passed along is knowledge lost. I would hate to have toiled away at my research, uncovering new things, but not have shared that with others before I died. And I mean more than what can be passed along in a journal article. Too many journal articles are never read anyhow; if you actually take the time to teach someone what you know, then you know that knowledge will have been passed on. And when I talk about teaching, I mean more than just standing in front of a room and saying words. There was a class in university that I went to less than half the time, and I did better for it because I didn’t get confused by the abysmal teacher reading nothing but equations off a Powerpoint slide. I think that too often, profs forget that the people they are teaching could become some of the most important people in their lives: namely, politicians. If these future politicians (and their constituents) a never taught how exciting or amazing a subject is, that subject might not get as much funding the next year, because nobody cares about it. Teaching can be in your own self interests.

Building a Better Teacher (NYT)

Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers

Fixing US STEM education is possible, but will take money

A PLoS article this week puts some numbers (small, though they may be) on how truly free and open scientists are in sharing their data. For the article, the authors sent information requests for data previously published on in PLoS journals. The thing about these journals is that they have an explicit data sharing policy, which makes it clear that the raw data sets they use in their analyses must be made available to other researchers.

Just a little history about the PLoS journals: they were originally set up with the ideal of Open Access as a founding tenet. This included not only sharing your data but making the journal itself freely accessible to anyone, free of subscription.

But back to the article itself. THe authors found that out of 10 requests for data, they recieved only one dataset. In fact, some of the data holders seemed rather indignant in the thought that someone might actually want to look at THEIR data, as I’m sure they thought the only reason why would be for the requesters to scoop the next big story to come out of these datasets.

In the end, this study only really serves to emphasize the fact that science is still a very closed (and I would say, closeminded) place to work in.