blogging at 10,000 feet

As it turns out, on my flight back to SLC the wireless access was free. I never really thought I would pay for internet access on a plane, but since it was free I thought I would go ahead and check the scores and my email. But the really interesting thing is that the internet access up here is much better than it was in my hotel room. There, it was worse that a 28K modem. But here it is pretty fast. I guess the thing it makes me remember is the importance of making web sites accessible to people with disabilities of course but also to people with slow connection speeds. Blackboard, for example, does not work well at all when the internet access speeds are slow. Everything takes several minutes to load. So I am a little behind on helping my TA out with his portion ogf the grading, which he cannot do since the internet access where he is is even slower. So with case-based learning, since that is what my students will be learning about next week, videos can be crucially important to help describe cases. But videos can take up a lot of bandwidth. One way to get around that is to use really good compression technologies, and it have multiple options of people who can download lower quality versions if they have slow internet. Now if we could just get blackboard to create a low-bandwidth alternative....

conference reflection

One thing that has always been a problem for me at conferences is figuring out the layout. It always seems that it is not until the end of the conference that I actually understand how to get from one room in one building to another room in another building. So I have been wandering quite a bit today. But that is okay because my presentation went pretty well. People had questions and that is always a good thing. I also remembered what I was going to say pretty well. And some people want to read my paper (being a good academic I wrote out a full length paper before the conference....that's what we are supposed to do but some people do not do that), which is definitely a good thing.
Something I have learned over the years is that conferences are not only about presenting and attending presentations on interesting topics. Rather, they are about building relationships with other academics. Sometimes those other academics are professors, sometimes students, and sometimes industry professionals. Academics just like any other field is social. You have to build off of other's research to do any research of value. The way you know about that research is by a combination of doing a lit search and the snowball method of talking to people you know who do research in the area that you do, asking them for suggestions of what to read, asking people who wrote the stuff that you were referred to for some more stuff to read, and so on. You never can read everything that there has been written on a topic, and if you limit yourself to just library lit searches you can miss important lines of research just by not having the right keywords and so forth. But also there is the file drawer problem, in which people might have done a study that did not give significant or interesting results, and it never gets published, and thus sits in someone's file drawer. The only way you can know about those is by talking to people. Another benefit of building relationships is that it helps when it it time for job hunting and writing collaborative grant proposals. I knew 4 people at USU before I ever interviewed here. I knew them from conferences. Of course I know that they did not give me preferential treatment because I knew them, but I could ask them "what is it like in Logan?" (knowing about where you are interviewing is very important because you come out for two-three days and then if you are lucky you get a job offer which could potentially be the only job for the rest of your life). I could also guess what types of questions they might ask at my job talk.
So in short, yes, academia is a social enterprise just as much as other lines of work, but that is not a bad thing. Rather it helps open our eyes to previous work that might not have been discoverable by just going to the library.