Professional Development

InsideHigherEd has a new series called Ph.Do that discusses professional development issues.  It’s written by Eszter Hargittai from Northwestern.  So far, so good.

 

 

More Grad School Advice

Blogs are a great place to learn about people’s experiences with grad school and transitions to faculty positions.  There are a lot of individual blogs that chronicle people’s lives and there are several group blogs, typically tied to a particular discipline or sub-field, that have branched into the business of collecting advice on different topics related to academia.  Since I haven’t found time to maintain a blogroll for this site, I’ll just highlight two of them here.  Orgtheory.net has a series called grad skool rulz that I’ve mentioned before.  They continue to add topics to the series.  Scatterplot, a group sociology blog, has a series called “ask a scatterbrain” that often includes good advice for grad students.  Two of their recent conversations that I found interesting were managing conflict and co-authoring.

Think Before You Use PowerPoint

Between the American Society of Criminology meeting and end-of-semester student presentations, I get burned out on PowerPoint by this time of year.  I end my Responsible Use of Information in Criminal Justice course with a lecture on the visual presentation of information and I rely heavily on Edward Tufte’s work, particularly his essay on The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.  I really think this essay should be required reading for all graduate students.  Getting professionals to stop using PowerPoint is probably a futile endeavor, and that’s not really my goal since I also use PowerPoint for teaching and presentations.  Instead I’m simply trying to get students to think critically about how they present information regardless of the format and to discourage them from trying to get technology to do the work for them.  Today I stumbled upon a new and fun example of how PowerPoint is misused.  It’s a slideshow called Death by PowerPoint available at the Slideshare site.

Effective Conference Presentations

While Edward Tufte has been critical of the effectiveness of PowerPoint as a communication tool for quite a while, PowerPoint is still the norm at most professional meetings and most presenters do not use it judiciously.  Recently there have been some articles in the American Sociological Association’s newsletter, Footnotes, to encourage presenters to think more carefully about how they present complicated research in a short time period and how they could use PowerPoint more effectively.

 Dean Harper, How Not to Make a Presentation

Jill Campbell, For Conference Presentations, Less Is More