Tweeting Creativity

Discovery, Creativity and Serendipity in chemical research – that’s the topic in my Research Methods classes (I teach two sections) this past week. The students read interviews with famous chemists, and we talked about what we found surprising in the backgrounds, motivations and stories of these individuals. Following the lead of my colleague who taught the class last year, I have been trying to incorporate a “creativity stoker” in each class session. These are fun ten-minute activities to help the students get their creativity juices going.

The students had just been assigned their working groups for the semester. They will put together an original research proposal attempting to answer one aspect of a “Big Unsolved Problem” in chemistry. For their first activity as a team, so they could get to know each other and brainstorm, I used an exercise that my colleague had developed. The assignment: Come up with tweets to describe discovery, creativity and serendipity. Here are the three prompts.

·      Define “Discovery” in scientific research in under 140 characters.

·      Define “Creativity” in scientific research in under 140 characters.

·      Define “Serendipity” in scientific research in under 140 characters.

The team that I thought did the best job came up with these three.

·      Discovery: Gathering and uncovering of new knowledge and applications on topics of interest using the scientific method

·      Creativity: Thinking outside the box and making old things new, applying them to pursue innovative ideas

·      Serendipity: Happy accident, finding something by chance. Making your own luck by being open to opportunities, identifying them and acting on them.

From the other teams, here are three others that I thought were fun and clever:

·      Discovery: Diminishment of the unknown through exploration which generates new ideas.

·      Creativity: Coloring outside the molecule. #creative

·      Serendipity: Discovering creativity through chance

In this last one, the group managed to use “discover” and “creativity” in their definition of serendipity, which I thought was neat.

Students asked me if I had a Twitter account. I don’t. They said I should go make one. I don’t know about this and I don’t see myself as a tweeter even though I’ve been reading about the different uses of tweeting in academic circles. I think I prefer blogging over tweeting. It forces me to write something a little longer, and hopefully a piece that’s more thoughtful. Since one of the reasons for blogging was to improve my writing, I was rather pleased by the referee reports I received last week for my most recent manuscript. Both reviewers commented that the paper was clearly written. Both also recommended minor revisions with no further review needed so I was able to make the edits, resubmit, and it was accepted. A good way to end the month of September!

Fifteen Minutes Before Class

I have been haphazard about trying the Five Minutes Before Class suggestions by James Lang. However, this semester I have the pleasure of having no class scheduled in the classroom right before my class, so I’ve been able to go in and set up at least 15 minutes early. My general chemistry class this semester is MWF at 8am, i.e., the first class of the day. My two sections of Research Methods are in the middle of the day but they are not in the science building (where classroom space is tight and classes are scheduled to the brim), and it so happens there is no class meeting the period before.

Normally there would be 10 minutes in between class periods, but it’s always tight. A few students always come up to the instructor right after class ends with questions. Then depending on the setup of the previous instructor, the next person may have to set up the audiovisual or a demo or something else. This might leave practically no time to chat with students. So having a free classroom and the leisure to set up ahead of time this semester has allowed me to take advantage of being available and unhurried when the first student walks into the classroom. In very rare cases a student will beat me to class, but it’s not common for a student to show up 15-20 minutes before class starts.

I’ve only just finished Week 3 but I already feel that I’ve built up a good rapport with students in all three of my classes. I managed to learn all their names sometime in Week 2 because these were smaller classes, but I used learning their names as they walked in as an excuse for a little chitchat. Interestingly, I’ve noticed that when class ends, quite a number of students say “thank you” and “have a good day” on their way out. It could be I have super-polite and friendly students this semester, but maybe the before class greetings have somehow extended to after class greetings. This happens even when my back is turned, because I’m quickly erasing the whiteboard so the next instructor can set up as quickly as possible.

One limitation is that the students who come to class early tend to be the same ones who I chat with at the beginning of class. Students coming from another class will typically make it on the dot, i.e., not early. For the 8am class, it can be a challenge for some of the students to get in early. Half of the class makes it in with at least five minutes to spare – they’re the “morning” people. (Yes, I did ask the students last week how many of them considered themselves morning people. I then talked a little bit about data from sleep studies on how your wake-up time varies over age.) I do try to make an extra effort to chat with students who don’t come in early, and with the quieter and more introverted students at other times (e.g. during in-class group work). I think this helps subsequent class discussion. Except maybe at 8am, when everyone is sleepy, myself included since I’m not a morning person. It’s still challenging to get discussion going about chemistry.

It’s been an excellent three weeks so far on the teaching front. I hope I can keep this up for the rest of the semester and take advantage of my fifteen minutes before class!

Cognitive Load Theory: A Primer

The Centre for Education Statistics & Evaluation at the New South Wales (Australia) Department of Education recently released a short primer summarizing Cognitive Load Theory. Here’s a link to the website with the document. The text itself is a short, readable, seven pages and hits the main points in what I think is a fair and balanced summary.

Cognitive Load Theory came out from the work of John Sweller. He has also written a comprehensive book, or you could consult the creative visual summary of each chapter by Oliver Calgiol at this blog. I’ve blogged about this particularly where it pertains to the learning of chemistry. A one-sentence summary can be found in the second paragraph of the primer: “Research in cognitive load theory demonstrates that instructional techniques are most effective when they are designed to accord with how human brains learn and use knowledge.”

The two foundational principles of cognitive load theory are: (1) “there is a limit to how much new information the human brain can process at one time”, and (2) “there are no known limits to how much stored information can be processed at one time.” The key distinction is new versus stored information, or using working memory versus accessing long-term memory. Thus learning is a process of turning new things processed in working memory into schemas that “place” this new information in long-term storage in a way that it can be retrieved for continued learning to take place – building one block on top of another in a sense. However the limits of working memory mean that it can be overloaded, resulting in non-learning or worse, mis-learning.

There are three types of “loads” contributing to the overall cognitive load: intrinsic, extraneous and germane. Intrinsic load is “the inherent complexity of the material and the prior knowledge of the learner”. Extraneous load is “poorly designed instruction that does not facilitate appropriate schema construction” while germane load is its opposite. The way this translates into effective teaching is that at the introductory level teaching should be explicit and less open-ended “discovery”, but as the learner builds more complex schema, more student independence is built into the assignments. There is an excellent article by Paul Kirschner, mentioned in a previous blog post, discussing the confusion facing educators in the sciences between pedagogy and epistemology – confusing teaching science by inquiry versus teaching science as inquiry.

Several examples of research are provided that feed into recommendations for the classroom. But the authors are careful to discuss the relevance and limitations of their research in the final section of the primer. “Cognitive load theory is particularly relevant to teaching novice learners in so-called ‘technical’ domains such as mathematics, science and technology… Far less research has been done on whether [it] is effective for teaching in less technical, or more creative subjects areas – such as literature, history, art and other humanities subjects.” In addition, “the literature on cognitive load theory is also silent on how other factors besides cognitive load [such as learner motivation] might influence the effectiveness of learning.” But it’s an excellent primer overall, and well-worth the seven minutes it will take you to read it.

Priority Disputes in Science: Element Version

I have been reading A Tale of Seven Elements by Eric Scerri. The book discusses the discovery of the remaining seven elements “lighter” than uranium in the Periodic Table following Henry Moseley’s key finding in 1913 that the elements should be ordered according to atomic number rather than mass. Coincidentally, we discussed key experiments on the structure of the atom, atomic numbers, mass numbers and isotopes in my General Chemistry class on Monday morning.

The seven elements in the order they were discovered between 1917 and 1945 are protactinium (#91), hafnium (#84), rhenium (#100), technetium (#43), francium (#87), astatine (#85) and promethium (#61). The spirit of nationalism in between two world wars contributed to some of the rivalry and bitter disputes over these discoveries. Scientists can be rather passionate when it comes to intellectual property. Summarizing the work of sociologist Robert Merton, Scerri writes: “[In discussing] scientific knowledge as a form of property… the protagonists in a [commercial] dispute can often resolve their differences because there is money to made from the property in question. But in academic life a discovery leads to intellectual property, which is seldom commercially exploitable [at least prior to Merton’s writing in 1957]. As a result, the only thing that the scientist can benefit from… is the fame from having discovered the knowledge. Small wonder then that scientists will fight so ferociously to retain the only benefits that might come from their hard-won intellectual property.”

In the book’s introduction, Scerri puts this issue of priority disputes front and center of his book in a section titled “The Nature of Science and Priority Disputes”. Here is an excerpt from the first few paragraphs that convey the gist:

“Whereas theories and concepts that appear in textbooks are presented as being fully formed, real science is in a constant state of flux. When science is reported in the press, one seldom hears of the errors that led up to a discovery. In fact, actual science is full of mistakes and wrong turns… The best we can hope for is an approach to the truth, perhaps in an incremental fashion, meaning that current science is necessarily incorrect. To better understand science is to face up to the historical twists and turns and the mistakes. Moreover, the practice of science often involves struggles between individuals or teams of scientists trying to establish priority, not because scientists are egotists, although some are, but because scientific society rewards the winners who can boldly assert their claims.”

As he goes through each of the seven elements, Scerri pays particular attention to the disputes of competing individuals and groups. What it means to “discover” an element is not so straightforward. Is finding the element in a compound sufficient? Or must it be isolated as the pure element? If so, how much? Must the isotope be stable or relatively long-lived? Interestingly, there was a time when “artificially” produced isotopes had lower priority over “natural” discoveries, the latter often coming from the painstaking grinding up of ores and subjecting them to chemical separation techniques. While the synthesis of urea by Fredrich Wohler in 1873 is the archetypical example blurring the demarcation of organic and non-organic chemistry, it was only in 1947 when Fritz Paneth declared that the “chemist no longer [should] discrimate between natural and artificial elements”. He also laid out the rules for assigning names and symbols, as summarized by Scerri:

“(1) The right to name an element should go to the first to give definitive proof of the existence of one of its isotopes. (2) In deciding the priority of the discovery, there should be no discrimination between naturally occurring and artificially produced isotopes. (3) If a claim to such a discovery has been accepted in the past, but refuted in later research, the name given should be deleted and replaced by one chosen by the real discoverer.”

Scerri’s vignettes are interesting, but the narrative as a whole feels like it could have used more editing. It is choppy in some areas and repeats itself, sort of like my PhD thesis, which consisted of trying to find prose to connect a bunch of papers I “pasted” together. Hopefully my writing has improved since then. I enjoyed Scerri’s earlier book The Periodic Table: Its story and its significance. A Tale of Seven Elements is his follow-up, but the earlier book is better written in my opinion. But the stories move briskly and the writing feels aimed at a more general audience; the earlier book was more dense and geared towards readers with some background in history and philosophy of science.

While I had bits and pieces of knowledge about the discovery of some of the seven elements, the book helped bring these different threads together. I did not know much about hafnium (#72) so almost all of it was new and interesting. The chapter on technetium (#43) included a vignette to the “natural” Oklo reactor; this was really interesting as I was unaware of it even though the discovery was back in 1972. In any case, if you’re interested in the discovery stories of these seven elements and priority disputes, Scerri’s book is a nice quick read.

Honors Chemistry Imbalance

First week of classes: My first semester Honors General Chemistry (G-Chem 1) class is 85% women. Last year, my second semester Honors General Chemistry (G-Chem 2) class was also 85% women. I thought it was just a statistical blip given the smaller class sizes of the Honors section, but perhaps this is the new normal for the gender imbalance. Over the years I’ve regularly taught in the Honors program (although not every year) and the classes have been typically two-thirds women and on occasion it can reach closer to three quarters.

Where have all the men gone? I’m not sure. Are they picking “easier” majors? Are they on average less willing to work as hard as the women academically, and staying away from the more challenging classes and programs? Chemistry and Biochemistry, the two majors offered by my department are among the most challenging majors in my college. There’s just a lot of intensive lab-work and it is time-consuming, although the students learn a lot and are well-prepared for future careers in science. (In landing biotech and pharma industry jobs, our students tend to beat out the local competition – the more research-intensive universities in the area – simply because our students spend more time in lab and are better trained on average.)

On the first day of class, all the men opted to sit in the back row while the women mostly occupied the front seats. (None of the women sat in the back row.) In the second class, one of the men moved up. My writing on the board tends to be small. (I warn the students ahead of time on the first day.) Eventually almost everyone tends to move up if the room isn’t completely full. That being said, the men were vocal participating in class discussion from the back row, so this group was certainly engaged in the material. There are some interesting gender dynamics in the classroom, as discussed by Jay Howard in his excellent book Discussion in the College Classroom. (I blogged about one aspect of the book here.)

Our first week was spent on concepts familiar to most of the students since they’ve all taken at least one chemistry course in high school (and likely did well, otherwise they wouldn’t be in the Honors program). We moved quickly through the basics, and I had fun the first day of class bringing the Greek philosophers, the alchemists, and early ideas of the atomic theory. On the second day we went through units, measurements and calculations. This coming week we will delve into the structure of the atom and the interaction of light and matter, so some of the material will be new and even familiar things they’ve seen will be tackled in more depth. I’m looking forward to showcasing my chosen theme for G-Chem 1 this year: “Hidden in Plain Sight: Elucidating the Secret Structure of Matter”!

My other class, Research Methods, is closer to two-thirds women, typical of the norm I’ve encountered in my classes. It is not an Honors section and is required of all majors in my department. Due to an influx of majors in recent years, my department has made a major overhaul to the course streamlining it to reduce the workload (it’s now a half-class for the students) and allowing us to accommodate the larger numbers. This is my first time in the new format, but I’m looking forward to it. The final project of the class is to write a research proposal in chemistry or biochemistry that is peer reviewed. But along the way we have prepared activities along the way to get the students’ creative juices flowing. My colleague calls them “creativity stokers”. I did my first two this week and they both went well and generated lots of class discussion. Looking forward to the coming week!

Fall, Mortality and the Machine

When I was twelve years old, I was given J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and a box set of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Growing up without distractions such as TV, I devoured books. We didn’t go to the city library often (it was further away and a hassle to get to) so I read books multiple times. Lord of the Rings is probably my most-read book of all-time. It was only 3-5 years later that I finally had access to a copy of The Silmarillion, and yes, I also read it multiple times.

Adult life interrupted all that free time reading. The last time I re-read Lord of the Rings was maybe 4-5 years ago, and even further back for The Silmarillion (I don’t actually remember how long ago). The old copies of these books have pretty much fallen apart. About 15 years ago, I bought a new version (second edition) of The Silmarillion (cover pictured below) along with the matching boxed set of Lord of the Rings. I finally got around to re-reading The Silmarillion this week. (Yes, it is the first week of classes, and of my summer goals that went unfulfilled.) I’m savoring it slowly, just reading a few chapters every evening.

The second edition has a Preface containing a letter written by Tolkien to his editor friend Milton Waldman. In the letter, Tolkien tries to explain the premise, context and history of the “background” to the Lord of the Rings world. The letter is actually quite long and wordy, but one section struck me. Tolkien starts the paragraph by explaining his dislike of the “conscious and intentional [use of] allegory – yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language.” In this one paragraph, he boils down The Silmarillion into the themes of “Fall, Mortality and the Machine” – the title of today’s blog post. Having just read Atul Gawande’s rather sobering Being Mortal, I was looking for some grandeur and a bit more escapist as a follow-up. Let’s just say that The Silmarillion provides all this, but is also a different kind of sobering read.

Here is an excerpt of Tolkien’s summary in the letter explaining the three themes.

“With Fall inevitably, and that motive occurs in several modes. With Mortality, especially as it affects art and the creative (or as I should say sub-creative) desire which seems to have no biological function, and to be apart from the satisfactions of plain ordinary biological life, with which, in our world, is usually at strife. This desire is at once wedded to a passionate love of the real primary world, and hence filled with the sense of mortality, and yet unsatisfied by it. It has various opportunities for ‘Fall’. It may become possessive… the subcreator wishes to be the lord of his private creation. He will rebel against the laws of the Creator – especially against mortality. Both of these (alone of together) will lead to the desire for Power, for making the will more quickly effective, and so to the Machine (or Magic)… [using] external plans or devices instead of developments of the inherent inner power or talents – or even the use of these talents with the corrupted motive of dominating: bulldozing the real world, or coercing other wills. The Machine is our more obvious modern form though more closely related to Magic than is usually recognized.”

There follows an interesting paragraph about how to think about Magic, particularly the magic of the elves and their role in sub-creation. I have been contemplating a blog post about the nature of magic in Lord of the Rings, which is of course very different from magic in the Harry Potter stories. But I should re-read the trilogy before I make that attempt. The linking of Tolkien’s exploration of sub-creative desires and what we in today’s world term ‘creativity’ is another interesting topic to explore. There is in a sense a ‘dark side’ of creativity because of the possibility of Fall and its obsession and rebellion against mortality. In The Silmarillion, mortality is a strange gift not quite understood by the Elves or the greater powers shaping the world as sub-creators, who are bound to their world – immortally, i.e., death does not remove their connection. The capital-C Creator (in addition to creating the greater powers and the Elves) creates Men with this strange gift of freedom of not being bound to the world.

The Silmarillion is actually five books in one. The first, Ainulindale, (in my opinion) is the best mythical creation story out there. If string theory turns out to be true, it seems fitting that the physical world is created from music – the vibrating of strings! Valaquenta is a short treatise about the greater powers and spirits. Quenta Silmarillion takes up the lion’s share of the book, and is the main story concerning three special jewels called the Silmarils. These first three books constitute the First Age. Highlights of the Second Age are discussed in Akallabeth, the fourth book. Finally a connection is made to the more famous of Tolkien’s book with a fifth section titled Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age.

I’m partway through Quenta Silmarillion at the moment. Wow! It’s nice to revisit this old classic.

Being Mortal

It is not often I read a book I don’t “enjoy” but I keep going all the way to the end because it forces me to be reflective and think about things I would rather avoid. Being Mortal by Atul Gawande is one of those books. Gawande is a surgeon reflecting on how the medical profession approaches situations that may well lead to end-of-life scenarios. One of the main points of the book is that the advance of medical technology has made all of us try to avoid the important conversation of mortality, and that modern (more affluent) society has oftentimes focused on “staying alive” rather than living (and dying) well.

Here’s an excerpt from the last chapter that hits many of the main points. “Technological society has forgotten what scholars called the ‘dying role’ and its importance to people as life approaches its end. People want to share memories, pass on wisdoms and keepsakes, settle relationships, establish their legacies, make peace with their God, and ensure that those who are left behind will be okay. They want to end their stories on their own terms. This role is, observers argue, among life’s most important, for both the dying and those left behind. And if it is, the way we deny people this role, out of obtuseness and neglect, is cause for everlasting shame. Over and over, we in medicine inflict deep gouges at the end of people’s live and then stand oblivious to the harm done.”

Gawande chronicles his journey thinking about this issue by reflecting on many interviews with patients, many of them ravaged by cancer, whose bodies are simply breaking down. He brings the reader into their lives and those of their family members – and the sheer difficulty many of them face is emotionally staggering. Threading through the book is the personal story of his father (also a doctor) who has the debilitating experience of aging catch up on him, like all other mortals. The book is also the reflection of a son experiencing those difficult decisions and conversations. One chapter of the book is devoted to “hard conversations” and why it is important to have them and how doctors need to consider how to approach. These are delicate and difficult, and Gawande discusses how he began to change his conversations with his own patients.

I learned a lot about nursing home, assisted-living facilities, hospice, and palliative care. There are many vignettes of people and places where living and dying well are first and foremost. These stories are encouraging, but the reader will find sobering how many places seem so much less that they could be – not because they don’t care about the patients and the ailing, but because the road is more difficult in many, many respects. Here’s an excerpt from an interview with assisted-living pioneer, Keren Wilson: “To genuinely help people with living is harder to do than to talk about… [in an] example of helping a person dress. Ideally, you let people do what they can themselves thus maintaining their capabilities and sense of independence. But… dressing somebody is easier than letting them dress themselves. It takes less time. It’s less aggravation… unless supporting people’s capabilities is made a top priority, the staff ends up dressing people like they’re rag dolls. Gradually that’s how everything begins to go. The tasks come to matter more than the people.”

That last sentence is a sober reminder not just to health-care workers but to all of us no matter what our profession. As a teacher, particularly approaching the beginning of a new semester, I have spent the last week mainly thinking about the tasks I have to do to get ready, much more so than the conversations I’m going to have with my individual students and getting to know them. When things get busy, what’s the first thing to go? It’s not the tasks. Those all still need to be done. But it gets worse if you focus mainly on measurable things such as grades, homework and test scores, etc. Gawande recognizes this in the follow-up passage to the one quoted above.

“Compounding matters, we have no good metrics for a place’s success in assisting people to live. By contrast, we have very precise ratings for health and safety. So you can guess what gets the attention from the people who run places for the elderly: whether Dad loses weight, skips his medications, or has a fall, not whether he’s lonely. Most frustrating and important, Wilson said, assisted living isn’t really built for the sake of older people so much as for the sake of their children. The children usually make the decision about where the elderly live, and you can see it in the way that places sell themselves.” This short excerpt doesn’t do justice to the thoughtful way that Wilson talks about what ideal assisted-living should look like and where it falls short, and I recommend reading the full story in Gawande’s book.

I read Being Mortal quickly, over the course of two days. So instead of having a celebratory back-to-school Labor Day weekend, I’m in a sober and reflective mood. Especially since I’ve been struggling with some chronic health issues over the summer. Things are getting better, thankfully, but I’ve noticed after passing forty that inflammations can show up unannounced and take longer to heal – and sometimes there is no apparent cause, or at least unclear to both the doctors and myself. It also made me reflect that I have not spend much time with the elderly since moving far away from home (internationally) for college and career. I grew up watching one set of grandparents ail and pass away in my own home, but I have missed many a funeral from older generations of people who were hale and healthy adults when I was a child. So it is with sobering “gladness” that I read Being Mortal. We should all be so reminded.