Tuesday, August 19th 2014
I’m PMSing at The Daily Beast
I wrote a thing. You should read the thing.
PMS Won’t Ruin Your Marriage, The Daily Beast
Friday, February 28th 2014
If You Want Normative Reporting, Reporting Needs to be Independent and Anonymous
Please forgive me for the quickie posts this week. I have bigger ones planned for the next two weeks.
I don’t have time to fully unpack this, but I think the Science Online community could stand to read this article (and the associated links therein that tell the backstory):
On Prosecutors Having Survivors of Assault Arrested: It’s Not a Zero-Sum Game
The folks at #scio14 are having hushed conversation after hushed conversation about Bora and our community more broadly. I’m also hearing that there are explicit conversations about harassment policies, appropriate conduct, boundaries, and reporting. I just want to remind everyone that reporting harassment isn’t a chicken and egg issue where we can endlessly discuss which comes first: creating the supportive environment that enables reporting, or reporting itself. Yes, there will always be some folks who will decide to report in the face of all sorts of personal, career, and physical risks. But moving towards a workplace culture where reporting is normative behavior cannot happen before the workplace has safer ways of reporting and zero tolerance for bad behavior.
So I would encourage those of you at #scio14 this week to make your conversations less hushed, and to start to talk about how one might create an independent, anonymous reporting mechanism for harassment. Some of the encouragement I am hearing that people need to report feels a little victim-blame-y. If we aren’t setting the reporting mechanism up for success we can’t expect people with the least safety and the most to lose to suck it up and tell someone when they have been harassed.
Thursday, February 27th 2014
Students Blog Evolutionary Medicine
Just wanted to draw your attention to this year’s student-run class blog for my Evolutionary Medicine class here at the University of Illinois. I am using the same assignment and rubric as last year, which is modified version of Mark Sample’s blog assignment at Profhacker (I wrote about this last year here).
Check it out and let my students know what you think of their work!
You can also check out last year’s blog, as well as the individual blogs that students wrote as part of their semester-long projects (The Daily Filling, A Little R&R, Cuisine for Comfort). This semester two Honors students will also be hosting individual blogs. Once they are up and running, I’ll share those as well.
This year instead of the 80/20 projects I am trying a class-wide problem-based learning assignment (PBL) for the second half of the semester. We are doing small group PBLs every Friday for the first half of the semester to warm up to the process.
