Maybe this explains Econ 490 from the students perspective.
Monday, February 20, 2017
Sunday, January 8, 2017
Inner Speech - An Interesting Read
The piece linked below is different yet perhaps still relevant to our class. If you have internal conversations on a regular basis, then our in class conversations might have offered a model for that. The second half of the piece, on hearing voices, is not so relevant but it is interesting to read about. I wonder though, when we are dreaming if we hear voices that way and it is entirely normal.
You also might enjoy reading the original story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, by James Thurber, which to my knowledge is the first piece to characterize daydreaming. The piece was written in 1939, yet the story still holds up.
Tuesday, January 3, 2017
Last Reminder - Discussion Group
So far there are two students who have indicated interest. It really would be good to have at least three students, so I am asking about this one more time. The original message is here. Thanks.
Some Sort of Spiritual Alternative to Being Online
When I was an undergrad at Cornell, there were quite a few weekends in the fall and the spring where we'd go traipsing around in the woods for a few hours, often at a park called Buttermilk Falls. It seemed like a good thing to do. Later when I was a grad student at Northwestern, I would sometimes sit on the rocks (artificial landfill) and stare at Lake Michigan, letting the view dominate my thoughts.
I wonder, do Illinois students do something like that now and, if so, what do students do to clear their heads? This question was motivated by reading the piece linked below by Andrew Sullivan, a former uber blogger, very well published, who had a breakdown from being online all the time. He ultimately recovered but now seems to be reverting to his old ways. It's a long read, but interesting, at least it was to me.
I wonder, do Illinois students do something like that now and, if so, what do students do to clear their heads? This question was motivated by reading the piece linked below by Andrew Sullivan, a former uber blogger, very well published, who had a breakdown from being online all the time. He ultimately recovered but now seems to be reverting to his old ways. It's a long read, but interesting, at least it was to me.
Saturday, December 31, 2016
One last post before the New Year
This is an interesting read about the philosophy of emotions. It might aid some of your own inner reflection as well as to help you make new year's resolutions that have been to you.
Monday, December 26, 2016
Mindfulness Again
This piece appeared in the Sunday NY Times Week in Review, a reposting of something from four years earlier. I thought you might find it interesting. I hope your vacation has been relaxing. I know that for me it has taken more than a week to unwind.
Friday, December 23, 2016
Compulsory Viewing When I Was A Kid
If you've never seen this before, you might be amused by it, even though the image quality is a bit shaky. I saw that it was colorized and that version might be easier to view, but I didn't see a free version of that. The March of the Wooden Soldiers, which happens right at the end is what people remember of this movie.
Friday, December 16, 2016
Reminder - Discussion Group
There is definitely no obligation for you to do this, but if you are interested in participating in the discussion group please let me know. The original message is here. Thanks.
Take Aways
This is only a little bit related to the course. Mainly it is just some suggestions of interesting reads, none of which are very recent, that you might peruse over the break or next semester for your own entertainment and edification.
- Bolman and Deal Part 2 - the second half of the book, which we didn't cover at all, is worth a read in its own. It takes the four frames developed in the first half and recasts them in a leadership setting. You might enjoy that.
- We did not talk at all about executive pay, which really is a big topic. Since the subject matter gets more than a mention by the a current Nobel Prize Winner in Economics, Bengt Holmstrom, I thought this might be interesting for you to look at. Note in the second half of the piece the issue on whether the compensation must depend only on verifiable performance. We did talk about that in considering the principal-agent model.
- This piece called Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead? is from a few years ago and is by Adam Grant, a psychologist at Wharton (the business school at U Penn). The giving he talks about is more random acts of kindness than it is where a quid pro quo is expected. You might try some of your own random acts of kindness over the break - with your friends or your family. See how they react, particularly whether you surprise them with your kindness. A positive reaction (as opposed to a gift in return) may encourage you to try it again.
- This piece called The Bell Curve is one I really like. It by Atul Gawande, a MacArthur Genius Award winner and a prolific author (plus he is a very well known M.D.). It is about what determines excellence when excellence can be measures, in this case in the treatment of cystic fibrosis. It might interest you to to see excellence cast this way, as it probably defies many of the stereotypes you have for it.
- This one called The Expert Mind mind and should appeal to those students in the class who have a chess interest (I know there are a few of you), and other students as well. It is about how experts differ from novices in their thinking and what it takes to become expert. Chess is used as means to illustrate the more general issues.
Course Grades Posted Later This Afternoon
I am waiting on a student who had a conflict and couldn't take the final quiz the normal way. I would like to post these all at one time.
Tuesday, December 13, 2016
Reminder - Final Quiz becomes available at 11 AM tomorrow
And it will run till 11 PM Thursday night. My intention is to post final grades in Moodle and In Banner on Friday. I will make another announcement then when it is done.
Monday, December 12, 2016
Bah, Humbug. Scrooge was an economist!
For your amusement only. I thought you'd find the title of this piece interesting. There is an economics paper published in the American Economic Review (the top journal in the U.S.) back in 1993 that got all of this started. You can find the paper here.
Class Projects
While I am still waiting on some of these to come in, I uploaded the virtual elevator speeches I have received and also posted grades for those teams. Below I want to make several more in depth comments about the projects.
About the Grading
The grading was pretty generous in my view. The underlying philosophy with this exercise in particular but also with much of the rest of the course is that this is learning as intermediate product. In other words, perhaps what you did here can be of use to you to learn something else in the future. Evaluating that is different than evaluating final product (which is sometimes called mastery learning). None of you have yet mastered the papers you were reviewing. With intermediate products in learning, the mistakes can be more useful than something polished. I really didn't want to penalize mistakes made in earnest. So the grades were high with very little variation from one team to the next.
About the Virtual Elevator Speeches
If you haven't heard of this book before, you might look at Made to Stick. There are also a variety of online presentations under that title that you might view. It gives you a sense of what your job is as presenter. Surprisingly, you don't present the paper. Instead, you present connections that your audience might make to the paper. This is a different task. It is hard enough when you know the audience. In this case, your audience was supposed to be students who might take the course in the future. If I were in your shoes, I would have tried to envision myself (as student) as the audience but without having read the paper first.
One other general point. If you haven't read the children's story The Princess and the Pea you should. It is not very long and conveys an important point. While this presentation was for class only, you can think of it as practice for presentations you will make in the future, possibly where you are a subordinate presenting to upper management. In that case, it is good to think of upper management as like the princess in the story. The least little thing might bother them. You should avoid that if at all possible. One thing that many presentations did is to end abruptly before the music finished. That's the sort of thing you should avoid.
Now some more specific comments. When you write a white paper you typically produce an Executive Summary to go along with it. That is one or at most two pages which gives an overview of the full white paper. Many people read only the executive summary. Or they read that and then a chunk of the white paper on the topic they are interested in.
However, an executive summary is different from a presentation on the paper. Some of your presentations were really more like executive summaries. You didn't trust that the images could communicate the ideas. So you put in a lot of text. But that is because you were presenting the paper rather than the connections the audience should make.
The most common single error in a presentation made by a subordinate to the bigwigs is to give too much information early on. The reason for the error is that the presenter is nervous and wants to establish that he or she is qualified to make the presentation. But the bigwigs are entirely uninterested in that. Their time is scarce. Can they get their hooks into the idea immediately or not? If you don't grab them right off the bat, they are lost.
Some groups did have an image reliant presentation but I found the image selection challenging - meaning I wasn't sure what message I should be drawing from the image. If the audience is confused, it is possible they will tune out before they can catch onto what is being presented. Group C did a nice job with image selection. Their presentation is worth looking at. It really is very simple. That was the goal.
About the Papers
This is where the bulk of the work was and for most of you I'm sure this was a stretch. What is most interesting to me is how much overlap there was from one team's paper to the next, although the papers under review were quite varied. What this showed me is that sometimes you can learn a broad topic by studying something in a bit of depth that is on a particular aspect of the topic. The particular gets connected to the general.
I am guessing that for most of you reading the paper you reviewed was a challenge and it is probably the case that you won't be reading Econ journal articles in the future, though you might read pieces from Harvard Business Review or other Business Reviews as you try to advance through your career - a much cheaper way to learn management thinking than to pay for an MBA. (I'm not knocking the formal business training, just saying that you can do your own professional development by reading published work on this stuff.)
The other part of the exercise that you probably won't get again anytime soon is to have someone edit your first drafts for you. If you do end up in a job where writing a white paper happens now and then, that editing function becomes increasingly important. If you can learn to be a good reader that way and give feedback to others about their drafts, you will be valued for that. And if you can't do it, it's good for you to know somebody who can.
You see a lot of bulleted lists out there nowadays, a trend I find regrettable, because then the people generating the lists don't have to connect the ideas into a narrative. That is left for the audience to do. Part of the goal behind the paper is for you to understand that the authors really should be the ones who do that, but it is a lot of work. We easily could have had still one more round of revisions, except for the end of the semester. Let's be thankful for that.
About the Grading
The grading was pretty generous in my view. The underlying philosophy with this exercise in particular but also with much of the rest of the course is that this is learning as intermediate product. In other words, perhaps what you did here can be of use to you to learn something else in the future. Evaluating that is different than evaluating final product (which is sometimes called mastery learning). None of you have yet mastered the papers you were reviewing. With intermediate products in learning, the mistakes can be more useful than something polished. I really didn't want to penalize mistakes made in earnest. So the grades were high with very little variation from one team to the next.
About the Virtual Elevator Speeches
If you haven't heard of this book before, you might look at Made to Stick. There are also a variety of online presentations under that title that you might view. It gives you a sense of what your job is as presenter. Surprisingly, you don't present the paper. Instead, you present connections that your audience might make to the paper. This is a different task. It is hard enough when you know the audience. In this case, your audience was supposed to be students who might take the course in the future. If I were in your shoes, I would have tried to envision myself (as student) as the audience but without having read the paper first.
One other general point. If you haven't read the children's story The Princess and the Pea you should. It is not very long and conveys an important point. While this presentation was for class only, you can think of it as practice for presentations you will make in the future, possibly where you are a subordinate presenting to upper management. In that case, it is good to think of upper management as like the princess in the story. The least little thing might bother them. You should avoid that if at all possible. One thing that many presentations did is to end abruptly before the music finished. That's the sort of thing you should avoid.
Now some more specific comments. When you write a white paper you typically produce an Executive Summary to go along with it. That is one or at most two pages which gives an overview of the full white paper. Many people read only the executive summary. Or they read that and then a chunk of the white paper on the topic they are interested in.
However, an executive summary is different from a presentation on the paper. Some of your presentations were really more like executive summaries. You didn't trust that the images could communicate the ideas. So you put in a lot of text. But that is because you were presenting the paper rather than the connections the audience should make.
The most common single error in a presentation made by a subordinate to the bigwigs is to give too much information early on. The reason for the error is that the presenter is nervous and wants to establish that he or she is qualified to make the presentation. But the bigwigs are entirely uninterested in that. Their time is scarce. Can they get their hooks into the idea immediately or not? If you don't grab them right off the bat, they are lost.
Some groups did have an image reliant presentation but I found the image selection challenging - meaning I wasn't sure what message I should be drawing from the image. If the audience is confused, it is possible they will tune out before they can catch onto what is being presented. Group C did a nice job with image selection. Their presentation is worth looking at. It really is very simple. That was the goal.
About the Papers
This is where the bulk of the work was and for most of you I'm sure this was a stretch. What is most interesting to me is how much overlap there was from one team's paper to the next, although the papers under review were quite varied. What this showed me is that sometimes you can learn a broad topic by studying something in a bit of depth that is on a particular aspect of the topic. The particular gets connected to the general.
I am guessing that for most of you reading the paper you reviewed was a challenge and it is probably the case that you won't be reading Econ journal articles in the future, though you might read pieces from Harvard Business Review or other Business Reviews as you try to advance through your career - a much cheaper way to learn management thinking than to pay for an MBA. (I'm not knocking the formal business training, just saying that you can do your own professional development by reading published work on this stuff.)
The other part of the exercise that you probably won't get again anytime soon is to have someone edit your first drafts for you. If you do end up in a job where writing a white paper happens now and then, that editing function becomes increasingly important. If you can learn to be a good reader that way and give feedback to others about their drafts, you will be valued for that. And if you can't do it, it's good for you to know somebody who can.
You see a lot of bulleted lists out there nowadays, a trend I find regrettable, because then the people generating the lists don't have to connect the ideas into a narrative. That is left for the audience to do. Part of the goal behind the paper is for you to understand that the authors really should be the ones who do that, but it is a lot of work. We easily could have had still one more round of revisions, except for the end of the semester. Let's be thankful for that.
Saturday, December 10, 2016
Grade for Comments Second Half have been uploaded
I will grade the project tomorrow and see if I can get the final quiz into Moodle (making sure it is not invisible). I will also post the elevator speeches to Moodle tomorrow. For those of you who have still to submit your elevator speech, I you can get it to me by then.
Thanks.
Thanks.
Grades for Blog Posts - Second Half Now Posted in Moodle
I need to take a break now. I will get to the grading the comments after that. I would expect those to be posted by late afternoon or early evening.
Friday, December 9, 2016
Comments Matrix/Moral Hazard with Music Selection
I have just uploaded the Comment Matrix - Second Half into Moodle. Here I would like to explain what is there.
1. For each post the alias is credited with a comment if that person made a comment. Two or more comments don't give any more intensity in the recording. Neither does a very long comment. When I get to the qualitative assessment of the comments, which I still must do, it might come into play then.
2. For the last post I only counted the comment by the author of the post. I did previously announce this. One of my broader issues with the class is knowing if an intended message gets through. Often it seemed it didn't.
3. There are aggregates, by post and by alias. Unlike the last time where I did those manually, this time I used formulas in Excel to do the counting. While mistakes are still possible, surely that makes them less likely.
* * * * *
The virtual elevator speeches have been trickling in. I launch each one to see whether it will play. So I get a sense of the music chosen. In all cases the music appeals to me. Why is that? These pieces were supposed to be for students like you who were getting exposed to the subject matter for the first time. Do you actually listen to classical music and/or jazz?
I won't hold it against you. I'm just noting it here. This is another one of those things that didn't happen last year.
Incidentally, another of those things is that the teams actually never chose a name. They stayed with their letter only. I wonder if that impacted team performance in any way.
1. For each post the alias is credited with a comment if that person made a comment. Two or more comments don't give any more intensity in the recording. Neither does a very long comment. When I get to the qualitative assessment of the comments, which I still must do, it might come into play then.
2. For the last post I only counted the comment by the author of the post. I did previously announce this. One of my broader issues with the class is knowing if an intended message gets through. Often it seemed it didn't.
3. There are aggregates, by post and by alias. Unlike the last time where I did those manually, this time I used formulas in Excel to do the counting. While mistakes are still possible, surely that makes them less likely.
* * * * *
The virtual elevator speeches have been trickling in. I launch each one to see whether it will play. So I get a sense of the music chosen. In all cases the music appeals to me. Why is that? These pieces were supposed to be for students like you who were getting exposed to the subject matter for the first time. Do you actually listen to classical music and/or jazz?
I won't hold it against you. I'm just noting it here. This is another one of those things that didn't happen last year.
Incidentally, another of those things is that the teams actually never chose a name. They stayed with their letter only. I wonder if that impacted team performance in any way.
Thursday, December 8, 2016
Update on Where I Am with the Grading
There is a lot to track! I've posted the last Excel homework on the Shapiro-Stiglitz model and the last two blog posts. I am in the process of tracking comments and reading through them (two separate activities). I am not quite halfway there. This is going slow, plus my arthritis is acting up doing this (I wonder why) so I need to take regular breaks.
The upshot is that I probably won't have the grades for Blog Posts and Comments Second half till Saturday. I will let you know that as soon as those are posted. I will get to the projects immediately after that. The virtual elevator speeches have been coming in, but some are still pending.
Good luck on your finals.
The upshot is that I probably won't have the grades for Blog Posts and Comments Second half till Saturday. I will let you know that as soon as those are posted. I will get to the projects immediately after that. The virtual elevator speeches have been coming in, but some are still pending.
Good luck on your finals.
Wednesday, December 7, 2016
A little humor and....
.... if you've never seen it before an essential part of anyone's education about American culture.
Tuesday, December 6, 2016
What I forgot to say in class this morning.
In doing our review I failed to mention an idea I am toying with - replacing either one of the live class sessions or perhaps both with mandatory office hours. Students would be put into groups of 3 or 4 and have a 20 minutes session scheduled during regular class time. Since the class meets for 80 minutes, I could do 4 such sessions a day.
In this way I'd hope to get everyone in the group to chime in. And in that setting, as distinct from the full class, I wouldn't feel reluctant to call on you if you weren't otherwise participating in the discussion.
The big deal for me is that I haven't worked through how to keep these conversations somewhat novel. If I can somehow figure out how to do that, then this would work for me. Focusing on the blog posts of the particular group members might do the trick.
In any event, I am toying with this. If you have some thoughts on the matter, you might make a comment here, or send me an email about it.
In this way I'd hope to get everyone in the group to chime in. And in that setting, as distinct from the full class, I wouldn't feel reluctant to call on you if you weren't otherwise participating in the discussion.
The big deal for me is that I haven't worked through how to keep these conversations somewhat novel. If I can somehow figure out how to do that, then this would work for me. Focusing on the blog posts of the particular group members might do the trick.
In any event, I am toying with this. If you have some thoughts on the matter, you might make a comment here, or send me an email about it.
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