Asking for the “nerd topic” when introducing workshop participants to each other to foster self-disclosure to create community

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I am currently teaching a lot of workshops on higher education topics where participants (who previously didn’t know each other, or me) spend 1-1.5 days talking about topics that can feel emotional and intimate and where I want to create an environment that is open and full of trust, and where connections form that last beyond the time of the workshop and help participants build a supportive network. So a big challenge for me is to make sure that paticipants quickly feel comfortable with each other and me.

As I am not a big fan of introductory games and that sort of things, for a long time I just asked them to introduce themselves and mention the “one question they need answered at the end of the workshop to feel like their time was well invested” (way to put a lot of pressure on the instructor! But I really like that question and in any case, it’s better to know the answer than to be constantly guessing…).

For the last couple of workshops, I have added another question, and that is to ask participants to quickly introduce us to their “nerd topic”*, which we define as the topic that they like to spend their free time on, wish they could talk about at any time and with anyone, and that just makes them happy. For me, that’s obviously kitchen oceanography!

Introductions in my workshops usually work like this: I go first and introduce myself. I make sure to not talk about myself in more detail than I want them to talk about themselves and to not include a lot of orga info at this point so I am not building a hierarchy of me being the instructor who gets to talk all the time, and then them being the participants who only get to say a brief statement each when I call on them. I model the kind of introduction I am hoping for to make it clear what I am hoping for from them. Then I call on people in the order they appear on my zoom screen and they introduce themselves. (I hate the “everybody pass the word on to someone who hasn’t spoken yet!” thing because it’s hugely stressful to me and making sure I call on someone who really hasn’t spoken yet and don’t forget anyone binds all my mental capacities if I am a participant. So when I am the workshop lead, I do call people myself and check off a list who has spoken already).

Including the “nerd topic” question has worked really well for me. Firstly, I LOVE talking about kitchen oceanography, and getting to talk about it (albeit really briefly) in the beginning of a workshop (when I am usually a little stressed and flustered) makes me happy and relaxes me. My excitement for kitchen oceanography shows in the way I speak, and I get positive feedback from participants right away. Even if kitchen oceanography isn’t necessarily their cup of tea, they can relate to the fascination I feel for a specific topic that not many other people care for.

And the same happens when, one after the other, the other participants introduce themselves. Nerd topics can be anything, and in the recent workshops topics ranging from children’s books to reading about social justice, from handcrafts to gardening, from cooking beetroots with spices to taste like chocolate to fermenting all kinds of foods, from TV series to computer games, from pets to children, from dance to making music. People might not come forward with their nerdiest nerd topics or they might make them sound nerdier than they actually are (who knows?), but so far for every nerd topic, there have been nods and smiles and positive reactions in the group and it is very endearing to see people light up when they talk about their favorite things. Participants very quickly start referencing other people’s nerd topics and relating them to their own, and a feeling of shared interests (or at least shared nerdiness) and of community forms.

Since they fit so well with the content of my workshops, I like to come back to nerd topics throughout the workshops. When speaking about motivation, they are great to reflect on our own motivation (what makes you wanting to spend your Saturday afternoons and a lot of money on this specific topic?). When speaking about the importance of showing enthusiasm in teaching, they were a perfect demonstration of how people’s expressions changed from when they talked about their job title and affiliation to talking about their nerd topic. Also practicing designing intriguing questions is easier when the subject is something you are really passionate about. Nerd topics are also great as examples to discuss the difference between personal and private — sharing personal information, showing personality, is a great way to connect with other people, but it does not mean that we need to share private information, too.  And if participants are thinking about their USP when networking online, connecting their field of study with their nerd topic always adds an interesting, personal, unique touch.

Maybe “nerd topics” are especially useful for the kind of workshops I teach and not universally the best icebreaker question. In any case, for my purposes they work super well! But no matter what the nature of the workshop: Self-disclosure has been shown to lead to social validation and formation of professional relationships, both in online professional communities (Kou & Gray, 2018) and in classrooms (Goldstein & Benassi, 1994) and other settings. Listening to others disclosing information about themselves makes people like the other party better. But there is some reciprociticy in this: openness fosters openness, and as soon as the roles are reversed, the second person disclosing information can catch up on being liked, and the more is disclosed from both sides, the more the liking and other positive emotions like closeness and enjoyment grow (Sprecher et al. 2013). So maybe asking about participants’ “nerd topics” is a good icebreaker question for your classes, too?

*While I really like the longer form of the question, I’m actually not super happy with the term “nerd topic” itself. But I don’t have a good and less charged alternative. If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them!

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Goldstein, G. S., & Benassi, V. A. (1994). The relation between teacher self-disclosure and student classroom participation. Teaching of psychology, 21(4), 212-217.

Kou, Y., & Gray, C. M. (2018). ” What do you recommend a complete beginner like me to practice?” Professional Self-Disclosure in an Online Community. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 2(CSCW), 1-24.

Sprecher, S., Treger, S., & Wondra, J. D. (2013). Effects of self-disclosure role on liking, closeness, and other impressions in get-acquainted interactions. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 30(4), 497-514.

My 3 favourite podcasts on university teaching

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Thanks to Corona and my minimum of 10k steps a day, I now have a good hour every day that I increasingly often use not to quietly ponder my surroundings or catch up with friends in a phone call, but listen to podcasts. I am very selective about what I want to listen to, but here are three that I can highly recommend to anyone who is interested in university teaching, and that I feel have really given me food for thought and had a positive influence on my teaching practice. Enjoy!

Teaching in higher ed

“Teaching in higher ed” was the first podcast I started listening to regularly. And it’s also one that is getting kind of expensive because I keep ordering the books recommended on there (like “invisible learning” that I wrote about earlier, where the interview with the author was great and the book even better). Not that I regret buying any of the books, though!

The first episode I ever listened to (on “becoming a minority“) blew me away because it exposed me to a way of thinking about minorities and experiences connected to being in the majority vs the minority that was completely new to me, especially by seeing it through the eyes of someone who grew up in the majority, then moved, and then “became” a minority, so knows both sides of the coin.

The next episode (on “teaching effectively with zoom“) then provided me with great ideas right when I needed them, and the rest is history. I love how different the different episodes are, I usually feel like I have been exposed to completely new ways of thinking. I take so many actionable ideas and tricks away from it that I don’t want to imagine what my online teaching would look like without the input from this podcast!

The professor is in

“The professor is in” is a fairly new find that Steph recommended on Twitter and that I have since been binge-listening. A recurring theme there is that they have a really different view on “passion” as a driving force than I had up to that point. I was socialized in a culture where being passionate is something commendable. You should follow you passion and choose your career accordingly. Passion is what gets you out of bed in the mornings and makes you excited to run to work every day, week days and weekends. Passion is something that I have felt, and looked for and encouraged in my students. But this podcast really gave me something to think about. Because if passion is the ultimate driver, it can overshadow other important considerations. If you work because you are so passionate, it is easy to exploit you. Because how can you possibly care about wages or working hours if you are working on something you are passionate about? Which of course you are, because not being passionate is pretty much the worst that someone can be. But if passion is the driving force and if you are only passionate enough, you will surely succeed, that also makes failure an individual failure rather than maybe an issue within the system or just a case of wrong time wrong place. It builds up the illusion that passion is all you should ever want or need. And apparently it plays a big role in hiring processes and counts very much just to claim to “be passionate”! It gives you the competitive edge and people are excitedly looking forward to working with you (but they do not give you a higher salary). Many of the recent episodes focus or at least touch on this topic (and I haven’t gotten very far back yet to say anything about the older episodes), but definitely check out this podcast if these ideas are intriguing to you!

Tea for teaching

I haven’t listened to “Tea for teaching” as regularly as to the other two, but I think that’s mainly because the lengths of the episodes don’t fit as well with the walking routine as for the other two podcasts. My first episode there (and the one that made me subscribe) was on “gender and groups“, a conversation about a recent study that showed that in a setting where women are the minority when planning small group work, spreading them out over as many groups as possible is actually doing them a disservice. For the women, it is better to be the majority in the groups they are in (and then just not represented at all in others). Interestingly, being in the majority is good for the women, being in the minority doesn’t have a harmful effect on the men, so there seems to be no downside to just implement this going forward!

And then today, I listened to an episode on “engaging students“, where students were included in a project to figure out how they actually like being engaged in class, and asked for the advice they would give their teachers. While there wasn’t a big newsflash happening for me, it was still very interesting to be reminded of how important it is to learn student names (or even just call them by their name that you read off of zoom or a name tent — it’s the intent that matters), and similar small-ish hacks.

So there you have them — my three favourite podcasts on university teaching! Any other related podcasts that you would recommend?

Baby geese making waves <3

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At the moment, I am doing almost daily trips to check up on the baby geese because they are just sooo cute! And growing up so quickly! Their waves are getting a lot better, too.

There are two families, one with four and one with three babies. Looks like they are all sitting on an invisible starting line, about to start a race, doesn’t it? :-D

When you meet a hard boundary, the reflection starts

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When I look at the picture above, I see basically three different zones on the surface of the lake.

The yellow zone, which is under the direct influence of the wind, where the water is full of small waves, and then two other zones.

In the red zone, the water isn’t under direct influence of the wind any more, we see clear, parallel wave crests propagating towards the shore. I’ve marked some of them below.

While they are still to the left of the wooden edge, not much happens. But once they hit the edge, we enter the “green zone”: The incoming wave crests get reflected at the wooden edge. They start propagating out onto the lake, getting longe and longer over time, while the red wave crests continue running further and further into the green zone, so we get interference between the incoming and reflected wave crests. Pretty cool! :)

All the things too investigate

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Sometimes it’s not the prettiest wave watching pics that we can think about the most.

Here, I really like how the petals that blew from the trees surrounding the lake accumulated in this spot, and how they accumulated in different bands. Do the broader white bands show strong wind events when many petals were blown off the trees? Do changes in individual bands’ widths indicate that the wind direction changed? What’s all the yucky brown stuff in between the petals?

Also for those of you who are really curious, I guess you could calculate when that picture was taken if you knew my height (or my height, if I told you when I took the picture :-))

Rotating foam disk

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So you thought exciting wave watching can only happen near the ocean? That is so not true!

Last weekend, for example, I spotted the round foam patch just downstream of that little weir. Further downstream, the foam acted kinda like a flow tracer, but what was going on with that round patch?

Turns out it’s spinning around itself as one side is continuously driven by the current! And on the other side the water is just recirculating. Btw, can you spot the recirculation cell on the other side of the main current? Seems to be where most of the foam that ends up downstream enters from!

Below is a timelapse:

This made me very happy for a very long time, even though I had to balance in a very uncomfortable position to capture this movie! Totally worth it! :)

My wave watching picture book for kids is out!

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A wave watching book for beginners and those who appreciate the art and science of wave watching! Now available to order here or via any book store or online dealer that can find books using their ISBN :-)

I wrote this book such a long time ago (read about the process here and follow the linked posts in there), when my niece Line was still as small as I drew her in the book. It then took me forever to go from “oh, the proofs are here” to actually doing the small changes and publishing it.

Line is now quite a wave watcher in her own right, but I hope that this book can raise interest and support curiosity in many other kids (and adults!)

“Invisible learning” by David Franklin

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Several things happened today.

  1. I had a lovely time reading in the hammock
  2. I tried to kill two birds with one stone (figuratively of course): writing a blog post about the book I read (which I really loved) and try a new-to-me format of Instagram posts: A caroussel, where one post slides into the next as you swipe (so imagine each of the images below as three square pictures that you slide through as you look at the post)

Turns out that even though I really like seeing posts in this format on other people’s Instagram, it’s way too much of a hassle for me to do it regularly :-D

Also a nightmare in terms of accessibility without proper alt-text, and for google-ability of the blog post. So I won’t be doing this again any time soon! But I’m still glad I tried!

And also: check out the book!

Invisible Learning: The magic behind Dan Levy’s legendary Harvard statistics course. David Franklin (2020)

Metaphors of learning (after Ivar Nordmo and the article by Sfard, 1998)

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On Thursday, I attended a workshop by Ivar Nordmo, in which he talked about two metaphors of learning: “learning as acquisition” and “learning as participation”. He referred to an article by Sfard (1998), and here is my take-away from the combination of both.

When we talk about new (or new-to-us) concepts, we often describe them with words that have previously been used in other contexts. As we bring the words into a new domain, their meaning might change a little, but the first assumption will be that the new concept we describe by those old words is, indeed, described by those words carrying the same old, familiar meaning.

When concepts are described by metaphors that developed in a different context, or are commonly used in different contexts, an easy assumption is that all their properties are transferrable between contexts. On the one hand that makes it easy to quickly grasp new contexts, on the other hand that easy assumption is most likely not entirely correct, which can lead us to misunderstanding the new concept if we don’t examine our implicit assumptions. And usually we don’t stop to consider whether the words we are using that were borrowed from a different context, are actually leading our thinking on a separate context without us realizing that this might not be appropriate.

The way we think about learning, for example, depends on the language we use to conceptualize it, and there are two metaphores who lead to substantially different ways of understanding learning, with far-reaching consequences.

Learning as acquisition

Learning is commonly defined as “gaining knowledge”. Facts or concepts are building blocks of knowledge that we acquire, accumulate, and construct meaning from. We can test whether people posess knowledge or skills (we might even be able to assess someone’s potential based on their performance). Someone might have a wealth of knowledge. They might be providing teaching and knowledge to someone else, who is receiving instruction and might share it with others. We can transfer knowledge to different applications. We might be academically gifted. In all these cases, we gain posession of something.

We think of knowledge as something we posess, intellectual property rights clearly assign ownership to ideas, and stealing ideas is a serious offence. As any other expression of wealth, knowledge is guarded and passed on from parents to children, or maybe shared as a special favor, making access to those from less knowledge-affluent circles difficult. It is perfectly fine to admit to wanting to accumulate knowledge just for the fun of it, without intending to use it for anything, same as it is socially accepted to get rich without considering what that money could and maybe should be used for.

Learning as participation

Changing the language we use to talk about things might also change how we think about the things themselves.

An alternative metaphor to “learning as aquisition” is “learning as participation”. In that metaphor, learning is described as a process that happens in specific contexts and without a clear end point. The focus then is on communicating in the language that a community communicates in, in taking part in the community’s rituals, but simultaneously influencing the community’s language and rituals in a shared negotiation with the goal of building community.

When learning is about participation, it is not a private property but a shared activity. This means that the status that, in the acquisition metaphor, comes with being knowledge-rich, is now gone. Actions can be successful or failures, but that does not make the actors inherently smart or stupid. They can act one way in one context on a given day, and could act differently at any time.

While the participation metaphor brings up all the positive associations of a growth mindsets on the individual level and equal access to learning in society, it is hard to imagine it without preserving parts of the acquisition metaphor. If knowledge is not something we possess within us, how can we even bring it from one situation into the next? How do individual learning biographies contribute to the shared activities? Can someone still be a teacher and someone else a learner?

I find considering these two metaphors really eye-opening as to how much the language we use shapes how we think about the world. Which I was aware of for example in the debate on how to use gender-neutral language, but which I never applied to learning before.

The recommendation by Sfard (1998) is not to choose one metaphor, but to carefully consider what is inadvertently implied by the language we use. Meaning transported in metaphors between domains might be buried so deeply that we are unaware of it, yet it can lead us to think about one domain wrongly and unknowingly assuming properties or causalities from a completely different domain, and to making sense in that second domain based on a faulty, assumed understanding. So awareness of the metaphors we use, and reflexion on what that does to our thinking, is not only useful but neccessary.

I don’t claim to have gotten far with these thoughts yet, but it was definitely eye-opening!

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Sfard, A. (1998). On two metaphors for learning and the dangers of choosing just one. Educational researcher, 27(2), 4-13.