Higher Education | Nick Byrd, Ph.D.

10 Steps For Organizing A Conference or Workshop

Organizing a conference or workshop is time-consuming yet important work. I have organized a handful or international conferences, in-person and online. In this post, I distill my conference organizing experience into a list of 10 steps to make your conference or workshop a success. To find out more about organizing conferences/workshops—especially online—see Online Conferences: Some history, methods & data

New Jobs, New Projects, & What’s Next

I’m lucky to share updates about new jobs, new projects, and what’s happening next on the blog, the podcast, and the YouTube channel. I’ll explain below.

Upon Reflection, Ep. 4: Online Conferences’ History, Methods, and Benefits

In this episode of Upon Reflection, I explain how academics should conference better. More accurately, I read my chapter, “Online Conferences: Some History, Methods, and Benefits” from Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene. This chapter reviews some history of online academic conferencing going back to the 1970s, explain the potential advantages of online conferences, report quantitative and qualitative results from three online conferences, and urge scholars to consider how they can contribute to a more sustainable, inclusive, and emergency resilient academy by replicating these online conferences.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 34:48 — 63.7MB)

How to Record Professional-Quality Conference Presentations

A timely guest post by Katlyn Proctor

Recording a conference presentation is helpful for many reasons, from wanting to share the presentation with others to having it simply to look back on and refer to. Having a high-quality recording is therefore essential and needs to be done right the first time. There are different ways you can record conference presentations depending on the quality needed, what it will be used for, and whether your conferences are in-person or wholly online. This post will cover the basics to get you started.

Online Conferences: Some history, methods & data

In the wake of virus outbreaks in multiple countries, many scholars are reconsidering conference plans. As someone that has organized multiple online conferences—sometimes during states of emergency—I have thought a lot about how online conferences can be more resilient to such emergencies. I have also found online conferences to be preferable in many other ways, which I explain in a paper about the history, methods, and findings of online conferences. The paper is ~~currently under review for~~ forthcoming in a collected volume about sustainable academic practices (see my CV). More links to free versions of the chapter are below.

Debiasing in Administration, Advising, & Teaching

I recently published a paper about implicit bias and debiasing. The paper argues that implicit bias is probably associative, but that debiasing is not fully unconscious or involuntary. As with all of my papers, you can find the free preprint of the paper on my CV. Anyway, while I was working on that paper, it occurred to me that my views about implicit bias and debiasing had implications for institutions like universities. Specifically, my views implied that it should be relatively easy for education administrators, advisors, and teachers to incorporate debiasing into what they do—and no: I’m not talking about diversity trainings. I tested my prediction in my own classroom and the results were promising. Nonetheless, I wanted to hear my colleagues’ ideas about debiasing. So, I created a workshop about it. In this post, I’ll share the materials for the workshop. If your employer or your organization would like me to host this workshop, they can contact me.

Multi-disciplinary Philosophy PhD Programs

One of my favorite researchers is Chandra Sripada. Sripada is a professor of both philosophy and psychiatry. My research also crosses the humanities-science divide(s). So, I often wonder how to replicate a multi-disciplinary career like Sripada’s. A look at Sripada’s CV reveals a career path involving multiple advanced degrees, internships/residencies, etc. If you are like me, then you (or your partner) might want a more efficient path to a career. In this post, I share advice about how to obtain multi-disciplinary training from philosophy graduate programs. Continue reading Multi-disciplinary Philosophy PhD Programs

4 Steps Toward A 40-50 Hour Work Week

A handful of people have asked me about my daily and weekly work routine. Some people just want to know what philosophers do all day. Others are looking for ways to impose structure on their work week. In this post, I will share four (probably predictable) steps that have increased my productivity and lowered my stress.

Continue reading 4 Steps Toward A 40-50 Hour Work Week

Academic Fake News?

I was just on the I Can’t Believe It’s Not News podcast talking about fake news, academic fake news (e.g., fake conferences, scam publishers), open access publishing, and what it’s like to look like Neil Patrick Harris. I had a great time. The hosts, Beth and Elizabeth, are very fun and resourceful. You can preview and listen to the podcast below.

Listen

You can listen to the podcast in the player below. (In case you care, I join the podcast somewhere around 4:10 and leave around 52:30.)

Continue reading Academic Fake News?

3 Tips For Your First Philosophy Class

Did you enroll in a philosophy class? Cool! You might have heard a few things about philosophy. But — on average — few people know much about academic philosophy. So here’s a quick introduction to your first philosophy class. It’ll cover the basics of what your philosophy teacher cares about and what they probably expect from you.

1. Forget What You Already Believe

Good judgment matters in many contexts. It matters when we’re voting, when we’re raising children, and when deciding how to spend our time, etc. In each of these cases, we need to be able to

find information.
understand information.
explain information.
evaluate information.

And this is similar to what we will do in a philosophy class. So your grade in a philosophy class is a matter of how well you understand, explain, and evaluate information — where “information” is just the stuff you read and discuss for class.

But that’s not very specific. You probably want to know how to evaluate and explain the information we come across in a philosophy course. For instance, is it enough to say, “I disagree with So-and-so because I believe that _______”? The short answer: no.

In a philosophy class, it doesn’t really matter what we believe. Academic philosophers care more about Continue reading 3 Tips For Your First Philosophy Class