Making use of icould: learning from practice

icould, is an online careers resource which provides individual’s with access to the work and life experiences of hundreds of people in the form of online careers films. The films are supplemented with labour market information and other resources. This approach seeks to provide both a self-directed resource for career explorers and a resource that can be used by career and education professionals to enhance their practice. In addition, icould provides a range of information, games, interactive activities and other resources that can also be used either directly by a career explorer or as underpinning resources for professionals working in the field. icould is a technically innovative product which utilises multi-media content, interactivity and social media in new ways to provide career support. icould has become popular with career professionals and other educators and is frequently used as part of the delivery of career support. icould has produced a very useful suite of resources for teachers to facilitate its use in practice. However, up until now there has been no investigation of the ways that icould is actually being used in practice. Consequently in this project we sought to draw this practice together and to present it in a way that might stimulate, inform and inspire future practice. To do this a diverse group of practitioners were recruited to form a community of practice (COP). This report provides new ideas and insights into the way which the icould website is used by practitioners

A quantitative perspective on ethics in large team science

The gradual crowding out of singleton and small team science by large team endeavors is challenging key features of research culture. It is therefore important for the future of scientific practice to reflect upon the individual scientist's ethical responsibilities within teams. To facilitate this reflection we show labor force trends in the US revealing a skewed growth in academic ranks and increased levels of competition for promotion within the system; we analyze teaming trends across disciplines and national borders demonstrating why it is becoming difficult to distribute credit and to avoid conflicts of interest; and we use more than a century of Nobel prize data to show how science is outgrowing its old institutions of singleton awards. Of particular concern within the large team environment is the weakening of the mentor-mentee relation, which undermines the cultivation of virtue ethics across scientific generations. These trends and emerging organizational complexities call for a universal set of behavioral norms that transcend team heterogeneity and hierarchy. To this end, our expository analysis provides a survey of ethical issues in team settings to inform science ethics education and science policy.Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures, 1 table. Keywords: team ethics; team management; team evaluation; science of scienc

The ASCCR Frame for Learning Essential Collaboration Skills

Statistics and data science are especially collaborative disciplines that typically require practitioners to interact with many different people or groups. Consequently, interdisciplinary collaboration skills are part of the personal and professional skills essential for success as an applied statistician or data scientist. These skills are learnable and teachable, and learning and improving collaboration skills provides a way to enhance one's practice of statistics and data science. To help individuals learn these skills and organizations to teach them, we have developed a framework covering five essential components of statistical collaboration: Attitude, Structure, Content, Communication, and Relationship. We call this the ASCCR Frame. This framework can be incorporated into formal training programs in the classroom or on the job and can also be used by individuals through self-study. We show how this framework can be applied specifically to statisticians and data scientists to improve their collaboration skills and their interdisciplinary impact. We believe that the ASCCR Frame can help organize and stimulate research and teaching in interdisciplinary collaboration and call on individuals and organizations to begin generating evidence regarding its effectiveness.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figure. Updated to this Version 5 by adding a few more references, discussing how to teach ASCCR in the classroom, calling on others to add to research supporting the use of the ASCCR Frame, and adding discussion of ethics and reproducible researc

The sociological imagination and its promise fifty years later: Is there a future for the social sciences as a free form of enquiry?

This paper offers a restatement of Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination and tries to judge whether its promise can be credibly renewed today by addressing the question about the present and future possibilities of the social sciences as free forms of enquiry. Relying on Weber, Mills and other thinkers, the paper sustains that the possibilities for a truly free social science essentially depend on three major ‘conditions’: the subjective stance or vocation, the sociological imagination proper, and an independent social science politics, conditions whose apt names can also be ‘love’, ‘insight’ and ‘courage’. An analysis of the presence and strength of each of these conditions in contemporary social science and in academia shows the magnitude of the task faced for the existence of a free social science