sevda

I came across to this ‘adage’ in several places from newspapers to articles and it describes the situation of professors in the US. Professors are under an extreme pressure about publishing until they get a full professorship. On their work, quality is underestimated if the quantity is high. In other words, they have to publish as much as they can if they want to stay in academia.

There are so many debates about this situation. Most of the academics think that more publication in a short time decreases the quality of the publications or works. Because higher quality studies need some time most of the time. I am sure most of us already realize that so many publications’ research method or findings are not strong enough. Or, those publications are not unique enough. I absolutely agree that a short period of time is not enough to make a good research design or make a good statistical or qualitative analysis. We are writing a dissertation in 2 years in general in Ph.D. Ok, we are learning at the same time, but still doing a literature review, finding a good study design, conduct some methods, and then, interpretation take so much time. The expectation from professors is teaching some classes, writing several papers, and doing some other service works in the same academic year. This is not a healthy and a sustainable plan at all. Academia needs better quality works rather than just publication crowd.

Higher education needs so many things to change all over the world. Despite the U.S. education is better than some other country’s, there is still a lot to change. Especially, diversity and inclusion is a big issue for some minority groups in the U.S.

U.S. might be the most attractive country for international students, also the country has many other minorities as well. This makes expectations from the country even higher in terms of being more inclusive for a diverse group of people. In other words, structurewise, everybody’s ancestors are already from different countries. Any American’s grand grandparents from somewhere else. Also, people will keep coming anyway, and existed minorities will not migrate to another country. So, I do not really understand what is the reason for being aggressive to minorities. Specifically, why are these kinds of issues discussed in the same subject with education? We do not have to like other people or do not have to support their beliefs, but we have to respect them. We do not have right to take their education right away.

When we remember why social media first emerged then we might think like this platforms are for only personal use and personal communication. But nowadays many scholarly articles and research discuss if it is still true. They are trying to define if are there any benefits or drawbacks of technology for education. Because technology and social media are everywhere and everybody using those 24/7. Also, everything is changing in education and in technology.

Until I took some classes this semester, I was not sure how to integrate social media into the classroom and how faculty could use it effectively for the sake of the class. But then, I read some of the articles such as ‘Using Social Media to Listen and Learn from Students and ‘The role of social media in higher education classes (real and virtual) – A literature review‘. Those showed me how usage of social media changed over the time. Because their publish dates are 4 years apart and still results or their claims are way different than each other.

As Stoller said, social media can help institutions and faculties to collect better data than any survey or questionnaire most of the time. Of course they should evaluate the responses if there is an unrelated one, but still, institutions and faculty can reach students better via social media. He also said “Students who are more engaged w/ their university are more successful + more likely to be retained. Digital engagement matters.”. As a communication person of the program, I can say that it is correct for our Landscape Architecture program as well. Most of the time, very engaged students with our program website and social media, also engaged with the program as well. And those students are generally more successful ones and have a better relationship with faculty as far as my observation. This social media channels also help to build community engagement for school and for the class.

Other ways of learning also introduced thanks to social media. As students learn about their program and school’s particular events, services, events and more, they can also follow classes through social media channels if faculty agree to use it. For example, if somebody is sick, that person can connect to the classroom through social media and do not miss any class or attend a meeting by using the same method. Blogs also are used as a learning environment. Faculty and students can propose their ideas on the same platform or they can interact with each other through social media. Facebook and Twitter also can be used for the same purpose. In other words, all social media platforms can be useful for higher education, students, and faculty if they can define the correct way to use those.

UpLanD (Journal of Urban Planning, Landscape and Environmental Design) is an open access journal in my discipline. That journal’s country of the publisher is Italy and the organization is MASTER PRO Ingegneri Associati.

According to their own description from their website, their aims are:

“disseminate meaningful, responsible, accurate and independent contributions in the field of urban planning, landscape, and environmental design, which are supported by research and original experiments carried out both in scientific environments and practice;
provide an international comparison tool for research work being done on the subject of the sustainable governance of the built environment, in view of the advancement of knowledge, methods, and tools in comparison with the global scientific community;
promote the dissemination of research and experimentation, whose results and effects are of interest due to their social, economic, environmental, cultural and ecological impact;
promote the recognition of scientific contributions according to the criteria for the evaluation of research in the academic field, as defined internationally;
offer young researchers a user-friendly environment for the promotion and dissemination of products in the international scientific community and for the relevant measurement of their impact;
promote the sustainable governance of the territory as a central and essential strategy for the growth of the collective well-being;
promote encounters/comparisons among scientific researchers, the profession, producers and decision makers.”

Its scope is broad and interdisciplinary from urban planning to landscape design. Despite it is an open access journal, publications are peer-reviewed (double-blind process) and indexed.

Journal’s open access policy is explained on its website as: “UPLanD provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.” The website also mentioned the license “Creative Commons Attribution Licence 4.0” to protect authors’ and journal’s rights and copyrights as well.

Ethics should be applied to every part of our lives, but “scientific research” is much more sensitive in terms of ethical behaviors than other ordinary things. Because scientific results affect so many people, and all researchers should aware their responsibility for other people’s lives. They are also responsible for public perception. Any kinds of unethical behavior or activity lead to damage public’s trust in science.

According to ORI (The Office of Research Integrity)’s case summaries, there are so many research misconduct cases noticed and most of them are not available anymore due to their administrative action periods’ expiration. In other words, there are so many different misconducts cases listed on the page since the early 2000s, and these are the only a small part of the whole. I surprised when I saw that many cases on the list, and I even more surprised when I saw that this is not the whole list. I especially surprised when I read them and their way of falsifying data.

Graduate student Meredyth M. Forbes’s case in 2016 is an interesting one. She falsified and fabricated data while she was a Ph.D. student in Medical school. Research misconducts should always be intentional, but this is more than that, I think. She fabricated numbers in data, and created images in Photoshop. She did not use the actual results from her experiments. I did not understand why she really modified the data while she spent a good amount of time to get some results through experiments. Because I checked her resume from the internet and saw that she was working in a lab and her job was related to that research. So, she supposed to conduct some experiments. Then, the real question is: Why did not she use those results even if they did not support her hypothesis? What was her motivation? Also, she was taking some grants at that time and she had another/additional responsibility to those institutions. After her falsification of data in 3 papers and 4 presentations, the situation was realized and her career was destroyed permanently even if she was penalized for 3 years in total. When I also checked her career through the internet, she had to change her career from medicine to web design after 2016. So, she paid that fraud’s result seriously. She even could not finish her Ph.D. after this case and only has masters degree right now.

Since experiments are not easy to conduct anytime, it should be really hard to detect those misconducts. But, when those are noticed, enforcement is applied seriously. To prevent those kinds of misconducts, ethics should be understood by researchers very well before they start to conduct research. For this “understanding”, institutions can provide lectures, face to face interviews, or any other written protocols in advance.

Each higher education institute has its own somehow unique mission statement. I was not aware of those statements before taking the Preparing Future Professoriate course this semester. When we discuss this subject in the class, I wanted to check my current and previous universities’ (Virginia Tech (VT) and Istanbul Technical University (ITU)) statements.

ITU is my previous university which I finished my masters in Turkey, and VT is my current university where I am doing Ph.D. in the U.S. Both of them are big, technical research-based public universities and they are very well-known in their own countries. Due to the similarities and differences between them, I wanted to compare their missions through their statements:

Istanbul Technical University:

“The purpose of existence for the Istanbul Technical University is to expand the borders of knowledge and its applications in science, technology, and art for contributing to the sustainable community.”

Virginia Polytechnic University:

“Our mission is to collaborate with communities, students, and faculty to cultivate sustainable, mutually beneficial partnerships through engaged service, learning, and reflection.”

Since I was not aware of those statements before, I kind of surprised when I first saw the similarities between the two. Their lengths are almost same: one is 30 words while the other is 22. When I read, the first thing I realized is both universities’ statements mention from communities and sustainability. Also, while ITU explains why it exists, VT emphasizes the strategy and plans of the institution. ITU says they are exists for the benefit of the community and its sustainability by increasing the knowledge and its applications, while VT mentions to create partnerships or collaborations between university’s community and other communities. Both universities are research-based, but neither of them used the words “research” and “teaching” in their mission statements. Only VT used the term “students”, while both used “community”.