Vol. 0 - What is this all about?
After many years on social media and microblogging platforms, I am ready to reclaim a little more space for writing; starting a newsletter felt like less upkeep than starting (or reviving!) a blog, and now here we are:
Welcome to Ctrl. Alt. Tim, where I will regale you weekly with tales of...
Ecology! I want to write about cool papers I have read, be excited about them, and share this excitement. My goal is to highlight the work of early career scientists, and to use this as an excuse to discuss good practices when designing and writing papers. I am convinced that questioning why we enjoyed a specific paper is one of the best ways to learn about writing, and this is what I will do.
Time management! I had to acquire my time management techniques through trial and error. And frankly? It hasn't been great (or efficient). I will talk about what works for me, how I approach different types of tasks, projects, and deadlines, and discuss some of these strategies from my perspective as an academic with an anxiety disorder.
Teaching! I love teaching! Unlike research, it just works! And I want to spend some time discussing evaluation, classroom activities to engage students in different ways (especially for quantitative/programming classes), and the inspiration I take for teaching from other activities.
Once in a while, I might indulge in a little bonus episode. I will write about the importance of analog tools (like sticky notes, and of course, googly eyes) in a digital world, especially when it comes to deep thinking on programming and mathematics, or as a way to clarify one's ideas. Another topic that is dear to me is the (mis)use of generative AI in academic spaces, and the conversations we must have with students about it.
The plan is to alternate between these topics every week, and to keep it reasonably short. Discussions of all of these topics have been (and are still) taking place on social media. But the landscape of social media sees more fragmentation every day. In addition to seeing part of our social networks unravel, I feel like we have lost collective knowledge, some of our folklore. I strongly feel the need for a place to give these topics more time, and to engage with them on a scale of weeks, rather than minutes. If these ideas are worth writing about, they are worth writing about slowly and with intentionality.
Sustainable engagement with longer content now seems fundamentally at odds with microblogging; the last five years have shown us that some ideas do not fit easily in threads and replies. Maybe we gave up on the ecology blogosphere too rapidly. Speaking of which: fear not! It looks like 2024 is the year of the big comeback of the ecology blogosphere! We may never get our RSS readers back, but we can still blog like it's 2010. Because we're cool like that.
And with all of this clarified, stay tuned for Vol. 1 on Jan. 22, in which I will discuss a teaching activity I did on the first day of my data science class, to help biology majors develop an intuition about how machine learning works.