grouperlab

The following is from Jeremi London, our most recent GROUPER alumna (deposited her MS thesis in April, now continuing her PhD in Engineering Education at Purdue, where she was jointly enrolled).  Edits only for grammar and clarity.  –BSC

It is Wednesday, May 22, 2013. My bags are packed. The conference is over. It’s time to leave the ocean views of San Juan, Puerto Rico and return to the orchards and cornfields of the Midwest.

The conclusion of the 5-day IIE conference doubles as the culmination of an endeavor I started a few years ago. In many ways, this is both an endpoint and a transition. That makes this juncture in time an ideal one for reflection. In this blog, I will highlight what I worked on as a Masters student and share what’s next. I will spend the majority of the time reflecting on what it is like to be in GROUPER and how this relates to what it means to be a GROUPER.

My name is Jeremi London. I recently defended and deposited my Master’s thesis entitled, “Analysis and Modeling of Learning Outcome Mappings in Engineering Education”. As part of my thesis, I used archival data, survey results, and simulation software to understand the relationship between three sets of learning outcomes and to model how these outcomes relate over time. Now that my Master’s in Industrial Engineering is complete, my primary focus is on completing my dissertation and graduating next summer with a Ph.D. in Engineering Education (also from Purdue). Many elements of my experience in GROUPER have contributed to my personal and professional development, and add to the foundation upon which I will build my future successes.

Weekly one-on-one meetings with Dr. C throughout the academic year are central to what it means to be in GROUPER. Each meeting began with a simple question, “What would you like to talk about today?” While the startup is pretty predictable, I never knew where the conversation would end or what intellectual escapade(s) would get us there. It was in my one-on-ones that I heard witty phrases like: “Read widely; question deeply,” and “That’s so pretty” (which often means that Dr. C has an awesome, multi-dimensional visual in his mind that depicts the current topic of discussion).

After years of engaging in these one-on-one experiences, I have a greater appreciation for mentoring the next generation, for allocating time to scholarly discourse/interactions, and for the process of graduate engineering education in general. As a result of this experience, it is much easier for me to pause periodically, allow my thoughts to roam from one connection to another, and have confidence in the value of the ideas that come to mind.  In my opinion, the greatest hallmark of what it means to be a GROUPER is the ability to “scan and connect.” One-on-ones with Dr. C contribute to the development of this skill.

Engaging in experiences that form the camaraderie that exists among GROUPERs is also central to what it means to be in GROUPER. During the weekly lab meetings, I heard about the fascinating projects that others were working on. This was also a time to discuss important topics related to successfully completing grad school, and to receive encouragement/advice from peers on how to deal with the most recent “hot mess” that came up during the process of conducting our research.

Another activity that allowed us to build camaraderie was each semester’s G4 (i.e., GROUPER group get together). Undoubtedly, the trust grew as we engaged in the engineering design task of developing a potluck menu that minimizes allergy-related risks, incorporates everyone’s dietary preferences, and maximizes the likelihood that you’ll be asked to bring that dish to the next G4. It was over good food that we meet members of one another’s family, exchanged childhood stories, revealed hobbies, and daydreamed about having a G5 someday (i.e., a global G4) as the number of GROUPERs from countries other than the U.S. increases.

The combination of lab meetings and G4s have taught me how to balance work and play, and has encouraged me consider blurring the lines at times –in contexts like these and others. In light of this, to be a GROUPER means that you can manage tensions between notions that initially may seem contradictory.

The last activity that comes with being in GROUPER is participation in a research community that extends beyond Purdue. Of course, the idea of matriculating into a research community by engaging in conference-related activities is not unique to GROUPER. I attended the 2012 HFES conference in Boston, and participated in the 2013 IIE / ISERC conference. Both experiences were valuable, but IIE was more impactful. By participating in the conference, my critical thinking skills improved; I have gotten better at tailoring my writing style to an audience; and I have a better estimate of how long and what it really takes to complete a writing task – well. It’s hard to describe the validation that comes from having papers accepted, presenting my work before an audience of credible scholars, and stimulating thought-provoking questions and conversations among colleagues. It is also nice to establish new networks (with GROUPER alumni or other IE researchers) and discuss possible collaborations over dinner. Again, much of what I have described is not specific to GROUPER. However, my experience in GROUPER will always be associated with my socialization in the IE community because it provided the context for the development of my identity as an IE scholar.

This brings me back to where this reflection started.  While in GROUPER, I have developed as an individual, as a team player, and as a member of the IE research community. These three aspects of my development converged this week in San Juan. In this way, having the opportunity to participate in IIE was both a culmination of an experience I started a few years and a nice transition to what’s next.

At Purdue, summer starts in May.  Classes end in April; grades were due on May 8.  Jeff (our stalwart STINGRAY student) deposited his PhD dissertation, and I got to “hood” him at Commencement on May 13.   This past week, I presented some of our work at the Industrial and Systems Engineering Research Conference.  Oh, and I also got to see the SpaceX Falcon9 / Dragon launch.  Pretty cool.  

I’ve been accused of working too hard, and not having the ability to have vacations.  Well, that’s probably true.  (I did spend a few hours by the pool in Orlando after the launch and my conference presentations.)  So, what to do?

I’m going out of the country tomorrow.  When I get back, it’s visiting my daughter for her birthday, and taking some time off the grid.  Most of the lab is gone for the summer.  It’s quiet now in GROUPER.  We’ll get back to you in August.

Although it’s still only early February, our academic calendar says that it’s the fourth week of the semester.  That means, there really is stuff to discuss, issues to address, and activity to promote among many of the members of the lab.  Not everyone is in West Lafayette right now, but there’s still activity engaging all of the students.  Jeff is in Maryland, working on the background section of his dissertation.  Melvis is in Hong Kong, updating her research design.  Natalie is in Spain, providing Kelly back here at Purdue with coding structures for the new Pharmacy / CHF medication study data collection and analysis.  Yes, we’ve got that distributed performance thing covered–we don’t just study it, we do it.  (That sounds more impressive than it felt two weeks ago.  These things go in cycles.)  

Jeremi met with her committee today to discuss her thesis concept.  She proposed some pictures as illustrations of where the thesis might eventually be able to go (“I don’t know what that means, but it’s HOT!” was one comment).  In lab meeting yesterday, we talked about Jake’s work with control room visualization and sonification, and its potential use in new generations of control rooms. (I find it interesting when news stories in the media, such as the expected licensing of a new power plant in Georgia, generate a response: “Oh, that’s what we talked about on the phone last week–it looks like our work has even more relevance now”.)  However, it wasn’t just the topics of these discussions that fills me with enthusiasm; it was the process.  The discussion of Jake’s research also became a primer on how academics put together research proposals–not just the cool ideas, but how to write deliverables, and craft budgets, and manage timelines.  Jeremi’s thesis committee helped talk about how to organize a project that makes real impact on a field, but has enough grounding in existing research to give others a sense of continuity and comprehension.  The folks at the National Science Foundation talk about Intellectual Merit and Broader Impact; a good project considers both, and communicates them both well.

The album by the lab’s alter ego musical persona, Surviving December (a hip-hop emo group), is filling out its tracklist.  (These are, in fact, humorous references to comments actually made during lab meetings.)  The new hit is “Doin’ 2 B Doin’ 2 B Doin'”–a reference to this sense of additional productivity and generativity.  Let’s look at tools to help with increased project activity.  We need access to the shared drive.  The new monitor helps a lot in discussing the Statement of Work–what else do we need?  Mendeley has most of the lab’s references and cited papers in it: over 2500, including the merged set from Caldwell’s EndNote collection.  [If you’re not in the lab, you can’t see us.  But we’re there.]  So, the persona and the tracks are a bit of humor to lighten the mood and add a sense of shared identity and experience.  But the work is real.  And so is the lab’s activity.  Let’s do real things, with real impact, in real settings.  Because that’s what engineers do.  Ideas to reality.

It’s been a while, but we’re now starting up again with the GROUPER lab meetings for Spring Semester.  This also means that I am trying to update our lab’s website, which you can find at http://www.grouperlab.org.  Are we busy?  Of course.  Do we just spend our time promoting ourselves? No.  However, GROUPER is glad to note that two GROUPER alumnae, Sandra Garrett and Ashley Benedict, were featured in the January 2012 Newsletter of the Society for Health Systems. (You can see their paper here, courtesy of the Institute of Industrial Engineers.)

Stay tuned.  Later this month, we should have some additional papers in development for the 2012 Industrial and Systems Engineering Research Conference; the 2012 Applied Human Factors and Ergonomics International Conference, and most immediately, the Society for Health Systems / Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Symposium on Human Factors in Healthcare being held in March in Baltimore.  We’re working on journal papers, and in February, it will be time for the HFES Annual Meeting papers to be submitted.  As you can tell, the mark of a new year for GROUPER is one of file and status updates.  Resolutions?  Well, maybe a little (like being more timely in our blog updates), but we prefer to do the work than promise that someday…

Well, it’s been a while.  We haven’t written, and maybe someone out there has noticed this.  But, since we don’t have lots of followers, this lag has not cost us followers.  Alternatively, I could say that we are not responsible for excessive irrelevant material that clogs your email inbox and causes you to want to delete your subscription.  I did reference, in an earlier post, the problems of people complaining about posts on a discussion list that they consider irrelevant by asking to be removed from the list—by replying to the entire list.  This is a problem of “push” vs. “pull” information and communications technologies.  You might want to have your favorite information delivered right to you, but it seems unreasonable to have, as was once prophesied, a “Me Channel” with nothing but information that you want, but all of the information you want.

So, in the lab last Thursday, we did a bit of push and pull ourselves.  We went around the room, and everyone gave a brief update about the project that they are currently working on for their next degree—undergraduate honors, master’s thesis, doctoral dissertation.  They’re not all on the same topic, of course.   In fact, the best way of describing GROUPER research is a matrix of application domains (healthcare, spaceflight, STEM education) and theoretical concerns (communication bandwidth limits, requirements for knowledge sharing, and system delays and lags).  But there are enough areas of overlap, and enough interests among the lab members, that each person could share feedback on others’ project ideas.  Interestingly, one of the students then asked what I thought distinguished GROUPER from other research labs across IE or the College of Engineering.

Collaboration is already an evident element of the lab, just from the setting that generated the question.  Students aren’t competing against each other for access to the equipment, or the field site, or even for the money.  (That’s right.  This semester, I’m funding none of the students—they have assistantships from other sources.)  But I think there is something even more important operating: contact hours.  So far this month, I estimate that I’ve spent approximately seven hours in individual meetings with students, four hours in group-level meetings, and another 10-12 hours in reading and reviewing emails and sending responses.  (The email creates a modern update to what used to be described as “management by wandering around”—discussions occur that fuel internet searches that result in paper downloads that get attached to email replies.)  Whether this is push or pull may depend a bit on where you sit.  However, it should be clear that the process of generating a research topic is not strictly sequential.  I don’t like telling people exactly what to do.  It goes against my general philosophy.  (I can most certainly tell them what I want accomplished, and I do.)  So, the student who expects their dissertation to be crafted solely by me, for them to execute without having to think about it, is going to be in for some problems.  By contrast, I don’t like waiting in an information vacuum, and I am very uncomfortable leaving a situation to stagnate if I can actively do something about it.  (I’m an engineer.  “What do I do about it?” is a frequently expressed sentiment.)

I also realized something recently.  After more than 20 years as a faculty member, and closing in on 40 MS and PhD students, there is a lot of experience that any new GROUPER should have the opportunity to call upon for assistance.  That experience may come from others in the lab—hence the value of the GROUPER project discussions.  But some of it is in my head, just waiting for the right connection to emerge.  It can’t be purely pull from the student: they don’t always know what question to ask, because they haven’t been through this before.  If they can only meet with me once they have figured it out, that’s a large waste of time and a failure to engage available expertise.  But undiluted push doesn’t work either: they do need to put some effort into making sense of the problem and helping me understand their own perspective.  As my son once said, “Part of learning is trying to figure out the answers yourself.”

I’m not sure I want the “Me Channel”.  I learn a fair amount from making new connections based on things I haven’t thought about before, from perspectives that aren’t mine.  GROUPER theses and dissertations wouldn’t be as interesting or far-reaching if they only came from a single disciplinary or experiential origin.  New knowledge isn’t purely about learning what I’ve already decided is important—because if I don’t know, what criteria am I supposed to use to figure out what I need to know?  Obviously, though, I can’t spend all of my time just picking up random factoids: lectures still need to have a point (and they need to get written) and conference presentations and journal papers still need to answer the question about addressing the research question in an effective and focused way.  Oh, yeah.  It’s that exploitation and exploration thing again—I talked about that before, too.    Push and pull.  What is the dynamic stability range of information access patterns?  Don’t wait for someone else to generate the answer for you, though.

On campus, the new school year is well underway, and there is a lot of novelty on my mind.  New projects (especially Purdue’s selection as one of two finalists for the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination), new assignments, and especially new students.  But that’s not really how this entry started.  It started with a discussion list.

A researcher on one of the discussion lists which I (BC) follow (this one happened to be within the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, but you can find this in a variety of groups on a variety of topics) had initiated a thread about a particular research topic.  Potentially interesting, but not really my specialty, so I only glanced through it.  What really drew my attention, though, was some of the responses to this new thread.  Several people were highly annoyed that someone had taken up the bandwidth of a thread to discuss a topic that wasn’t in their particular interest.  In fact, some then complained that the thread was inappropriate for the list, because it wasn’t particularly interesting to them.  You can probably guess what happened next.  More comments about the complaints about the thread, and then a set of finger pointing at the software itself for not keeping unwanted discussions out of their mailboxes (I think that the “delete” key works especially well for that function), followed by a slew of “remove me from the list” emails.  (Nothing is a bigger waste of bandwidth than a set of “remove me” postings to a discussion list.)  To me, this sort of behavior (and it seems to be common across email and web-based discussions) is fascinating, because it seems to reflect different attitudes about willingness to be exposed to new material that isn’t exactly within one’s current focus of view.  I thought about writing an entry on “Pushing and Pulling Sticky Balls: Accretions and Connections of Knowledge as Inertia,” and maybe I still will.  But not today.

I think what became even more fascinating to me is this idea of tolerance for novelty, as a companion to or essential tension against desire for directed focus.  Those who know me know that I do seem to tolerate and collect a fairly large range of novel connections, and seek out new connections between existing ideas.  (It seems that one of the best ways of distinguishing those who “get” me and those who don’t is their response to one of my nonlinear connection interactions.)  This shows up especially clearly in the process of recruiting students.  GROUPER spends an unusual amount of effort in trying to identify students who like working across project areas, and in collaborative teams, as potential members.  This fall is a special challenge: all but one of the students who were continuing members one year ago today are now elsewhere.  (Three have taken permanent jobs—all accepted before depositing their PhD dissertation.)  It’s a lot to place the burden of maintaining the culture of the lab on one PhD student, one MS student, and one undergraduate (only the MS student was part of the lab on September 15, 2010).  We have three new potential graduate students and a new undergraduate, all wanting to start in the lab—more than the current population, and the single largest addition of students (in terms of percentage change in lab size) in the 20 years of GROUPER.  So, what’s a professor and lab director to do?

I called out for pizza (well, actually, one of the students did) and told some stories. 

Telling stories is a famous mechanism of developing and sustaining an entrepreneurial organizational culture—Hewlett-Packard was legendary for their “Bill and Dave” stories.  So, I told some “Dr. C” stories of novelty and connection and the pictures in my head.  (Again, that discussion can come later—it’s about a three-dimensional coordinate axis of sensory experience of the world, capability of processing the world from external or internal frames of reference, and overall cognitive capacity, which I tend to reference as “horsepower”.)  It was interesting, and gratifying, that three of the GROUPERs made the connection to neurodiversity that had spawned my development of the coordinate space, even though I hadn’t mentioned it in that context.  (That’s another hint that there is a possibility for a good match—not only do they “get” my connections, but they can make connections like the ones I make.)

In a little while, you’ll get to read the students’ perspectives on this “restocking” and story telling pizza party.  Until then, what is my sense of the need to restock a lab without completely changing what is its essence?  I continue to think about this process of novel discovery and focused activity as an essential balance affecting individuals, and teams, and organizations.  It may even be an evolutionary requirement with a fundamental mathematical dynamic—similar balances can be seen in the behavior of ant colonies, balancing environmental exploration and resource exploitation.  Maybe we’ll get to study that sometime, too.  Obviously, there is no lack of topics for the blog, or for our projects and papers.  Bear with us, though, if you’re waiting for updates here: there’s a lot to work on, and an ecosystem to innovate.