If You Had Only One Minute…..

By Dave Andrusko

 I was about to close up shop for the week when I ran across an article at Inside Higher Education headlined “Snapshot Dissertation.” I had an intuition what the subject matter might be about and sure enough that’s what it was. In two paragraphs, or fewer, I’ll show you why it speaks to us, and make a request.

In a nutshell Duke University has what reporter Colleen Flaherty describes as an initiative to “forge connections between academics and other community members.” It’s called Scholars and Publics and the hope (my summary here) is to find a common language by which the scholarly community and the rest of us can “talk.” It’s starting in the sciences, but the intent is to spread across all disciplines.

 One component is for graduate students to be able to encapsulate their dissertations in a 30-60-second video. This is not a variation (I don’t think) of the idea that if you can’t explain something orally, you don’t really understand it. Instead the objective is to “teach [students] to imagine explaining what they’re learning to their parents or grandparents,” according to Huntington Willard, director of Duke University’s Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, in an e-mail interview with Flaherty.

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