Can’t help but wonder where I’m bound
Another picture from the ethnic minority park in Shenzhen. I leave for the airport in a few hours for the arduous flight home. I figure it will take about 26 hours door-to-door, although this includes a fairly long stop in Detroit (and it may take longer than that, because it includes a fairly short stop in Tokyo).
Today I gave a guest lecture to a research methods class for first-year graduate students. Ive alternated between giving talks in English and reading talks in Chinese for the last few years and I havent been satisfied with either approach. So today I decided to try to give a talk in Chinese in the way that I would were I doing this in the U.S., switching to English whenever I needed to.
I decided to begin by talking about the question of how you decide what kind of research is worth doing. I suggested that they do something that I did in graduate school and found very enlightening, which is to go and read journal articles in their area from various periods in the past; long enough ago that the trendy, frothy stuff has disappeared, and they think about what is still interesting after a period of time. I argued that some paradigms that are very clever and complicated are nonetheless bound to be ignored in the future. A good example is the discrimination shift research, which was quite popular from the 1950s-1960s. In this paradigm, subjects choose one of two alternatives and are rewarded for right answers. At some point, the rules change, either as an intradimensional shift (i.e., LARGE was right before and now its SMALL) or as an extradimensional shift (i.e., LARGE was right before and now its RED). For adults and monkeys, intradimensional shifts are easier than extradimensional shifts (presumably because theyre learning rules). For preschoolers and rats, its the reverse (presumably because theyre learning items, and half the old items are still correct in extradimensional shifts versus none in intradimensional shifts). But, it was never clear what this told you about learning that might apply to the kinds of things that people actually learn.
So, my argument was, that they should choose issues that 1) involved something that made a real difference in peoples lives (e.g., how well you can read has profound consequences; so does whether you get married or not), and 2) try to study it in ways that preserves as much as possible of the phenomenon in its natural state.
So this led nicely into presenting SMIL and Sujais wonderful examples, the subtitled U.S. small-group method video and some results from the first viewing study, and the developmental eye-tracking reading study.
I talked for about an hour and then there were questions for about half an hour. I had trouble with questions asked in Chinese, I think in large part because people get excited when theyre asking questions and talk really fast, but the questions were very good.
Then I had lunch with Shu Hua and Dong Qi, and discussed the development of the school of psychology here, and the university in general. We passed by a scale model of the campus, and Dong Qi told me that theyre in the process of building a new, larger campus in the Bei Sha Tanr area, north of the Institute of Psychology and just West of the Olympics area. Psychology will stay in the current campus, but may be able to expand here. As it is, the psychology program has taken over a remarkable proportion of the Ying Dong building, and theyre in the process of doing a very nice remodeling job for the research labs. I saw the new eye-movement rooms, and look forward to working there next time I come.
Theyre also investing in new methods at a ferocious rate. There is going to be a 3 Tesla fMRI magnet in the first floor of the building, probably when I return, and theyre pumping out fMRI research at a terrific rate. Its an interesting place, and one where the connection between research and practice is much closer than in the U.S. Dong Qi and his collaborators set up a bilingual elementary school and so can study the course of second language acquisition in a way thats hard to imagine doing otherwise.
I went to visit Fang Ge and took taxis both ways, which I’ve done little of this trip. On the way over, the driver was someone who’s been driving in Beijing for more than 20 years, which is very anomalous (almost all cab drivers are people who’ve been “xia ganged” or laid off, relatively recently). I enjoyed talking with him, and he claimed that my Chinese was comparable to the famous Canadian Da Shan (Lin Da’s friend), and wanted to know if I knew him. A few minutes later I went into a bookstore and saw a life size blow up of Da Shan next to a Chinese-English dictionary he’s touting. If it really is life size, he doesn’t quite live up to his name. On the way back, the cabdriver was a young man who taught me some useful driving phrases, such as “sha3 lv2”—stupid donkey and then we discussed comparable phrases in English. He also wanted to know about the English word “ho” and we had a discussion about dialect differences in English.
I need to finish getting packed, so Ill stop here and call it a trip.
This was an interesting and productive trip, but it will be very good to get home again.