Analytical Logbook
Students in this course will keep an analytical logbook to document their experiences in solving problems in fish population dynamics. The analytical logbook is analogous to the laboratory notebook of bench scientists. Its purpose is to keep track of details critical to the analysis, just as a lab notebook will serve to record conditions occurring at the time of an experimental procedure. Its raison d'etre is that the practice of fish population dynamics or stock assessment is an analytical pursuit fraught with the difficulties and uncertainties of highly variable biological processes, each described and estimated by a plethora of theoretical models, all of which impose their own assumptions and uncertainties on the process. When these procedures must be invoked to interpret highly variable data of sometimes questionable reliability, far too many assumptions may be unnoted along the way. The analytical logbook merely assists the analyst in keeping notes about these assumptions, analytical procedures, data origins and reliability, and references relevant to the analysis at hand.
The inspiration for this project derives from the educational philosophy espoused by Toby Fulweiler's "Writing Across the Curriculum," a pedagogy that recognizes that all "education" teaches language. In this approach, Fulweiler described how the mechanics of writing serve to: focus attention, make learning an "active" process, and individualize the process. Personal aspects of writing include: committing the writer to a position, identifying one's biases and values, and clarifying for the writer what he/she knows and doesn't know. Because writing is visible it establishes a dialogue with one's self, allows analysis and promotes digression.
The inclusion of a logbook and other informal writing in this course is based upon the following premises:
1. All teachers are language teachers.
2. Language and thought are intimately related.
3. Writing serves many roles in the learning process.
4. Reading, analysis, and writing are the center of the curriculum.
5. There are no "quick fixes".
In many academic pursuits, writing has been effective in:
1. Increasing student confidence
2. Increasing oral responses
3. De-centering authority
4. Encouraging independent thought
5. Replacing quizzes, tests, papers and talk
6. Monitoring class progress
Students will begin to rely upon analysis only if it becomes an integral part of every academic experience. I believe that frequent documentation of the analytical process through a student's own writing is one of the keys to this reliance and that an informal style with a strongly personal character will be conducive to development of an analytical habit. I expect that the logbooks will help students to understand the course material more completely. Whether or not the increased understanding is worth the effort of maintaining the logbook is something that can only be judged by the individual student. At the conclusion of the course, I will be asking you to make that evaluation.
Logbooks are intermediate in character between journals and class notebooks. Journals are strictly personal whereas class notes document the thoughts of others. Just as the journal is written in the first person, so too does the logbook record the students' perception of the analytical process in a personalized fashion. The pronouns tend to be "I", and "we" rather than "she" or "he." Each logbook entry should be an exercise in trying to expand on a fact, idea, process or thought. The student should accept the challenge: "How accurately can I describe or explain this analysis?"
There is no one recipe for keeping a logbook, but it is clear that such a logbook ought to emphasize or facilitate the process of recording each step in conducting an analysis. While remembering what you have done in conducting an experiment or doing an analysis has always been a challenge for the "absent -minded" among us, such lapses of recall are no less than catastrophic for those engaged in programming. Donald Knuth, Professor Emeritus (Computer Science) at Stanford has gone a long way to circumvent these catastrophes. First, by inventing TeX, a document processing system for anyone who wants to maintain complete control over her/his writing. And, second, by imploring the community of computer programmers to employ "literate programming", a practice that makes documentation an integral part of computer programming. My advice to graduate students in fisheries is to move as quickly as possible toward proficiency in both R programming, and in the LaTeX (Lahhh-Tech) document processing system. Such a combination of skills will enable you improve both your analytical abilities and your competency in written communication. Trust me. You are already old enough to regret not having learned of this earlier in your academice career. So, you might just as well start now!
Fortunately for students at the University of Minnesota, we have a local guru in the person of one Charles Geyer in our School of Statistics. In addition to teaching a number of statistics courses here, Dr. Geyer has provided some programming examples and insight into literate programming in the R language. In particular, Dr. Geyer's links above provide an introduction to the "Sweave" function in R and show new users how to begin the process of literate programming in our favorite statistical computer language. The example below is my own attempt to illustrate the process by using an introductory problem in my Fisheries Population Analysis course, FW5601. Here we see how students conducting an R analysis can document their work in a simple lab report. The final result is a PDF file readable on any modern microcomputer.
Example to follow soon (today is Sept. 19, 2007)
Fulweiler, T. 1980. Journals across the disciplines. English Journal, 69(9):14-19.
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Date created: January, 2003
Last modified: September 19, 2007
Copyright © 2003, 2007 George R. Spangler