Case Study

At RITMO retreats we often use case studies to discuss relevant topics. I have blogged about some of these before: the Coauthorship Case and Confession Case. This semester’s retreat focused on project development and management. I developed a new case study that was successfully used for group work and plenary discussion. A challenging project Consider the following scenario: Professor Penelope has received external funding to start a new interdisciplinary research project....

I have previously written about the coauthorship exercise that we use at RITMO workshops when we have new groups of doctoral and postdoctoral fellows. Another concept we use from time to time is what we call a “confession workshop.” This builds on the fact that a researcher’s life is often filled with rejections and discouraging feedback. Too often, we only talk about successful stories, giving the skewed impression that there are no challenges in academia....

I have previously written about the different publication cultures at RITMO. This includes different coauthorship traditions between our disciplines: musicology, psychology, and informatics. Our approach to avoid conflicts over (co)authorship is to discuss it often. We also have an exercise that we run occasionally at retreats. Since this may be a topic of interest to others, here I share the case we have developed. We typically allocate an hour for the exercise and split people into small groups (4–6 people) from different disciplines....