21st Century Journal Clubs

I do a journal club driven by students’ diverse interests. Our protocol: (1) Students propose great papers to discuss in the form of short blog posts. (2) I survey students (using Google Forms) on what topic they’d like to discuss at the next meeting. (3) At each meeting, one student presents the winning paper. All of the other students read that paper and any other related paper that they’re curious about, coming prepared to present the related paper for 5 minutes. I really enjoy seeing the diversity posts, the diversity of related papers, and especially the Q&A that naturally follows most of the 5 minute presentations. This works well I think for up to about 5-10 students… for a bigger group, I’d probably have only 5-10 of the students pick and present the related papers. FYI here’s a resulting blog from last time we did this. The whole ‘course syllabus’ is in the right hand column. http://greatexperimentsblog.blogspot.com/