Jennifer K. Spenader

I am interested in a number of topics that, though related to my work, they are not the main focus of my research or teaching:

"Hobby" topic 1: Academic productivity

I'm very interested in research that has been done on how academics can increase their research productivity and deal best with writing tasks.
April 29th I gave a talk for the annual meeting of the `Nederlandse Vereninging Medische Onderwijs' on effective research. The presentation can be found here . This is the most recent version of my talk. Earlier version (and talk dates) are listed below.

April 19, 2011: Effective Research, Artificial Intelligence Department, University of Groningen.
January 25, 2011: Active Writing, Humanties, University of Groningen. Writing strategies, including strategies to approach the reading and motivational tips.
May, 2010 Successful Research for SHARE, Medical Phd student association.
December, 2008, Academic Self-help, Humanities, University of Groningen.

Here's a list of the best books on writing, research and motivation. There is a lot of advice online about writing well, especially geared to grad students, but because I am continually encouraging people to read this one document, I'm adding the link here:Scrutiny of the Abstract by K. Landes.

"Hobby" topic 2: Second Language Acquisition

I'm personally interested in methods for making foreign language learning more efficient, especially ideas for using computational resources to improve the learning process. Sometimes this personal interest can be combined with professional activities :)! To this end I advised a bachelor's project to create a tool for people learning Dutch as a second language. Laurens Koelewijn created ``Colour your Dutch'', a program that colors words according to the frequency of their lemma in the CLEF corpus. Learning vocabulary according to their frequency is a simple but efficient way to maximize learning effort.
I was always annoyed that there weren't any easily accessible resources for frequency-based vocabulary learning in Japanese, but I recently found the following: Words from Japanese Newspapers in order of Frequency. Now if this could just be combined with a Iphone flash card program...