In this Quantified Self podcast three university educators who've spent years teaching people how to use their own data to explore their own questions join me, Gary Wolf, for an unrehearsed, half-hour conversation about what it actually takes to teach personal science. Guests: Sara Riggare, Uppsala University; Thomas Blomseth Christiansen, cofounder of TOTTI Labs; and Martijn de Groot, managing director of Health Innovation Labs at Radboud University Medical Center.

A few highlights:

Sara, on what she's actually giving students and patients: "My role is to give them permission. For the community people, permission to think for themselves; in the university course, permission to think of themselves."

Martijn, on the "essence" of personal science: "You make structured observations, and the data that represents those observations shows something to yourself that is valuable for you — not necessarily for the rest of the world."

Thomas, walking through how a vague interest becomes a manageable project: "My area of interest could be my pollen allergies. Within that area, a question could be, 'What are the dynamics of my sneezes during pollen season?' And in there, there's a phenomenon, which is sneezes."

Nine tips for teaching personal science:

Start with concrete examples, not theory.

Give students explicit permission to ask "small" questions.

Workshop each student's question before tracking starts.

Keep the tracking period short — even just a few days.

Use freshly collected data, not existing historical or wearable data.

Cap written reports at a page to a page and a half.

Build in a peer show-and-tell where students explain their project out loud.

Address the epistemological differences between personal science and biomedicine, public health, and other group-oriented research.

Be permissive about the tools students use to turn data into an artifact — pen and paper included.

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MORE LINKS

PSRG (Personal Science Research Group)

Sara Riggare

Thomas Blomseth Christiansen / TOTTI Labs

Martijn de Groot

QS Show & Tell archive

The book