Stanley Milgram sent postcards, Scott Eric Kaufman tracks the spread of a meme across the bloggosphere in an experiment that will be presented at the MLA conference. Kaufman wants to evaluate in what way weblogs
affords scholars the opportunity to easily and enthusiastically cross heretofore closely guarded disciplinary boundaries. Furthermore, it enables academics within increasingly balkanized disciplines to reconnect without necessitating a return of the generalist.
Interesting, and you can join Kaufman’s experiment by doing this:
- Write a blog post with a link to this post on Kaufman’s blog.
- Ask your readers to do the same. Do it! Now! Think of all the poor graduate students out there, for example Scott Eric Kaufman, and their desperate need of data for their research, think of their excel sheets that need to be filled and their diagrams that badly need datapoints, and realize that you - yes, you! - can make a difference and help them, at the same time advancing research. Halleluja!
- Ping Technorati.
“Flickr already provides all the tools the typical faculty member needs”, Edwired concludes an interesting discussion on the use of Flickr in teaching. I agree, the tools are there and the collection of images is really great and tagged and everything.
I really like this web2.0-meets-education development as an alternative to learning management systems, and have been using blogs and del.icio.us in my teaching for years. Once I understood that the thing was to not only post myself to the course blog but also have the students blogging and del.icio.us-tagging during their paperwriting, interesting things started to happen, I think. Soon, some colleagues and I will host a workshop on blogs and similar technologies in teaching and research.
Only, there’s this slightly uneasy feeling I get about using a tool that is free but not open and that charges you extra for things like making your collection private. Personally, I would like to see alternatives to the Yahoo-owned Flickr, perhaps driven by academics, built on top of archive.org or something similar.
Been reading the new volume of Osiris, now a free bonus with the HSS membership/ISIS subscription; titled Global Power Knowledge: Science and Technology in International Affairs, editors John Krige and Kai-Henrik Barth have drawn together papers that address the fact that, as they state in the introduction, science and technology “play a significant role in international affairs”, but historians of S&T have been reluctant “to situate their studies in a broader historical context or to build bridges with opther disciplines (and vice versa).” (3-4).
Be that as it may, the papers I’ve consulted so far open up interesting views, not the least for me, finishing, as I am, papers on Swedish solar physics in an IGY context and the organization of food science (for an anthology on the welfare & warfare theme in Swedish history of S&T).
Anyway, here I sit reading John Krige’s paper on Atoms for peace and I stretch for my Powerbook to check out what’s on archive.org and, of course, there shows up six movies on the subject.
Next time I lecture on the cold war and science, some of these films will end up on the course blog.
Dan Cohen writes on why academics should blog. Especially, I like how he relates an idea from Paul Bushkovitch, who had argued that the key to being a successful scholar is to become completely obsessed with a topic, which, after a while, makes you into what others perceive of as an expert. This, according to Cohen, can take place on a blog.
Echoes, thus, of Alex Soojung-Kim Pang’s ideas about why we blog. Transparency and trust. There, Pang also relates to the skill component in blogging; it is a way of training, and he compares it to speed chess.
I like Howard S. Becker’s Writing for social scientists: How to start and finish your thesis, book or article and his idea of lowering the thresholds on writing by writing often (and talking about your research all the time). Becker, at least to judge from his homepage, is definitely from the pre-blog era, but I think some of his ideas about writing are applicable to blogging and blogging’s relation to scholarly work in general.
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