Yulblogging academics part 2
Okay, so that went well :-) There are 20 entries, but more interestingly than that it was picked up by two people and at least 5 people added or changed their info on the wiki page without me contacting them.
Hmm. Maybe we’re on to something here.
I forgot to mention in the last post why I’m doing this. I’m very curious about the tension between publication and blogging for post-grad students. I wonder about the possibilities for collaborative learning for undergrads and grads. I would love to discuss more whether blogging is a destabilizing force in the strict hierachy of academia. And mainly it really pisses me off that I don’t know other people *right in montreal* that are into the same stuff as me (that’s the reason I started IleSansFil - because I wanted friends that were into opensource and activism). I am amazed at the lack of social networking that exists inter- and even intra-universities in the same city. The first step towards any of us working together, having a discussion, or supporting each other is getting to know each other.
Nico said that he would help me, so the first step we have to take is cleaning up the page, making it bilingual, and trying to track down some more university bloggers. I know that there are a ton of them that aren’t currently blogging about their subject, but maybe they would if there was audience and a way to receive feedback.
I asked Seb some questions about how to display / share academic’s relevant posts (ie: not the entries where they talk about their girlfriends/boyfriends/pets). He suggested either building build a group feed out of everyone’s RSS feeds (too much info) or using topicexchange (too little info because we’re all too lazy/forgetfull to manually enter trackback pings for each relevant post.
So then I went back and bugged him about rss feeds for categories and / or automating trackback pings for certain categories. So if someone has a category called “work” or “sociology” I would want their blog to automatically ping the a certain topicexchange trackback url every time they post to that category. Or, I would want them to make an RSS feed available for that category and then splice them.
So what I have to find out now is how many of the blogging tools have these capabilities. MT does both of them (link 1, 2).
Wordpress can do the trackback thing.
However, most people don’t use MT or WP (well, looking over the list most people do host their own. However there are lots of blogspots).We would need blogger and livejournal to support this. Well, maybe not livejournal ;p
. . . . researching blogspot . . . What a second, those poor fools over at blogspot don’t even *have* categories! What the freak are we going to do now? sigh.
I’m going to put my pea-sized (when it comes to web-devel) intellect to work on this. If any of you have ideas, or know more about blogspot please post.
December 2nd, 2004 at 9:55 pm
i guess i will put myself out there on this one, since i have not been much of a cheerleader on this topic, as you and i have discussed many times.
I think there is a line between sharing ideas and having a productive banter about each topic of interest. This definition of ‘academic blogging’ would be great. As we have discussed before, i would love someone to discuss my research interests with.
I think where my line is drawn is posting actual works in progress or finished papers that have potential for future use (idea mining). Although i would welcome productive critique, I do fear some of the academic ‘borrowing’ of ideas without proper referencing at least. I know that on the one hand, academia can be about an open and intellectually stimulating environment, but it is also a ‘publish or perish’ environment for some who want to stay in academia as a profession.
I have recently had a negative experience in this light.
All negativity aside, i was happy to look through the list, checking out what other ppl’s topics were - knowing that there was a potential to actually hook up with some of these people for drinks and a great chat.
If there is anything i can do to help out Mike, just let me know =)
December 2nd, 2004 at 11:26 pm
My idea of blogging is about looking out what’s new in my field, presenting or discussing stuff i see, papers, receiving insights from others, etc. or just use it as a sort of memory for my poor brain. Sometimes i may post ideas, but i believe people can’t steal my work starting with only one idea i have … I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing a “request for comment” on my blog for example.
I see the list as a potential community of research, where people can exchange about what they do. Furthermore, that could lead to a reflection on the tool iteself : what are we doing with our blogs? what are the main uses of it?
There’s many things we could discuss as students with interests, and as blog users too.
Anyway, i’ll be glad to help at organizing this, even if my technical habilities are very limited for now.
December 4th, 2004 at 7:20 am
Wait. There is another way. First you splice all the feeds, then you filter the resulting feed by keyword (using e.g. Bloglines), looking for the magic word “YULacademics”.
Then if anyone wants their post to show in your aggregator they just have to use the magic word somewhere in the post.
This works for any blogging tool that provides a feed.
December 10th, 2004 at 7:15 pm
A list of Montreal academic blogs
Michael Lenczner has launched a barnraising effort around the idea of listing Montreal academics who blog (and non-academics who blog academically).
December 10th, 2004 at 11:48 pm
Seb just linked to this entry so I better put an update. Nico and I talked today and we’re going to meet next week to discuss the next step.
I’m pretty optimistic about at least organizing a get-together to meet and to discuss some of the issues that have been raised sometime next term - maybe have a parallel meeting as the Yulblog meetings? Maybe we’ll wait until then to decide on setting up splicing / trackbacking / meta-blogging / etc. Whatever we setup should be a response to the wishes of the people concerned.
December 13th, 2004 at 2:37 pm
i have been doing a lot of research recently for a writing project (on paleontology), and I got much of my info from the web. got me to thinking about free software/creative commons issues.
Often I was taking work (written facts about paleontology), reworking them and rewriting them. But recent IP debates are going in the direction of patenting knowledge itself (expressly banned for now in US copyright law). That is I can see a move towards law which says in order to write “fossilized feathered dinosaurs prove conclusively that birds are in fact surviving dinosaurs,” I could have to get the rights to that idea from the owner (the original paleontologist, the university he worked for, or the publisher of the original work).
Seems crazy, but that’s the general direction now.
At the same time, technology has advanced to such a degree that ALL information should be available to everybody, free.
When I was in university , textbooks for each science course cost in the range of $100 a pop; the publishers changed a few pages here and there every 2 yrs, published a new version, with the problem sets all rearranged, so you had to get a new one, not a used one. ridiculous then, more so now with the internet.
so I started putting my newfound paleontology knowledge onto wikipedia.org … to give back. and plan (vaguely) to put the kernel in place for a wikibook on paleontology.
so, back to blogging, it fits in with the notion that ideas should be free — kelly’s concerns about attribution are a sad reality of a knowledge system that doesn’t really make sense with new technologies. Ideas and knowledge should be free and available, not controlled by publishiong houses or universities who decide how much you have to pay to get access to them. seems to me, once you give up the need to “own” your ideas, you are fulfilling the idea behind academics (or at least the 18th-20th century idea). This does not discout the problem of having to work in a certain system where this kind of thinking is counter to the whole set-up. whew.
December 16th, 2004 at 5:15 am
Carnetiers universitaires de MontrÈal
Via SÈbastien Paquet, cette belle initiative de Michael Lenczner de crÈer un rÈpertoire des carnetiers universitaires de MontrÈal. La concentration de carnetiers par domaine et par rÈgion est un moyen puissant de faire dÈborder líexpertise dans la comm…