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 =)

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.

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.

Michael Lenczner has launched a barnraising effort around the idea of listing Montreal academics who blog (and non-academics who blog academically).

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.

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.

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…