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post-turkey reflections 
11.28.2005, 1:32 PM
Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. Still pondering how we might want to proceed here.
We just wanted to check in on how people's thinking has progressed over the past few weeks. Various threads have been picked up elsewhere in promising ways. Daniel Anderson, an english professor at UNC who we've talked with a bit, linked to our discussions here on the Techrhet listserv:
There is a good deal of momentum and conversation related to the role of public intellectuals taking place around the Institute for the Future of the Book. See their Sidebar blog. A lot of that energy seems to be directed toward thinking through models for peer review and cooperative archiving/legitimizing of these new forms but concepts such as the reputation economy associated with these efforts seem to overlap with notions of ethos.
We're curious to know what else is brewing, and in hearing from everyone about other related conversations you may be having elsewhere. There is no reason to confine this to the original meeting participants. Anyone who hasn't yet taken a look at John Holbo's proposal on The Valve for a Thinkr-esque initiative should do so (and a similar project is getting underway here). We're definitely interested in something like this happening, but are unsure whether it is the right sort of thing for us to sponsor directly. In some ways, we feel that a project of this kind will have the best chances of success if it arises organically among academics, with us just providing sympathetic support and consultation. Then again, we recognize the problem of funding. We're interested to hear reactions to John's proposal and any other ideas you might be toying with.
Two concerns have come up repeatedly in our discussions. One is how to raise the status of blogging as a scholarly activity within the academy. The second is how to use blogging, or something like it, to connect academics to the public sphere. As a sort of in-between institution, we think the second area is probably where we have the most to offer. As much as we would like to see blogging taken more seriously by tenure review committees, we feel the importance of scholarly blogging is in large part a function of its slightly oppositional stance. So independence and connection with a general readership are to us the paramount objectives: "marshaling and re-deploying intellectual capital." We're still thinking about this "Magnum" collective idea, as well as possible ways that academics might tie their blogs to specific research or book projects.
These are just some thoughts. What else is cooking?
Posted by ben vershbow at November 28, 2005 1:32 PM
Comments
Wednesday before Thanksgiving I took my dean on a tour of the blogworld of education. She was interested and had a couple of concerns and some good ideas.
First, she thought it was fairly unstructured, for better and worse. In education, looseness in thinking is a problem already, and we're looking for ways to encourage more rigor without losing discussion.
Second, she was quite interested in the communities of thought growing up organically around teaching practice. Practitioners sharing their knowledge and work without the structures of buildings, meetings, etc. She was equally interested that outsiders were engaging in discussion with practitioners, scholars, policymakers.
Finally, she and I talked about a scholarly journal that would have some kind of revised peer review, but also have a web discussion component. I might be a form that would allow for the publication of the highly detailed research, plus an accessible, executive summary piece that would be on a blog-like area and open to debate. It would serve to supply for the researchers and scholars the details of the work, while helping make transparent the work to those without the time or inclination to wade through statistical models.
I was pleased by her interest in this, and I think we'll have more discussions.
Posted by: JennyD at November 28, 2005 2:12 PM
Jenny, you might want to show the dean the University of Minnesota "Into the Blogosphere" collection. It does what she indicates she wants to happen.
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/
Chris
Posted by: Chris Boese at December 7, 2005 1:55 AM