Rough Theory

For folks at my university, there will be a panel session tomorrow on “Online Tools for Building Research Networks”. Different presenters will be discussing the internal DLS system, Facebook, developing a research project website, and academic blogging. I’ve been tagged for the blogging presentation – but, chances are, if you’re seeing this announcement here, you know everything you want to know about blogging in general, and this blog in particular (when I was invited to present, I was told: “Don’t prepare anything special – just show them your blog!” Yeah right…). But if you want to show up and heckle, correct the grandiose claims I’ll no doubt make about what I write here, or similar, feel free – perhaps it will give a live performance version of what blogging is really like.

My thought was to hand out copies of the Ivan Tribble anti-blogging article and my response (although I’ve loosened up a lot on blogging since I wrote that piece…). For fun, I thought I might also toss in Adam Kotsko’s diagnosis of the medium – and perhaps pair this with something that gives a sense of the more productive cross-blog discussions that sometimes range around, although the more productive the discussion, the more difficult it is to show this briefly… I’m tempted to show them some of the results from Scott Eric Kaufman’s unintentional experiment in using the blogosphere for methodological feedback…

I would also like to hand out something simple that gives people the basics about how to find academic blogs specifically, how to set up a blog if they want to give it a try, etc. I’m hoping there’s something lovely and pre-made that I can stumble across in the next 24 hours, rather than making something myself…

The session will be held in the Research Lounge (entrance across from Swanston Library in Building 8 level 5), from 3:00-4:30. There seems to be some rumour about going to the pub after…