July 13th, 2005
I read an article written by "Ivan Tribble" (a pseudonym) over at the Chronicle. Ivan was part of a committee, at a small college, looking to hire a new professor. It just so happened that a couple of the people vying for the position also had web logs. Ivan's argument is that the majority of web logs are highly innapropriate for someone to get a job with - and that may be the case. However, one person, in particular, caught my eye:
Professor Turbo Geek's blog had a presumptuous title that was easy to overlook, as we see plenty of cyberbravado these days in the online aliases and e-mail addresses of students and colleagues.
But the site quickly revealed that the true passion of said blogger's life was not academe at all, but the minutiae of software systems, server hardware, and other tech exotica. It's one thing to be proficient in Microsoft Office applications or HTML, but we can't afford to have our new hire ditching us to hang out in computer science after a few weeks on the job.
Now, I have a real problem with this. It seems as if the position that this person is going for is not immediately related to technology, which is fine. However, Ivan seems to think that simply because this person has a web log that discusses technology, that he would immediately run off to another part of campus. Can't a person's hobbies be different from their profession? If a person had a web log dedicated to cooking, writing, politics, or philosophy - would that person immediately run off to be with people of a similar interest? The whole notion that having interests that aren't inline with your profession, and being vocal about them on the Internet, is a negative attribute is ludacrous.
Tags: academic, business, blog, blogging, blogs, research
1 Comment on 'Blogging is a 'Problem''
March 9th, 2005
Yet another social networking site popped up on my radar yesterday, so I decided to take a look at it. It's called Academici, in theory it's a social networking site for Academic-related work. However, what it actually is is something much poorer, and more useless.
In a nutshell: You can only provide a scant amount of business contact information and virtually no, actual, critical academic information. And to do anything remotely useful, that's when it's time to shell out the cash. I was grossly dissapointed with this site. However, what I would like to discuss is my vision of a good academic social networking site. Here are some of the most critical features:
- Papers - You can provide a form to post papers. It would be nice to be able to: Upload the paper, provide the abstract, authors, where it was accepted to (optional), title, papers that it cites, etc. Much of this could probably be done automatically from a latex file.
- Citations - Having a network based upon citations would be very powerful - you could see not only what papers cite other papers but who cites other people. You could begin to see these other networks form and possibly the people who are at the head of their field.
- Collaboration - Being able to collaborate with other academics on papers and projects would be critical. Listing your skills, research groups that you've been with, and work that you're looking to do would be an excellent start towards this.
- Groups - Being able to set up research groups/corporations would be really interesting. You could see everyone who is in the (in my case) Data Mining Research Group, or everyone who was in that group. That alone would be very powerful as you could see where people might get some of their influence from.
These are just a few suggestions that I've been able to think of off the top of my head and I can tell that I'm only just scratching the surface. This really needs to be explored further. Maybe in the form of a fun side project?
Tags: academic, networking, social
3 Comments on 'Academic Social Networking'
