Academic blogging

[see: Rob O'Toole]

Rob writes about why and how he uses Warwick Blogs for his academic work in his PhD in Philosophy. I have pulled out the following comments, as being ones I find insightful:

1. I do not want to risk getting involved with interactions that detract from my precious research time.
   
2. I also do not want to have to spend much time managing these interactions.
   
3. I need to have interactions with other philosophers in which we can share concepts, terminology, interests, entities, but without always directly engaging in a debate. We need to know each others territories and directions of movement, and know how to connect with them when required. We need to be able to pass around, try out and develop new concepts, without always having a direct debate about them.
   
4. The problem is 1) to avoid isolation, with my research becoming irrelevant and obscure; 2) to avoid getting involved in debates and misunderstandings that detract from my own research development.
   
   In short, we need to constitute a collective 'milieu' in which our own individual developments may occur.

Wrt management of unwelcome or banal comments Rob says It seems that the overhead of this extra commitment outweighs the milieu building power of blogs. First of all he makes a distinction between:

1. entries that I have written simply to position myself within the milieu;
   
2. and those in which I am looking for a more direct response.
   

Rob is either making statements, or Rob is inviting comments. He doesn't allow commenting in the first example, and will include an email link with an invitation for readers to email him if they have anything interesting to say. The second example is given open comment permissions, but ends with definite guidance as to what kind of responses he is after.

[tag: community]