Talk on institutional blogging at the Max Planck Digital Library
I’ve been wrestling with several papers and the associated deadlines during the last few days, but all is well and under control now. On Wednesday I visited the Max Planck Digital Library - the Porsche of German public library & information services shops - to do a presentation on institutional blogging.
As usual, here are the slides.
A few interesting questions were raised after the talk, such as how wikis and blogs relate to one another in an organizational context and how researchers use blogs. I think it depends on the organization and the task, but both blogs and wikis can (and should) certainly be used side by side. At least in my mind, wikis are a little more information-centric, whereas blogs are more person-centric. Coherence and connectedness are essential in a wiki, whereas the structure in a blog is chronological and hard-coded. One item comes after the other and basically there is no assumption that there has to be a coherent structure at all, other than then one that is naturally imposed by time. This may mean more individual freedom to some and too little structure to others - it all depends on your personal point of view. I really can’t stress enough how extremely individual tastes are when it comes to information management. Blogs and wikis can both be used in great ways together and frankly I’m wondering more about those people and organizations that use neither than about those that use one of the two or both.Regarding researchers and blogs - the short answer, in my view, is that they don’t use them nearly enough. But then, from a purely egoistical point of view that’s nothing I should be complaining about. This morning I chatted with a good friend who uses blogs intensively for teaching at the university level. She started about a year ago and introduced all sorts of blog-based tasks into her students’ coursework. They absolutely love it. She’s a great teacher and using blogs has made her classes even more popular. Recently she was invited to do a course for educators on how to use blogs for teaching at another university. She is essentially an expert on the subject now, simply because she has recognized the potential of a new technology that many of her colleagues are still unaware of.
I don’t believe that education and science will change over night because of social software, simply because institutions are fairly resistant to change (people are). Often this isn’t because we’re lazy either, but because we see no need to meddle with a system that we think works. But of course the ways we learn and do research will change fundamentally in the next twenty years or so. Symptomatically, I just need to look at how I do research using Google Scholar, del.icio.us, Zotero and my blog and I can see the writing on the wall. I use these tools because they allow me to be better at what I do and others will eventually use them for the same reason. And who knows, maybe those of us who got into it early will have a little head start.