Chris Rowan is a geologist specialising in the dark arts of paleomagnetism, and getting people to pay him to travel to exotic destinations for fieldwork. Having drilled up New Zealand during his PhD, and South Africa in his first post-doc, he now works at the University of Edinburgh.
Anne Jefferson has a love of all things water-related and blends hydrology, geomorphology, geology, and climate change in her work. She has a Ph.D. from Oregon State University and is now an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.Janet is about to submit her tenure dossier, a three ring binder which simultaneously manages to look imposingly thick and yet a rather flimsy thing on which to hang your academic destiny. It also has an interesting addition: a section on academic blogging, with her department not only consenting but actively encouraging her to do so:
My department has been quite insistent that the blogging I do here does constitute a kind of scholarly activity that ought to be recognized. They think that communicating philosophy to a wider audience is A Good Thing. So, a colleague wrote an evaluative letter about a selection of posts, and that letter and the posts are included in the dossier.
This is an agreeably enlightened perspective; it's nice to know that I'm not alone in feeling that for a University, sharing knowledge with the outside world should be just as important as generating it is, if not more so. Perhaps my online activities will be viewed in a similarly positive light in the future. At this juncture, however, my personal experience is mixed: whilst I haven't gone out of my way to publicise this blog amongst my friends and colleagues, a number have stumbled across it by various means, and their reactions have ranged from enthusiasm to vague bemusement. More tellingly, I have noticed a degree of inverse correlation between age and enthusiasm - in other words, the people most likely to be populating tenure boards are also the ones most likely to see blogging as a distracting waste of time.
Of course, should I ever get to the stage where I'm compiling my own version of Janet's dossier, it's a fair number of years down the line, and the situation may change. In the meantime, let's hope that Janet's university do the bleedingly obvious thing, and ask her to stay.
Education & Careers
Comments
Make that two -- Greta's department is very encouraging about Cognitive Daily.
Posted by: Dave Munger | September 26, 2007 8:30 AM
I've had a similar experience with my blog, Chris. A handful of people say "Oh, that's cool!" and actually look at it, but most professors and staff that I've tried to explain it to have given me the impression they consider it a waste of time. Of course many of my professors are probably far too busy with papers, research, and other duties to take much of an interest, but it does seem that the younger generation in academia is far friendlier to blogging about science.
Posted by: Laelaps | September 26, 2007 9:07 AM
I think my experiences are similar to yours, Chris. My supervisors ignore my blog and show no interest in reading it. My fellow palaeontology students within the research group probably think it's a waste of time or ignore it too. The only person ever to have commented on my blog who doesn't have one of their own is my dad. But I've had complete strangers coming up to me and telling me how much they love reading it.
But I suspect the opinion at Birkbeck/UCL/Natural History Museum is that it's distracting me from working and it serves no useful purpose.
Posted by: Julia | September 26, 2007 9:11 AM
Wow. It's a little spooky how two palaeontologist bloggers decide to comment at exactly the same time with almost exactly the same opening sentence...
Posted by: Chris Rowan | September 26, 2007 10:47 AM
Creepy... maybe there's some paleontology hive-mind that I've not yet been made aware of...
Posted by: Laelaps | September 26, 2007 11:13 AM
Maybe something to do with the Triffid/Cephalopod overlords?
Posted by: Fnord Prefect | September 26, 2007 11:20 AM
My college's administration has a decidedly negative view of blogs. Our institution is trying to streamline tenure/promotion rules, and our department has been discussing conditions for promotion to full professor. (We are all tenured, as of two years ago.) I asked the president and the dean about the role of communicating with non-scientists, and the president's answer was NO. Peer-reviewed journal articles, yes. Non-science faculty could have books for the general public (including novels) considered, but science faculty needed to publish in science journals (or science pedagogy journals). Period. No exceptions. And blogs would never, ever be considered as scholarly activity, not for anyone in any department.
This, by the way, is not a research university. This is an undergraduate college. We teach 12 credit hours per semester, and do not have graduate students or teaching assistants to help with labs. In fact, our institution is not nearly as well-respected as San Jose State. So... the attitudes may vary by institution, and not just by institution type.
I took the link to my blog off of my work web page, but I'm not going to stop blogging. I'm tenured. And I think that communicating with the general public is important - if we don't communicate with non-specialists, we are doomed to be misunderstood.
Is science useful if nobody but scientists understand it?
Posted by: Kim | September 26, 2007 12:40 PM
I definitely agree that communicating science to the public is an important part of what it means to be an academic scientist (at least it should be an important part). But I'm not convinced it's scholarly activity - instead, I think of science blogging as a form of service.
Posted by: ScienceWoman | September 26, 2007 12:52 PM
Forget blogging! Get involved in all those nuclear plants trying to pop up everywhere. Find more faults under nuclear waste sites! That's where the real action is! :) The curse of the 'old boys' will run its natural course, although they are raising them from the 'Home' for the new nuclear plants...
Posted by: Harold Asmis | September 26, 2007 4:02 PM
Chris - did you see this?
Posted by: Kim | September 27, 2007 9:50 PM
Just wanted to add my 2 cents. As a postdoctoral fellow at the NCI, my supervisors would no doubt consider blogging to be a waste of time. Heck, they consider career development seminars paid for by the NCI admins a waste of time. Ha! nonetheless, I'm new to blogging myself but most everyone I've shared my blog with has been supportive; especially if they are younger scientists. The one or two more senior PI's who know that I am blogging have had the same response: "You should be learning new techniques and reading papers, not writing about them". Nonetheless, I have already seen my own blog prove to be useful, even in its infancy. I'm now in contact with two people in my field who I would have never otherwise been in touch with; all because they googled something and somehow managed to land on my blog page.
Nice blog Chris.
Posted by: Jonathan | November 8, 2007 11:45 AM