Mick Cope has written a book on professional networking of which two chapters are online.
These chapters read without effort, but they aren't vacuous and the
material is quite convincing. Useful for anyone, really. It could serve
as a prelude to Phil Agre's cheesecake-heavy Networking on the Network.
One key motivation for maintaining a network is captured in this quote from chapter 1: "The
strength of a wideband professional network is that it gives access to
deep and tacit knowledge across a range of areas that you could never
hope to touch, understand or gain access to." In other words, it makes you smarter.
And if you need a network in a hurry, here's a quote from chapter 1 that provides a bit of perspective: "The time to think about your network is probably up to two or three years before you are likely to need it." Interestingly, I was chatting with Rob Paterson
just this morning and I think he said he was happy he had done exactly
that before leaving the bank where he worked, so that the move felt
like walking from one boat to another instead of diving into cold water.
"WebCT, Blackboard, and other
e-learning and course management systems are expensive propositions. I
would guess that any institution looking to deploy these systems on a
large scale will be spending upwards of £15,000 or more for
installation, and similar figures for support contracts. These support
contracts do not cover extension of the software in critical ways to
better enable their effective use in a given learning environment. In
our case, we have no way to programmatically access the WebCT grade
book, email system, discussion fora, or any other aspect of the system
from our e-learning tool, which exists largely outside of WebCT itself."
[...] We believe there are few benefits to the community at large by
investing in closed or proprietary solutions, especially when viable,
open solutions exist. A course management solution like Moodle would have eliminated any
question of whether our investment of integration effort would be
possible (as we could easily use Moodle's extensibility to our
advantage) and valuable (as we would leverage one freely available
educational product against another).
David Brake raises interesting questions about academic weblog ranking schemes,
some of which readily generalize in one direction to PageRank and
related web ranking schemes, and in the other to citation analysis in
academic
publishing. What do citation tallies indicate, really? Value? Perceived
value? Inbound attention? Are they taken seriously? What happens when
they are?
A few years back,
Jean-Claude Guédon wrote In Oldenburg’s Long Shadow, a well-researched and insightful piece on
scientific publishing; of particular relevance here is chapter 6 which discusses the birth and rise of citation indexing
and describes what happened when the Institute of Scientific
Information (ISI)'s Science Citation Index (SCI) became a means for
university librarians to
decide which publications their budget-challenged institution would
keep and which ones they would unsubscribe from. Choice
quote:
In mapping the citation patterns among the articles
of these journals, ISI had purported to create a new bibliographic tool; however,
in pragmatically limiting its citation analysis device to a selected number
of "core" journals, ISI had really constructed a knowledge or scientific
space located somewhere between excellence and elitism. Excellence has to do
with quality; elitism with value. In introducing elitist components into the
scientific quest for excellence, SCI partially subverted the meaning of the
science game.
Read the whole thing, it's really good.
To connect this with weblogs, note that each of us has a limited amount
of attention and seeks to spend it effectively. Fortunately the vastly
lower cost and flexibility of open Web content means we are in a better
position than university librarians: we have the luxury of making
completely individual choices as to which content we will follow.
So, which weblogs are worth reading for a researcher? It's an important
and complicated question. Let me make a few observations. On one hand,
it is important to be aware of what everybody else is aware of. There's
a fair chance that the best way to do this is to follow the popular
weblogs. On the other hand, innovation occurs at the edges. So if you
want to make a contribution of your own, you're unlikely to be able to
if you spend all your time in the core.
But the edge is a huge expanse, and the collective intelligence
manifest in general rankings doesn't help you a lot in picking one of
the many directions available. This is where your personal
characteristics have to enter the picture. Based on what
(little) you know about yourself, you have to insert yourself in the
network in a spot where you can learn and contribute. No one will tell
you where that spot lies; in all likeliness, no one has ever been to
that particular spot. The challenge can be frightening, or exciting, or
both; but as far as I'm concerned it is one of the most rewarding
activities a researcher can face.
I guess I could sum up my thesis thus: if you're on a Quest for the Really New, you shouldn't act as if link rank is everything.
Great quote found on Doc Searls' blog (via danah): "RSS is opt-in authenticated email."
It can be other things too, but this is one key facet, very
economically summed up. I'd be tempted to append "with permanent
links". That would make the picture a bit harder to grasp, though.
