2019 blog review
Martin Weller,
The Ed Techie,
Dec 20, 2019
I'm generally pretty comfortable with Martin Weller's writing, whether in blog or journal article form. But this bit rubs me the wrong way: "working in academia, blogging performs a different function for me – I write research papers and books which is the place for the carefully argued work. My blog felt like an antidote to that in a way – a place to put out half baked ideas and quick posts that are knocked off in-between other things." My first (very unfair) thought was, "well, that's a bit snobbish."
For my own part, I don't care where I publish - I've written more publications this year because my employer, after years of not caring and even discouraging publication, is now counting them as team research deliverables. But my best bits might be found anywhere. The other bit is that I don't think of my ideas as half or fully baked. The idea is what it is, and the crust that forms around it is more often than not some sort of rationalization after the fact. Each to their own, I guess, but in a career where I've read hundreds of thousands of articles (and highlighted 30,000 of them in this newsletter) I would never assume that the best and most fully-formed ideas are found in academic articles or in books - and that this is a prejudice that academia would do well to correct sooner rtaher than later,
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