Serendipity in Blogging
The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article today that highlights a fortuitous, yet unplanned, outcome for an academic who maintains a academic blog.
In a moment of reflection he published his thoughts on a mutant plant gene and went on about his day. But as the Chronicle continues:
“Six months later a plant geneticist at the University California at Davis contacted Mr. Cartwright after reading his post. The California researcher said that he had coincidentally arrived at the same hypothesis offered by Mr. Cartwright, and that he was about to publish his research in Plant Cell. The plant geneticist said he felt obligated to acknowledge Mr. Cartwright’s blog post and offered to make him a co-author of his article. Mr. Cartwright, who is not a plant geneticist, accepted the offer.”
Blogs are quick to publish, quick to edit, widely distributed, and easily accessible by millions and millions of people. In an academic sense this means the scale and scope of potential for collaboration is incredible. They key is how to effectively harness this capacity and utilise it to its fullest potential.
Given academic blogging is still relatively under the radar in higher education it may be a while yet before wide-spread collaboration will occur via social software. Yet there is little doubt in my mind that there is tremendous opportunity and value that should be investigated across the academic spectrum.
A commentor named Richard Tabor Greene perhaps put it more eloquently when he said:
“Blogs are privately published publicly available such ruminations—and if we measure their impact—they open up for diversity and collaborative enhancement early stages of thought hithertofore much more laboriously and slowly opened to much lesser degrees to thought. Now global audiences can diversify greatly entirely local blog publishings of ruminations. This is a great step for humankind, overall, in this way.”
