Forskningsblogger ikke helt vellykket …

Forskning.no har startet med blogger, og et knippe bloggere er invitert til å bidra. Jill Walker , landets mest kjente og i alle fall mest kompetente vitenskapelige blogger har kikket på bidragene, og hun er ikke særlig positiv, for å si det mildt. Les analysen hennes her. Her er hennes råd til Forskning.no.

1. Run a small seminar for the invited bloggers or at least sent out some guidelines explaining what blogging is. (Perhaps this was done: if so I’d love to see the guidelines.)
2. Tell bloggers to use links!
3. Foster a conversation. Ask guest bloggers to at least sometimes respond to each other’s posts rather than write with no context. If staff members are blogging too, they should be particularly active in this, especially in the beginning when you’re just starting to build a community.
4. Set up a technical system that makes linking easy, and where trackbacks work. Such a system should alert your bloggers to posts on other blogs that reference their post so that it’s easy for your blogger to respond either in the other blog or in a new post on your blog.
5. Insist that if readers respond to a blog post, the blogger should ANSWER, especially if their post, like that of the professor of physiotherapy, is about how blogs tend to be monologues and you hate mumbling monologues.
6. Pay bloggers. The professor of physiotherapy notes that this, like so many other outreach activities, is unpaid yet not really counted as “work” by the university. Seriously, if you expect researchers to put all this work into contributing content, they should be paid the same as a freelancer would be.
7. Correct typos and fix links and images shortly after a post is published (I’m assuming bloggers publish directly; as all posts are timestamped at 5 or 6 am this may not (but should) be the case.) Show the same professionality in proofreading the blog posts as with other articles on the site. If you want the blog to add value to the site you have to take it seriously and treat it with the same professionality as the rest of the site.
8. To start such a venture off well, make sure all or most of the first guest bloggers are experienced bloggers. This will create a foundation for future posts. Researchers who have never blogged or read blogs have no idea how to do it and need role models and examples.

Jeg synes hun har helt rett, og jeg synes også det er synd at ikke flere ved univseritetene er aktive bloggere. Dette er en fin måte å formidle både fag på, relatere faget til samfunnsaktuelle diskusjoner og problemstillinger, og ikke minst gjøre kollegaer i stand til å skjønne hva vi egentlig driver med, hva vi er opptatt av, hvilke nettverk vi inngår i.

Men slikt samarbeid har jo universitetene ingen tradisjon for, så det blir kanskje ingen enkel endring?