ohohlfeld.com : blog
There is a tendency of more and more people from academia getting involved in blogging and thus provide valuable and interesting insights into their daily life as researchers. Christian Spannagel, assistant professor at PH Ludwigsburg, is an researcher who can be considered as an open scientist. Open scientists intend to make processes more transparent to the public, e.g. by blogging about interesting things. Similar to the idea of open scientists, there is also a tendency of having “open teaching“. Christian Spannagel is an ardent advocate of this method and opens up his teaching philosophy to the public where he wants to reflect his teaching methods, discussions and feedback of talks and classes.
I’m happy to see that others follow a similar path and provide more insight into their courses. Course CS263: Wireless Sensor Networks, which is a graduate seminar held in the spring term 2009 at Harvard University by Matt Welch, is covered by an official blog to post notes and musings of papers discussed in the class. The blog is highly interesting as it makes discussions within a seminar public. Speaking from my own experience, students come up with lots of interesting musings during discussions on a particular paper which are normally “lost” but are archived and published in this way.
It would be great if these examples would catch on, e.g. by having more reports on scientific conferences. As one example I would like to mention the NSDI’07 blog coverage.
Reference:
- Harvard CS263 Blog
- Blogging as a research project (about the course blog)
German blog posts on the concept of an open scientist:
