France excels at R&D, but Academia is overdue for disruption

Re:France excels at R&D, but Academia is overdue for disruption by CJefferson on Wednesday May 09, 2012 @10:09AM (#3948617)

I feel one big thing that the "cool" (as opposed to us 'uncool' academics) can miss is that good research is hard. It is common to spend months on topics on areas that don't work out, and years on topics that do. It doesn't fit the modern high-speed of the internet, and it doesn't fit in 140 characters.

And of course, most research isn't particularly interesting to people outside a fairly small area. I might come up with a new way of doing something important in my research area 50 times faster than we did it before, but explaining what I did struggles to fit in 15 pages, never mind 140 characters. Personally I can't imagine what interesting research related-comment you could fit in a tweet. Then again, I've never got twitter (which isn't something I'm proud of -- sufficiently many people are using it that I am sure I'm missing something.. just not sure what).

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Re:France excels at R&D, but Academia is overdue for disruption by sb on Wednesday May 09, 2012 @10:45AM (#3948796)

Agreed. Besides the length issue of a tweet (which don't apply to blog posts, as we all know from Steve Yegge) I also think that there is no incentive for a researcher to participate in the social web--at least none that I can think of. Actually, quite the contrary is true: yesterday's post on academic blogs linked to the "serious engineering" blog, which contains the following line in a post about time management:

  Do not read blogs and above all do not write them.

AFAIR, Matt Might had a somewhat different point of view, where he elaborates on strategies how to publish blog posts out of presentations, etc. To me the social web compares very well with the TV on the time-sink scale: you save a lot of time by not doing it.

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Re:France excels at R&D, but Academia is overdue for disruption by nernst on Wednesday May 09, 2012 @12:42PM (#3949351)

I'm fairly sure that line from Anthony Finkelstein is tongue-in-cheek.

Like any profession, academia is about networking. Social media can really help here, and I think academics are slowly understanding this. There are two problems: blogging/tweeting are lower priority than grant-writing, teaching, marking, and paper-writing; and academics are usually older and (in my experience) older people don't 'do' social media as much.

But in software engineering, at least, there is a good community of people on social media. For example, the Never Work In Theory blog (of which I'm an author), and various academics on twitter, like @profserious or @avandeursen.

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