Blogging Hours
3The past few days, I’ve been back at Johns Hopkins, my alma mater. I was there giving a talk to their intersession class on Entrepreneurship (I’ve put up a PDF version of my slides, btw)
Afterwards, I got to see and talk with some of my old professors and it was great to talk with some of the best and brightest and catch up on their current work. They asked me what kinds of things they could do to (a) improve alumni relations, (b) improve or change the student experience, and (c) increase or enhance the reputation and knowledge sharing at the University.
I’ve been thinking about it, and I think I’ve got a suggestion:
Give every faculty member, graduate student, undergraduate, and employee at the university a blog.
If I had a million dollars to give to the university, I’d split it into $10,000 chunks and I’d make them available as grants to the 100 people that posted the most interesting, useful blogs during the school year. Make it a contest.
Imagine that – 100 members of the JHU community blogging daily. Some would talk about their current research, some would write about daily life, some would post poetry and writings, who knows. The conversation would be phenomenal. It would get national and local press. It would open an window to the entire world of the interests, knowledge, and thinkings of 100 of the world’s finest professors, students, and administrators in higher education today.
I think it would also start conversations. It would attract students to the school. As Doc likes to say, it would be arson. It would light fires of interest, collaboration, and involvement. Just spending 3 days down here, talking with some of the great people, I got intrigued by all the potential. I saw the stovepiped information pathways, the bureaucracy, and – to a person – everyone railed against it. Here’s an idea: Give the university a choir of voices. Make it easy for people to talk, easy to post. Imagine the connections that would happen just by doing a Google search, researchers across the world that could find each other. Throw away that old-fashioned quarterly newsletter, or even better – supplement it with the best of the conversations that these blogs start.
From an infrastructure perspective, it would cost almost nothing. An extra server or two. Training? Writing a blog has become point and click.
Heck, Lessig blogs. Reynolds blogs. When I think about Stanford, guess who I think of? When I think of the University of Tennessee, again, guess who? Imagine an entire faculty doing what these guys do. Wow. Office hours are from 2:30 to 4. Blogging hours are from 4 to 4:30.
The first university that gets serious about using blogs will create a huge impact in profile, research quality, cooperation, and collaboration both inside and outside of the university. The first one to do it will show its cluefulness. The value to the rest of us would be huge as well. I would bet it would end up increasing alumni giving as well.
The key thing is to create incentives for people to communicate. Go ahead, put up a disclamer on the blog pages, and get a blogging policy. But it is key to not punish people for publishing their thoughts. Don’t get PC. Trust the students. Trust the faculty. They will rise to the occasion. After all, they’re signing their names to the work.
I would read them, sure as hell.
God, that would be great.
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Dave, please keep an eye open and lend your support (the vast prestige you represent) to academicians who are fighting to drag hesitant institutions into the hypermedia age. Certainly, there are folks out there struggling to bring about what you describe—they need the support of the tech community, to drag along administrators who don’t get it.
This whole idea is very interesting. However, I’m not quite sure… Would its benefits outweight the negatives? Realistically, how would you get some of the brightest people in the states to spend 15, 20 minutes a day writing in a blog? Money is unrealistic for the size that you’re thinking of, and certainly, if you don’t have that size, it won’t be half as phenomenal. I myself, someone who actually enjoys blogging, has trouble remembering to update my blog, or what I wanted to talk about on my blog. So then, how would you get a bunch of people that may not be so interested?
I have been hired by a medium-sized private university in the south to do exactly as Dave suggests. I’m a long-time journalist and avid blogger, updating my site – hobbsonline.blogspot.com – numerous times a day.