Tuesday 9 December 2008

Round up: Online Scholarship, Virtual Training Suites, and Fascinating Miscellany


Honourable mentions in despatches (from Film Studies For Free's return to [indefatigable] active duty) for the following:

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the RESPECT, Catherine. If other writers need encouragement to post articles online, I could add that the readership of my blog far exceeds the circulation of anything else I've written and published in journals or books. The transmission of knowledge is what we should be concentrating on, right? Of course, academics also want the affirmation that comes from the peer review process, not to mention the essential formative feedback that usually helps to shape a work in progress. And you don't have to give that up.

I'm experimenting with blogging at the moment. I still have a bigger, ongoing research project in the background, so most of what I post is not directly related to that. It's been a good exercise in formulating ideas and presenting them efficiently, something I've had trouble doing in the past. I haven't run into objections from my superiors yet about giving away stuff that could have been developed into a publication (my blogging is not that carefully put together anyway), but I did just notice that I've posted 70,000 words in the last six months. I could've spent that time on two or three articles for a small but specialist readership.

I think my academic writing and my blog are two separate (though related) things - the blog is the rehearsal, and the pooling of notes that I would have been taking anyway.

Anonymous said...

Hi Catherine--
Great post. Just one caveat. "Reel Education: 50 Free Open Courses for Movie Lovers" contains a lot of dead ends. The Columbia courses are not open to the general public-- you need a Columbia id to get in. And most of the other "open source" courses from MIT and others are just syllabi and reading lists, with no podcasts or videos.
One real reel course (not on the list)is Sociology of Mass Communication http://www.oid.ucla.edu/webcasts/courses/2007-2008/2008spring/socm176-1 at UCLA.

Catherine Grant said...

Thanks Dan and Dara.

Dan, Alex Juhasz accurately describes her blog Media Praxis (http://mediapraxis.org/) as an 'online book' - I think that's a good way to be thinking of weblog/website work such as yours. It's certainly a lot more connected up, scholarly, and insightful than many academic books I can think of!

And Dara, thanks so much for your hugely important work in your great blog - The Do It Yourself Scholar (http://diyscholar.wordpress.com/) - as you already know, it was one of the main inspirations for Film Studies For Free.

Anonymous said...

Thank you for this wonderful informational page and the links! I have heard of Intute before but i had completely forgotten about it! What an amazing resource for education and research! They have everything from science & technology to Arts and humanities!

I will definitely be using this resource a lot there are alot of projects i have my students take on and this could be a brilliant opportunity!

Thanks again!
Danielle