Today is October 21st, and thus it’s ICTlogy.net anniversary. Its 13th anniversary, to be more precise. Happy anniversary, ICTlogy.
First things first, the quantitative data:
- 1,281 blog posts at the ICT4D Blog, (
), 1,397 comments () and 196 pages. - 318 blog posts at the SociedadRed Blog, (), 1,372 comments () and 3 pages.
- A bibliography with 3,103 works and 2,489 authors ().
- 633 wiki entries (, ).
- 27 learning materials.
- 5631 articles from 126 events from my liveblogging sessions.
- All the usual stuff:
Twitter, 
delicious, Google Calendar,
Slideshare, 
Prezi, YouTube,
Lifestream/aggregator, FriendFeed,
Linkedin,
ResearchGate and 
Academia.edu.
Which deserves the yearly comment.
The most evident thing is the low level of activity in both blogs. Only the bibliographic manager has maintained the usual level.
There are two reasons for that.
The first one is lack of time. Lack of time to share not only finished work (i.e. in my works section or readings (i.e. in the bibliography section, but ideas, ramblings thoughts, projects.
The last three years have been hectic and somewhat erratic both in the direction and ways of my research. I was appointed director of open innovation at Fundació Jaume Bofill three years ago and until last February (when I became fellow director, meaning that I still collaborate with the foundation, but with a much lower dedication). These same two years I was senior researcher at Open Evidence, which I definitely quite also in February 2016.
This last year (since half of 2016 until now) I assumed the direction of three masters programmes:
- Direction and management of NGOs (to be true I directed this one one year before)
- Master in conflictology UOC-UNITAR (international and armed conflict, with UNITAR)
- Master in conflictology (domestic and civil conflict)
This has been keeping me really busy. Really. And here comes the second reason for this scarce updates: I moved quite a bit of my time from research to academic management. This is being quite rich and interesting, but one loses the edge on one’s own research plans.
Indeed, I am thankful to Ricard, Maria and Can who somewhat forced me to write.
So, I did read and kept updated in the field, but had no time to do things as I used to, putting out there everything from the first idea to the final paper. I do have to solve this.
There is another thing worth being commented.
In recent years we have been witnessing Twitter being a somewhat substitute to blogging. It is happening in academia a lot. Between a quick tweet or two to share an opinion and taking the time to write a blog post, it is a temptation to go for the former.
It is my believe that Twitter withdrew many from having their own website — not to speak about a blog, or a full repository of their work — as it took too much time, and their online presence was already completed by having an active account on Twitter.
It is glad to see how many scholars are entering the realms of ResearchGate and Academia.edu and using them not only to share their work, but to follow others’.
Indeed, it is just great to see quite a good bunch of non-scholars entering these academic social networking sites to follow the work of some scientists. This is a dream come true. And, I would like to think, yet another nail in the coffin of the dated system of academic publishing.
Academic publishing is more than over. It does not provide a satisfactory answer to the needs it used to cover back when it was created: it is a narrow communication channel, it is expensive, it is slow, it limits peer review to only a couple of people or it mixes up the impact of the journal with the utility of a given paper. And, mind you, the current trend of altmetrics still has to acknowledge that there is no evolution in academic publishing, but a transformation. But this is another debate.
Happy thirteenth anniversary, ICTlogy!
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