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:
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.
The first one, my deep feeling that academia, as it is designed, is totally doomed. This is nothing new, but the feeling has grown deeper. Much deeper. And when I speak about academia I mean all of its main three functions: research, teaching and dissemination. Teaching and dissemination are, to say the least, inconvenient: they steal time to what the system only cares about, which is research. Thus, most debates about innovating in teaching and about making an impact in society are, in economic terms, irrational. All the time that faculty members devote to nothing but research is an irrational choice as it detracts time from the only thing that they will be given credit for. Hard to read? It’s even harder to cope with, mind you.
This would be only half a tragedy if research was handled in — my very personal opinion — rational terms. But it’s not. In most fields and places, research has ceased to be about building up new knowledge “upon the shoulders of others”. Now it’s about publishing. Whatever. Whatever with an impact index, of course. A technical report? Wrong. The analysis of some intervention project? Wrong. Some position paper or some white paper on some policy issue? Wrong. Some may say that everything can and should be published in impact journals, but it is wrong: academic journals, with all their waiting lists and politics inside, have their own logic, which is increasingly diverging from the pace of reality. Most people, when asked what they are working on, will answer they are working on a paper, not on a problem. And these are two different logics. Hard to read? It’s even harder to cope with, mind you.
For those thinking this is but a digressing rant, think about the problems you have in your everyday life. And see how much would you like some help from people that you, the taxpayer, pay to be thinking about solving problems. Yes, there are some relevant problems that are hidden to the common eye. But still. Ah, by the way, most publications by most scholars have to be paid twice for accessing them, because the system is double perverse: we push academia towards paper-publishing (not problem-solving) and, once their work is published, it’s behind a paywall. For someone a truly believer in the common good and the role of public sector, this is just enraging.
And, in this case, Twitter is not helping very much.
Don’t get me wrong: I think Twitter is actually transforming the world, and doing it for good. But, as it’s usually said in the world of communications, it is a strong competitor in the attention economy, and it’s capturing most attention away from the “long reads”. Indeed, it’s not only capturing attention away from readers, but also from writers: why would you write a 500-word reflection on a given topic or news when you can put it out in 140 characters? This has been happening to me since I joined Twitter in 2007, but I think this year I somehow peaked in this practice.
And if your life became more hectic than ever — kids, a more active role in politics, a strong participation in media — Twitter is just there to help you put out your thoughts in the easiest way. Though, of course, many times in the shallowest way.
Yes, this was not a good year for profound thoughts.
But don’t be mistaken. I believe my production in 2014 was quite good, and my production in 2015 will not be bad — there’s a book chapter, hopefully a couple of articles and some reports pending to add. But I just don’t like the way it all went. Even if I am happy with the outcome. Contradictory? Of course.
This should be October 21st, but it’s November 29th. Meaning: I’m more than a whole month behind celebrating ICTlogy’s 11th anniversary. I’ve like a zillion excuses to explain that oversight: pick any of them, and sure it applies to me.
288 blog posts at the SociedadRed Blog, (), 1,316 comments () and 3 pages [I’m realizing now that some of the stats from the 10th anniversary where wrong, as they included spam and other stuff].
While the activity throughout the year has been absolutely hectic, its disperse nature has caused that it has been less reflected in the website. Among other things, my appointment as Director of Open Innovation at Fundació Jaume Bofill made that I spent less time “thinking” and spend more time “doing” things instead. And when reporting the stuff you do happens elsewhere, it is just natural that the rest of the activity, the one related to reflecting, just takes less room than usual.
Fatherhood itself and opening up a collective blog on fatherhood — Vadepares — also took away a good amount of time I used to spend on writing. The two and a half hours I used to commute to work this year turned into an hour and a half of biking, thus implying less reading too. And, hence, even less writing. Fatherhood and a little bit of exercised turned to be something better than spending so much time typing… but I somewhat regret too the trade-offs that come with the limited asset of time.
And, of course, Twitter still is transforming my/our communication and organization practices. And doing it at a level which I would have never suspected back in September 3, 2007, when I joined the social networking site.
All that said, what is more remarkable from this past year is what I call the academic paradox. This year more than ever I became aware of a tremendous mismatch between what academia does and what academia is required to do. Take that last sentence as you want: any interpretation will suit what I meant. This year more than ever I became aware that most of the things I asked to do outside of the academia where due to the fact that I was, indeed, a faculty member. But. Most of the things that society at large asked me to do because I was a faculty member where totally, absolutely and definitely worthless in an academic world.
If I keep on accepting the demands that society does to me (speak at a conference, participate in a workshop, provide advice to some institutions), I will be kicked out of academia for not performing.
If I instead turn my efforts into achieving the goals that academia sets for a scholar to be called so, I will be forced to turn my back to most demands coming from outside of the academic world. A world which, shockingly enough, pays my rent.
A very simplified scheme goes like this:
Part of the government pays me to teach. Most of my income comes from this agreement between my university and the government.
Another part of the government, and academia at large, will evaluate my performance strictly looking at my publications, output of my research. And not all my publications, but only some indexed in some specific indices.
Society at large will perceive me as “useful” if I answer positively to their demands, most of them falling under the category of “knowledge transmission”.
That is, I get paid for doing one thing, I am evaluated for doing another most different thing, and people will think I am of any use if I do none of the former, but yet a third kind of activity.
This is so, so broken.
Doing research on the impact of Information and Communication Technologies in Development is right, but taking part in the Global Forum on Telecentres to explain what is the state of telecentres and what could be its horizon in 2023 is a waste of time if I care for my academic career.
Surprisingly, my peers will recognize my value as a researcher if I publish a paper on Spanish politics… in a US journal on Spanish Culture. This very same paper — with minor differences — is absolutely worthless if presented at one of the most important gatherings on Internet and Politics in Spain. So, if my fellow citizens want to read about the research they are paying with their taxes, they will (a) have to do it in English and (b) pay (again) for it. Either that or, indirectly, they will say (though academic evaluation boards) I am a bad scholar for not publishing where I should and not where they would like to. This is schizophrenia at its purest essence.
I’ve personally dozens of examples like the preceding ones.
If you want to do the things that you think you should do as a scholar — and which most people outside of academia ask you to do —, you have to circumvent the academia and, sooner or later, most likely be kicked out of it. If you want to stay in the academia, you have to most of the times forget about doing things not-for-scholars and concentrate in what the ivory tower is demanding.
This situation is tiring and discouraging.
And sad, very sad.
The solution to the puzzle, maybe in the 12th anniversary of ICTlogy. See you then.
The first obligatory remark that needs being made is that I forgot celebrating the 9th anniversary. It is a surprising thing to acknowledge as I cannot remember being specially hectic at that time. Maybe the novelty of the site having been somewhat recently renewed contributed to forget the date.
On the other hand, Twitter has become so central in daily, quick news, that the whole dynamics of the site — and not only sharing special dates — have been affected by it. Thus, now many of the things that I do are not publicly announced on the website as they used to, but are just shared on Twitter once the corresponding file has been created in the personal repository. Now, the news section features only very remarkable milestones, mostly publications, leaving other stuff (speeches, for instance) fall directly into the personal repository and then shared on Twitter.
The second big, huge, change has been the creation of the second blog, SociedadRed in Spanish and about Spanish politics and policy — with some bias, of course, towards the Information Society. Yes, the blog has already been up for almost 4 years so far. But its activity has grown quite a bit in the last two, especially in the comments section: in less than four years, the blog has more than four times the comments of the main academic blog. In terms of comments per post, while the ICT4D blog has 1.16 comments/post, SociedadRed has 16.37 comments/post. That is a difference.
By the way, both blogs have now the possibility to navigate through their archives in a much more comfortable way than before. Check that yourself visiting the ICT4D Blog Archives and the SociedadRed Blog Archives.
This year also saw the discontinuation of Google Reader, which took away my Blogroll, which was feed by Google Reader shared folders. Feedly is proving to be a good substitute, but it does not have this feature yet.
I cannot help by ending this reflection with a couple of negative notes.
The first one, of course, is about how increasingly difficult is to do research in Spain. Budget cuts in research and education in general (and especially in higher education) are making things very complicated. Just as an example, two of my academic communications in academic conferences required that I looked for an extra gig (a keynote in Granada and a workshop in Seville) to pay for my travel expenses. Not that I did not enjoy those gigs (on the contrary), but the point is that funding for research is really an issue — and, comparing with many of my colleagues, I cannot complain very much.
The second one is how the academy is increasingly locked in its own ivory tower. Research and policy are becoming so far away one from the other one that it will soon become difficult to make informed and evidence-based decisions. Scholars do not “waste their time” on policy papers, and decision-makers do not make the effort of digging into scholarly research. Many of the works that I did during 2013 are useless in academic terms. A complete, utter, sheer waste of time. An issue that raises an important dilemma: should the researcher focus only on “what matters” in academic terms? or should the researcher risk the academic career and try to make an impact even if it is outside of the scholarly track? or should the researcher — as I am myself struggling to do — try and play a role in both worlds? The latter is very satisfying, but a little bit stressing (and resources consuming). Any comments on that?
My personal/professional page, with information on who I am, what I do and, above all, what is my scientific production.
Resources I use in my work (teaching, research and outreach).
And the two blogs — academic, personal — with up-to-date content.
…and all the activity on several social networking sites and that, somehow, was also reflected here.
On the other hand, those very same social networking sites as well as the widespread use of search engines caused that the main point of entrance to the site ceased to be its homepage, and to literally become any page.
It thus became an urgent need to undergo some reforms, while bearing three main goals in mind:
To rethink how content was sorted and the overall site architecture.
To make possible that any page could operate as a homepage (as a good landing page).
To provide the user with access to related content from any page they were on, and to facilitate the identification of the author (i.e. me) where this was particularly important (e.g. from the scientific production page).
Unlike what had been the norm in the past eight years, this time I asked out for the help of professionals. In particular the help of Anna Fuster and Daniel Julià, from the Pimpampum studio. They were able to rethink the site without luggages from the past or sentimentality.
The result is in plain sight.
At the visual level, I would like to highlight the immense work of updating and managing the graphic look and feel, focusing on how different kinds of content use different colours, or how content was repositioned when it was repetitive or ‘interfered’ with other content, to name but a few amongst a long list of details.
At the technical level, the most notable is the idea of ??”widgetizing” the site so that one can put any piece of information (a blog, the literature, the “about me”, etc.) elsewhere when deemed necessary. Furthermore, the management of the whole thing or the creation of new pieces has been made really easy and robust, so the site can now grow without the bounds to which was constrained.
I can only thank the good times — as creative as challenging — that I spent with @tartanna and @daniel_julia, from whom I learned a lot in a short time.
And to the reader, both the regular and the occasional, thanks for being there, at the other end of the wire. As always, any comments are welcome.
For the last 15 months I have owned an iPad, which I use for many purposes but, mainly, for my academic activity. Every now and then I am asked or find myself involved in a debate on why and how to use an iPad (or, in general, tablets) for research. Although an offtopic in this blog, this post here will save me lots of typing and talking elsewhere.
For the sake of the context, I must say that I am a social scientist working in the crossroads of the Knowledge Society and development, especially in what is related with individual empowerment (education) and social empowerment (governance). I teach at a 100% online university, which means that all my working tools are a computer, some common software and access to the Internet. My professional life is mostly digitized, and gathered in my personal research portal. I mostly do not work with paper and mostly do not work offline. I am quite a fast typist (my liveblogging sessions a proof of it) and have a very light (circa 1,000g) while powerful laptop which I can take anywhere without hesitation. I do not own any Apple computer and do not plan to own one in the nearest future (i.e. I am not an Apple fan).
So, how does an iPad or a tablet fit in this context at the professional level?
Enhanced Reading
Reading it not anymore what it used to be.
Reading used to be sitting with a bunch of papers. Maybe a pen would be handy to scribble some notes on the margins, underline some sentences. Maybe not on the margins, but on a piece of paper. Maybe even on a notebook. You would stand up to look up something on the dictionary or the encyclopaedia. And that was it.
Now reading is, for starters, not knowing what you will be feeling like reading. Maybe it will it be a couple of academic papers, maybe it will be correcting some assignments, or proofreading a paper of yours. Or them all: some trips are long and you want to carry everything with you. What is the weight of 500 pages? And the weight of 5 MB?
Now combine everything said above: picture yourself with a dozen papers; reading all them at the same time (those papers with interesting bibliographies…); underlining and taking notes on them; writing some other notes on a separate file which you can tag and categorize and store and search and retrieve; accessing on the go the authors’ personal websites and their curricula and their list of published works; writing a short e-mail to them asking them for a pre-print of a difficult to find paper; forwarding your annotated copy of the paper to a colleague; or copying and pasting a table of data on a spreadsheet to plot some graphics (why hadn’t they in the original paper?).
And that is enhanced reading.
Picture yourself doing all that sitting (or standing) on the train. Or sitting on your couch.
And that is a tablet.
Why not an eReader
I tried several eReader devices based on e-ink before trying the tablet. There are two main reasons why an eReader is not an option for me:
eReaders are veryslow for academic papers reading. They may be fair enough to read a book (whatever its kind) whose content has been repaged for your device and for you to turn the pages sequentially, once a minute or two.
But if you are reading a PDF, A4-sized, with footnotes or endnotes and definitely with a bibliography, you will find yourself turning pages very often. Mainly because it is not optimized for the eReader. And also because the eReader is not prepared (yet) for continuous and quick page-turning. And if you want to compare different papers in parallel, the exercise of exiting a paper, opening a new one, closing that one and going back to the former one… that is simply not bearable for the common human being.
The second reason is that, usually, e-readers lack everything that is not strictly for reading purposes: browsing the internet, writing an e-mail or running an application (notebook, spreadsheet, etc.) are not usually supported by e-Readers. And if they are… aren’t we already talking about a table?
An eReader is mainly to read and to read plain text. But academic reading, enhanced reading, is much more than that.
Why not a laptop?
First of all, there is weight. Even if we assume that your laptop does not weight much more than your average tablet (which is quite an assumption), the iPad, one of the heaviest ones, is similar in weight as a 200 pages hardcover. You are already used to handle that weight. The best ultralight laptop will normally double that weight (and cut to a half the autonomy, BTW): if you think a hardcover edition of a book is heavy, try holding a pair of them for more than a while.
Second, there is comfort. Let’s speak only about reading for a while: for reading purposes, the extra keyboard in the laptop and the tactile screen in the tablet make a huge difference. Not only a keyboard is almost useless when reading — almost because you just type scattered notes ‐, but it is only uncomfortable: it takes extra space (and weight) of your surroundings (remember the crowded train: I spend, on average, 2h on it, daily) and key operating is much more difficult than simply touching a screen.
Besides weight and comfort, there is a third aspect, very subjective, but that I have tested several times, and is friendliness.
I’ve been to several “serious” meetings where people brought their laptops to take notes while I tapped and typed on my iPad. Unbelievable as it might sound, laptops all raised suspicion on whether their owners would be taking notes or reading e-mail or checking their preferred social networking site. On your iPad “of course” you are taking notes. Laptops are for writing and working and iPads are for taking notes, and you are supposed to take notes during a meeting.
And the fact that laptops raise a wall (the screen) between the owner and the rest and the iPad does not (because it rests on your lap or almost flat on the table) makes a huge “emotional” difference. Really.
Related to that, working at home is also different. We scientists know that there is no big difference between reading a paper for work or for leisure. But there actually is a tremendous difference between reading that paper in your home studio sitting in front of your desktop, or reading it sprawling on your couch. Especially if you do not live alone and it’s Sunday. Believe it or not, my Sundays or afternoons are very different now.
On the other side, laptops — or desktops — are unbeatable for writing. But we were talking about (enhanced) reading, right?
The added value of the tablet
In my own experience, the main added value of the tablet can be summarized in some keywords: read, notes, train, couch, shoulder bag.
Having get rid of most my paper usage in the last years, with the tablet I succeeded in getting rid of all paper. Period. This means, specifically, getting rid of:
The annoying collection of separate sheets and stickies with casual notes you will never revisit but never dare to trash: the tablet keeps them all together, searchable and easy to transfer (to other people by e-mail, to more serious documents).
Printouts of readings with limited life-span (destroy after read): thousands of times more digital documents in your tablet than printed ones in your usual bag, immediate transfer, time and paper saving — and healthier back.
Even more important than working paperless, the tablet provides full mobility, especially if accompanied with an Internet connection (embedded 3G or using your cellphone as a hotspot). And full mobility means that the tablet is always in my shoulder bag. Instead of everything else. The laptop is something you consider bringing with you: the tablet is always with you, as a pen or a notebook used to be.
For those more curious, I’ve shared my setup (or most of it) in the following set of snapshots. Enjoy.
), 1,397 comments (
Twitter, 
delicious, Google Calendar,
Slideshare, 
Prezi, YouTube,
Lifestream/aggregator, FriendFeed,
Linkedin,
ResearchGate and 
Academia.edu.
