Hi Andrew, I wish your blog gets lots of followers and your posts go viral in your field.

Think you Minh for your nice comment. I agree that the background of the audience is important.

Hi Negin, Such a nice summary of the subject. I agree with the point that practice will make you better at writing and sharing your ideas. Thank you.

Raymond, I agree blogs can help students connect, especially in such a big class.

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Corrie, that is a good way of approaching it. To empower students!

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Arash, I can imagine that with the evolution of your written voice, going back and reading old blog posts is quite entertaining!

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Thanks for the comment, John. I agree, it is much easier to write about something one is passionate about, it feels less forced and leads to better writing in my opinion!

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Hi Arash,
Thank you very much for your comment! Appreciated! Indeed, here I wasn’t intended to materialize the concept in-depth but this is useful to me, actually for food for thought 🙂 And, yes exactly 🙂 the same chapters echoed to me as well, all these benchmarks, ranking systems… Isn’t it because of these people internalize this notion of “getting by”, what Michel Wesh mentions in his TED-talk…

Dear Dr. Nelson,
I am so glad to see your comment here! Many thanks for your time to read, your comment, and particularly the clarification that you made. Exactly. Indeed, as you said, this assumption that you are (might) “always” being watched is the moment when we start to discipline/modify our behaviors or maybe sometimes “not”, as I remember, Foucault believes, there are always some “deviants” in the society that leads people to position themselves in binary and dichotomous patterns: normal vs. abnormal. Once again, many thanks!

Hello!

I’m super excited to participate in this course with you! I suspect I’m coming at blogging from an opposite framing of the value of media outside the formal academic system of citations, books, and journals. I’ve grown up participating in in-depth discussions and content online, and especially recently have been conscious of a deep disconnect between the things my (wearable robotics & formerly brain-computer interfacing) field’s publications deem important, vs those that I find helpful.

For example, I’ve found that my field’s publications actively avoid articulating the actually difficult part- implementation- of our work. We *exclusively* discuss the theoretical math of the movement or controls of robotic systems, while leaving wholly unstated how they chose to actually implement that math. We’ll simply state “RTAB-MAP ROS library was used for automated mapping and navigation”, and not even bother stating how we configured all of the 30+ different options and settings, each of which has materially relevant consequences for the effectiveness of the final work. This means our publications only serve as boasting tools, and are functionally useless for helping others even *replicate* our work, let alone use it.

In contrast, content like popular Instructables.com tutorials will detail the entire process in plain language, concurrently educating on the actual complexity at play, and providing guideposts from which a user can work. My thesis, for example, can be uncharitably described as “following three robotics instillation & configuration tutorials, one 3d design tutorial, and one web server tutorial, with three small extremely simple scripts to glue the systems together.”

In terms of the supposed main upside of academic publications- peer review- I struggle to see how the commentary of comparable content creators in long-form media is not precisely that, but public. In my piece this week, I list quite a few Youtube creators, describing them as a new sort of “academic” due to the sheer depth and complexity of their work. You’ll notice many of them are in overlapping fields- and if you were to look through their backlogs, there are collaborations, mutual citations, and responses in the same vein as I would love to actually see in academia. Instead the peer review process is opaque to outsiders, and only ever involves at most a small number of other people, let alone significantly varied perspectives & backgrounds the way online, public discussions commonly do.

All this before exploring the chilling effect on engineering ethics research that comes with having one’s name publicly tied in academic spaces to criticism of the sociopolitical consequences of the work of others in our departments. In a department funded heavily through the work of military-centric jet engine work, how likely is a prospective professor to get tenure from their colleagues when they have published work openly critical of militaristic mentalities in engineering?

Lookin forward to class & this semester with ya!