David Sifry has an interesting idea. Its something which I had mention to people from academia when I meet them. David captures the essence very well.
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.
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.
