SWJ: praise given and reviews (merged)

[Ratzel]

I always viewed SWJ (and the forum) as a place for practitioners of war, and those concerned with war, to trade ideas for use in combat. I'm interested in knowing if anyone learned anything here that benefited them and/or their units in combat? This would be a good survey question. Does this forum have that feature?

[marct]

Hi Mike,

A couple of the posters have suggested that it might be a stretch to consider the SWJ community of platforms a model for future academic work. Rex rightly points out that at least for academics, blogging, forum moderation, etc., count for next to nothing towards the ticket punching that needs to be done for academics to progress.

It's an interesting question / problem set, Mike. I think it is made even more interesting by the shifts that are happening, partly as a result of the new communications technologies, in the very definition and meaning of "academic". For example, one of the major changes that I see happening is a revitalization of the older, "independent scholar" type of academic who may be affiliated with a university (or research unit), but whose career is not controlled by them.

And, just as a note, in my department, blogging does count for academic credit in the tenure system, albeit not for very much.

I think where some new media can easily fail is in trying to function as an alternative to peer-reviewed publication, or trying to replicate it in accelerated form, or trying to revolutionize how peer-review is done.

Hmmm. Back in 1996, I had the chance to sit down with a guy who used to be the main editor of the American Journal of Sociology and talk about this. One of the points he noted, and he had been involved in peer review and editing for about 40 years, was that editing had pretty much disappeared in most journals while peer review tended to be more about theoretical correctness than any type of scientific assessment of the merits of an article. His point was that the heavy pressure to publish when combined with the huge increase in numbers of academics and increasing specialization was what led to this sorry state.

Personally, I see the development of online, hmmm, let's call them "practitioner communities", can serve as an excellent model of where scholarly research could go (if not "academic" research). Over the past 40 years or so, the pressure to use theoretical models, rather than fieldwork and data, has increased (one of those cost issues), so a lot of social science work has been based on "data" that is increasingly divorced from the field actually being studied. Forums such as the SWJ/SWC and the CTLab () act as a work-around putting practitioners and scholars back in contact with each other.

Why compete? Blogs, discussion fora, online magazines, all offer opportunities to extend debate and enable new and non-traditional voices to be heard - many of them non-academic practitioners with plenty to say. The can also enable academics, who might never be read or hear by any but their own narrow realm of academic peers, to become members of broader communities of interests, to have their work and ideas introduced to previously estranged communities.

If the management side of things remains focused, and keeps the content focused - as with SWJ/SWC - then the model works, and can be applied in innovative ways.

I think this gets to the divide I was implying between "scholars" and "academics". Academics are, to some degree, locked into an academic career system based out of universities, while scholars are not necessarily so restricted.

I always viewed SWJ (and the forum) as a place for practitioners of war, and those concerned with war, to trade ideas for use in combat. I'm interested in knowing if anyone learned anything here that benefited them and/or their units in combat? This would be a good survey question. Does this forum have that feature?

Hi Ratzel, yes, we can run single question surveys. You would need to start a new thread to do so. Under the "Additional Options" at the bottom, there is a check box marked "Post a Poll". That will generate a multiple choice (max of 10 options) poll question. If you want to run a survey with more questions, shoot me a PM and I can toss one together on my own site and link it through for you.

Cheers,

Marc

[John T. Fishel]

of a peer reviewd journal, I can tell you that in more cases than we care to admit, peer review is less than it seems. I notice that Military Review is now advertizing itself as a peer reviewed journal.

I don't really know how my department/school at OU sees online publication and blogging since I am not now and don't want to be tenure track. That said, they are full of praise for my online publications and have gone out of the way to publicise them. I also note that a number of academic journals are, in fact, moving to online publication -either as the sole mode or in combination with traditional print. This brings up an interesting practical question: How do we preserve for posterity publications that only exist in the ether? I know, you can't really get rid of electrons and you could archive them electronically. But the reality is that if there is no hard copy, researchers may well have a nearly impossible time finding a document.

Cheers

JohnT

[selil]

How do we preserve for posterity publications that only exist in the ether? I know, you can't really get rid of electrons and you could archive them electronically. But the reality is that if there is no hard copy, researchers may well have a nearly impossible time finding a document.

I suggested at a library sciences meeting (they actually respect information technology people), that we needed a knowledge program.

Every scientific journal that receives an ISBN should have at least ten archival copies printed and ten national libraries would then accept them as hard copies, microfilm, and long term digital storage.

That would result in multiple methods of storage for long term. The Internet is a communication mechanism not a storage tool. People forget that for some reason.

[John T. Fishel]

will anyone bite?

Way to go, Sam.

Cheers

JohnT

[Bill Moore]

Sam,

I like your proposal, but it sounds like quite an undertaking. For those who are vetted academia it may be easier to develop business rules where they submit their documents to a university librarian knowledge manager, but what about the wealth of of other knowledge out there in e-article type format (for lack of a better word)? I imagine we have the same challenge with on-line magazines as we do with on-line studies and books.

Correct if I'm wrong, but I heard e-archiving isn't exactly easy either. One of the things I read was that the older e-documents can't be accessed by newer forms or versions of software (the pace of software evolution has appeared to slow, but I imagine over time it will still be an issue). The medium you store on whether is a server, floppy disk, CD, etc. is subject to corruption/damage. Finally, I "heard" that electronic media is not stable over long time periods?

That's why I'm espeically fond of your 10 hard copy suggestion .

[selil]

Correct if I'm wrong, but I heard e-archiving isn't exactly easy either. One of the things I read was that the older e-documents can't be accessed by newer forms or versions of software (the pace of software evolution has appeared to slow, but I imagine over time it will still be an issue). The medium you store on whether is a server, floppy disk, CD, etc. is subject to corruption/damage. Finally, I "heard" that electronic media is not stable over long time periods?

That's why I'm espeically fond of your 10 hard copy suggestion .

From the people I've talked to they say you are absolutely correct. Entire electronic libraries have become unusable due to proprietary formats and systems. Updates can make systems incompatible or corrupt storage mediums.

Certain types of storage medium are effected by the magnetic field of the earth. Optical storage media can be subject to "rot". There are lots of solutions, but even the library of congress has changed it's mind several time about archival methods.

There is the "way back machine" or the "internet archive" but it has trouble keeping pace with the storage requirements.

[jmm99]

similar to Library of Congress for works which are formally registered.

I don't know whether SWJ is formally registered - it is copyrighted.

Anyway, submission of materials from any electronic media should be trivial - and, if its survival is the only question, should be relatively cheap. Sam can answer the technical questions as to how that could be best done - since he is our "smarts" in that area.

In a sense, Google Books is attempting something of the same for hardcopy. But, that is an expensive scan process.

In essence, what I would like as a end result would be a Google search which would be permanent - no dead links.

Hey Sam, now we know what you and I can do when we grow up - But, where do we get the few billion needed to initiate the project. I know !!! - Al Gore - it worked for Google

[Ratzel]

Hi Ratzel, yes, we can run single question surveys. You would need to start a new thread to do so. Under the "Additional Options" at the bottom, there is a check box marked "Post a Poll". That will generate a multiple choice (max of 10 options) poll question. If you want to run a survey with more questions, shoot me a PM and I can toss one together on my own site and link it through for you.

Thank you, I need to think about how I'd word the question[s]? I should be back soon?

[Mike Innes]

Hi Marc. I lost track of this thread and had to dig around for it...

It's an interesting question / problem set, Mike. I think it is made even more interesting by the shifts that are happening, partly as a result of the new communications technologies, in the very definition and meaning of "academic". For example, one of the major changes that I see happening is a revitalization of the older, "independent scholar" type of academic who may be affiliated with a university (or research unit), but whose career is not controlled by them.

I agree, technology is definitely morphing the dialogue and building bridges in all sorts of ways - SWC involvement in the new Foreign Policy being a pretty strong case in point.

Re. independent scholars, I see that too - or at least, I see the benefit of it, from a personal viewpoint. I'm a full time practitioner with several such affiliations, and they allow me to at least participate on the periphery of academia. It's an interesting position to be in (though pecking order atmospherics can get a bit weird, like in the dept. where I'm actually working on a PhD ).

Rex's earlier comment about his students' accomplishments is a good one, too: academics are practitioners, some practitioners are heavy-hitting scholars, some practitioners have a wealth of first-hand knowledge and experience to share, and between the three there's a useful synthesis that's available, if we're able to spot it when it happens (or wily enough to engineer it ).

And, just as a note, in my department, blogging does count for academic credit in the tenure system, albeit not for very much.

Do tell. I've never heard of the before. How progressive is Carleton? I wonder how prevalent that is? In developing CTlab, I polled quite a few academics on their view of blogging. Interesting, some junior academics seem terrified of the idea, lest they jeopardize their professional trajectories by doing something as flakey as (gasp!) blogging. Dan Drezner's case (denied tenure at Chicago, some say because of his blogging) was cited more than once (though now his success seems to moot the rest of it). Older, established academics seemed to love the idea as a more effective way of engaging the public more broadly. And then, of course, there are the independent souls who couldn't give a rat's ass about establishment expectations, and do it anyway, under a pseudonym or their own names. Bless'em.

Hmmm. Back in 1996, I had the chance to sit down with a guy who used to be the main editor of the American Journal of Sociology and talk about this. One of the points he noted, and he had been involved in peer review and editing for about 40 years, was that editing had pretty much disappeared in most journals while peer review tended to be more about theoretical correctness than any type of scientific assessment of the merits of an article. His point was that the heavy pressure to publish when combined with the huge increase in numbers of academics and increasing specialization was what led to this sorry state.

Fair point, and it rings true. Again, when I was first getting into blogging (not so long ago), and scanning around the web for some insight on how a professional might, errr, blog responsibly, ie. in a way that complements professional activities and standards without betraying the nature of the medium, I came across Research Blogging. It has a pretty interesting approach to things: research blogging, for that community's purposes, is only "research blogging" if 1) the blogger is appropriately credentialed, and 2) is blogging about peer reviewed research. At the time, the Research Blogging community was still sorting out how it wanted to do things, but the big debate, as you might expect, was how to set the parameters of "peer reviewed research". Conference papers? Published articles only? In any self proclaimed "peer reviewed" journal? Or only articles from journals of recognized standard/standing? What about the open source movement in some academic disciplines, and online-only publication outlets? The discussions got into the problems with peer review that both you and John Fishel mentioned. I'm not sure I entirely agree with Research Blogging's full set of criteria, but they set an interesting standard in quality control for blogging, and suggests something akin to what John, Sam, and Bill were getting at,too.

Personally, I see the development of online, hmmm, let's call them "practitioner communities", can serve as an excellent model of where scholarly research could go (if not "academic" research). Over the past 40 years or so, the pressure to use theoretical models, rather than fieldwork and data, has increased (one of those cost issues), so a lot of social science work has been based on "data" that is increasingly divorced from the field actually being studied. Forums such as the SWJ/SWC and the CTLab () act as a work-around putting practitioners and scholars back in contact with each other.

"Work around" is an interesting way of putting it. Heh heh... I wouldn't put CTlab in the same league as SWJ/SWC (yet!), but both are definitely filling a gap and bridging communities. I'm really looking forward to what they'll evolve into (hint hint...).

[Surferbeetle]

From the blog Press Think

Migration-which is easily sentimentalized by Americans—is a community trauma. Pulling up stakes and leaving a familiar place is hard. Within the news tribe some people don’t want to go. These are the newsroom curmudgeons, a reactionary group. Others are in denial still, or they are quietly drifting away from journalism. Many are being shed as the tribe contracts and its economy convulses. A few are admitting that it’s time to panic.

And like reluctant migrants everywhere, the people in the news tribe have to decide what to take with them, when to leave, where to land. They have to figure out what is essential to their way of life, and which parts were well adapted to the old world but may be unnecessary or a handicap in the new. They have to ask if what they know is portable. What life will be like across the digital sea is of course an unknown to the migrant. This creates an immediate crisis for the elders of the tribe, who have always known how to live.

[marct]

Hi Mike,

Do tell. I've never heard of the before. How progressive is Carleton? I wonder how prevalent that is?

Not much, really. Our Dean blogs, at least in the sense of using the technology. There just aren't that many of us who do blog... .

In developing CTlab, I polled quite a few academics on their view of blogging. Interesting, some junior academics seem terrified of the idea, lest they jeopardize their professional trajectories by doing something as flakey as (gasp!) blogging. Dan Drezner's case (denied tenure at Chicago, some say because of his blogging) was cited more than once (though now his success seems to moot the rest of it). Older, established academics seemed to love the idea as a more effective way of engaging the public more broadly. And then, of course, there are the independent souls who couldn't give a rat's ass about establishment expectations, and do it anyway, under a pseudonym or their own names. Bless'em.

I suspect I fall into the latter category . Honestly, I think a lot of it depends on why you are blogging. I do it mainly to try out ideas before I work them into papers and, occasionally, to vent or (hint, hint) promote CDs from my "other life".

Seriously, though, I've been looking at the HTS quite a bit and the entire culture education thing. Blogging has given me a venue to think things through, have them critiqued, get into conversations with all sorts of people, etc. It has also been useful in terms of networking without having to lay out thousands of dollars to go off to conferences (I'd rather save that money for Choir tours!).

"Work around" is an interesting way of putting it. Heh heh... I wouldn't put CTlab in the same league as SWJ/SWC (yet!), but both are definitely filling a gap and bridging communities. I'm really looking forward to what they'll evolve into (hint hint...).

Yeah, hint taken .

[selil]

I've been blogging a long time (defined as dated activities spanning time) from the early 1990s when I posted monthly articles on my website (static, no comments, top rate technology of the time), up until today where I use a fairly standard tool.

Like Marct I usually post things that are thought papers, or ideas "in transit", or things I am trying to create mind share about (poisoning the well sort of), and stuff that just wouldn't be published in academic literature. Since my website/blog is part of my life it is not as single minded focused as other peoples. From cyber warfare, to theory , to archery, and building cars. What I'm interested in floats to the top. I'm not a prolific blogger, and I don't "resuscitate" (<- NOT A MISTAKE IN TERMINOLOGY) the main stream media.

Still my department leaders, and university does not understand the idea of blogging. Though they have decided to "let" me continue.

[richyoung87]

Below is a post I submitted several months back - got some direct but mostly indirect responses - good info but not much to operationalize a concept....so....am asking for concrete ideas prior to our 1-2 Sep Initial Planning Conf for Project Starfish: Have funding and a sponsor (JFCOM JIWC & IWSP/TSWG) to start a collaborative Irregular Warfare Community of Interest focused on Education/Training first - web based. Idea is not to compete with existing COIs like SWJ, but to integrate efforts so the left hands working IW issues/education know what the right hands are doing (and POCs for both hands) We're not competing with Consortium of Complex Operations inititiave, but again - trying to complement and intergrate these efforts. If you haven't picked up on it, IW is the buzzword of the day in the QDR and all other DOD forums. Your suggestions to the questions below WILL get inputted into the mission analysis that will occur 1-2 Sep in Suffolf. Appreciate up front your time and concern for this venture. We owe our SOF and GPF + IA folks the best/cutting edge knowledge to stay ahead of the bad guys and drain their swamps!!! De Oppresso Liber!

"My question or request from the SWJ community is to provide suggestions in the best way to create and maintain this focused, IW learning portal. Going in position is "Don't care who gets credit for this - would love to have a consortium of sponsors / participants all considered equals in this endeavor. I'll be working with folks like JFCOM, Services, DOS, USAID, Brits, Canadians, Aussies, IA (SOCOM has LNOs within most major interagency orgs now), pvt security firms, select NGOs, and the UN for starters.

If anyone knows someone who is conducting research in this area (Modern Collaboration Techniques), please let me know.

I'm also looking for participants that have Subject Matter Expertise in the IW areas listed in the IW JOC (Insurgency/COIN, Terrorism/CT, Unconventional Warfare, Foreign Internal Defense, Stability and Support Operations, and "Understanding People" + the other areas to:
1) Join the cause
2) Provide access to their materials for the IW educational community
3) Be willing to be a guest instructor
4) Be willing to keep the community updated in their particular areas of expertise

If interested, please contact me via PM for additional details.

[selil]

"My question or request from the SWJ community is to provide suggestions in the best way to create and maintain this focused, IW learning portal. Going in position is "Don't care who gets credit for this - would love to have a consortium of sponsors / participants all considered equals in this endeavor. I'll be working with folks like JFCOM, Services, DOS, USAID, Brits, Canadians, Aussies, IA (SOCOM has LNOs within most major interagency orgs now), pvt security firms, select NGOs, and the UN for starters.

If anyone knows someone who is conducting research in this area (Modern Collaboration Techniques), please let me know.

Alrighty.

1) The tech is the easy part. I imagine you are using IW to mean irregular warfare. I am not an expert at that.

2) If you want to create a portal think about your goals. I've consulted on social media sites that generate 100K views a minute and have my own blog with (100 views a day). The difference is the community that has interest. You need to know intimately the community that you wish to engage.

3) You have a few posts here on SWJ/C and if you want a portal to grow you need to be involved. SWJ/C has grown because the owners are absolute maniacs in their involvement. SWJ/C is a jewel among social media sites because it reflects the progenitors excellence.

4) Design, design, design and know what you are building from content on up. Trying to combine technologies after the fact sux.

5) Stay away from "social media experts". They aren't and they won't.

Ask questions should you desire.