On the Non-Omnipotence of Blogs
Some more great discussion over at Science after Sunclipse: What Science Blogs Can’t Do
My thesis is that it’s not yet possible to get a science education from reading science blogs, and a major reason for this is because bloggers don’t have the incentive to write the kinds of posts which are necessary. Furthermore, when we think in terms of incentive and motivation, the limitations upon the effects of online science writing become disquietingly clear. The problem, phrased without too much exaggeration, is that science blogs cannot teach science, nor can they change the world.
And one of these reasons is the level at which science blogs are written
Why is introductory material so poorly represented?
Well, what do we science bloggers write about, anyway? This is how I caricature what I see:
0. Fun posts about random non-science stuff — entertaining, humanizing, but not the subject I’m focusing on right now.
1. Reactions to creationists and other pseudo-scientists.
2. Reactions to stories in the mainstream media, often in the “My God, how did they screw up so badly” genre.
3. Reports on peer-reviewed research.
Pretty much spot-on. That’s what I tend to blog about — entertaining crap, science-y or not, take-downs of bad science and science reporting, and “real” science, whether these are posts of my own making or it’s me acting as curator to direct a reader elsewhere. But all of the science-y stuff assumes a background, at some level, in physics, without which you probably can’t appreciate what’s going on.
Blogs aren’t the only source of information, of course, but something that’s closely related, discussion forums, suffer a similar scarcity of this information, but it’s not a completely bare cupboard. The host of this blog is a science discussion forum, scienceforums.net (SFN), and there’s been a push for some discussions of basic topics, from the ground up, but I think paucity of these posts suffers from the same basic problems that Blake discusses. So yeah, I might be able to point out and perhaps explain some really neat things about physics, but it’s not going to make much sense unless you already know a little bit about the subject; you’re probably not going to learn F=ma here, and it’s questionable I could make that level of material accessible and sexy enough in this format.
Update: I’ve made another post on the topic
SFN RSS
Well yeah, most blogs aren’t interested in teaching newbies, they want to talk about things with people of a similar education background.
There are notable exceptions (smarterthanthat, for example), and these blogs are great. But, researching and writing an extensive background for a single post is tedious and time consuming.
Thank you for your comments. Chad Orzel was not so happy; AFAICT, he asserts that the point and purpose of science blogs are to be exactly what they are now.
Hmmm, I wonder if some sort of Wiki could be set up to traverse up and down (and across) the scientific knowledge web. A subject could have a summary for the laymen, a list of prerequisite subjects, and links to other topics – either related or based upon the subject.
Phaedrus – so bloggers can reference the type of background one might need to understand any particular post? I like it.
I have actually tried to use my blog as an auxiliary tool for one of my classes (quantum cryptography). It worked alright but I need to try it again and work out some of the kinks.
Phaedrus, if you (or anyone) are interested in pursuing this, get in contact with me. I can be reached on the forum (scienceforums.net), or at johnREMOVETHISTEXT@scienceforumsDOTnet. If you try to email me, please include “SFN” in the subject somewhere or you will get caught by my uber spam filter.
doesn’t HyperPhysics do this? or did I get the wrong idea?
Hyperphysics is a great resource, but it’s not a blog, nor is it really a way to learn the material should you get hung up on a concept — there’s no feedback loop.