Over at Science After Sunclipse, Blake has a very long post about the limitations of science blogs. Brian at Laelaps responds, and Tom at Swans On Tea agrees.
You might be wondering whether I have an opinion on this. Since I’m going to be talking about it at a workshop in September (first talk, no less…), I better have some opinions..
The original post is very long, but can probably best be summarized by the following paragraph:
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.
My flippant response to this is “My thesis is that it’s not yet possible for me to set up a home Ethernet network using a pipe wrench.”
Look, I don’t disagree with a thing he says about the incentive structure of science blogging, and blogging in general. He’s absolutely right that the desire for traffic pushes people to write about topics that will bring page views and comments, which all too often makes scienceblogs.com feel like ranting-about-religion-blogs.com. His analysis of the culture and processes of the science blogosphere is spot-on.
But here’s the thing: we’re not a college science faculty. I mean, some of us are science faculty at colleges and universities, but bloggers as a group are not a faculty. We’re not providing “an interactive, distributed process of continuing education,” because that’s not the point of running a weblog. You won’t find people at Crooked Timber or The Valve providing an interactive, distributed process of continuing education in the humanities and social sciences, either– that’s not what blogs do.
The mistake Blake is making is the flip side of the mistake in the most recent Ask a ScienceBlogger. The questioner in that case erred by thinking of blogs as a research tool, while Blake is erring in the opposite direction, by thinking of blogs as a teaching tool. In reality, they’re neither primarily about research, nor about teaching.
Science blogs, and blogs in general, are neither a distributed classroom nor a free-floating research conference. The proper analogy is something closer to the popular book market. Blake makes a brief reference to this, but while he’s right on the details, he again misses the point:
[T]hink back to a popularization of science, or a class you took in school, which enthralled you, which fired your imagination. Lots of people have stories about “when I decided to become an astronomer” or “when I fell in love with biology.” Carl Sagan is frequently invoked in these recollections; my first Sagans were, actually, Timothy Ferris in The Creation of the Universe (1984) and David Goodstein of The Mechanical Universe (1985). Now that you have your Sagan in mind, here’s the question: how much of the science involved in that story was discovered in the year the story happened? Within the previous five years? Within the previous fifty?
To pick a specific example: How much of Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980) was about material which was speculative at the time, and how much covered territory which had been well and solidly established over the previous decades?
He’s absolutely correct that the great popularizations mostly rely on well-established science, not the fad-of-the moment. But the bigger point that he misses is that you can’t learn science from popularizations. Cosmos is a wonderful book, and the tv program was a transformative event in my life, but it can only inspire people to learn about science, not teach them science.
The situation in the science blogosphere is pretty much an exact parallel to the situation in the science book-o-sphere, if you’ll excuse the hideous neologism. Go to your local big-box bookstore, and find the science section (this sometimes takes some effort). Ignore the smattering of real college textbooks that always turn up in these places, and what do you see?
Well, in physics at least, what you’ll find is a fairly random scatter of books about pretty much the same sorts of topics that you see in the blogosphere. There’ll be a bunch of books about the latest hot controversial theory (Smolin, Woit, Susskind, Randall, Greene, etc.), a few books about other recent developments (I just got a review copy of Titan Unveiled, presenting data from the Cassini mission, and you’ll find a few books about quantum computing and so on), some ridiculous crankery and various books debunking ridiculous crankery, and a handful of magisterial tomes providing a grand overview of some (sub)field. The proportions aren’t the same as in the science blogosphere, but the basic range of topics is the same.
What you won’t find is “an interactive, distributed process of continuing education.” That’s not what popular books do. They’re not written to allow people who already know about science to extend their knowledge into new areas, or to allow people with no science background to bypass college science classes. They’re written to give people with no science background some flavor of the excitement of science, and hopefully inspire a few of them to seek out real education elsewhere.
The topics you see on the science book shelf are no more representative of the field than the blogs that you find in your RSS reader. High energy physics is grossly over-represented in both Borders and Bloglines, and condensed matter is grossly under-represented. This happens for exactly the same reasons in book publishing as in blogs: people write popular books not as part of a concerted effort to educate the general public about what’s important in physics, but because they feel moved to do so, for more or less the same set of reasons that people feel moved to write blog posts. They write about something that particularly inspires them, or something that pisses them off, or just something that they think a lot of people are likely to read. That means lots of overheated hype about particle physics, and almost nothing about condensed matter, despite the fact that condensed matter physicists vastly outnumber high-energy types, and condensed matter physics has infinitely more practical importance to people’s lives.
So, yeah, it’s perfectly true that “science blogs cannot teach science,” in the same way that it’s perfectly true that I can’t configure my home network with a pipe wrench. They’re not the right tool for the job that they’re not doing.
What can science blogs do? Well, they can do the same things that popular science books do– give people with no science background some flavor of the excitement of science, and inspire some of them to become scientists themselves.
Blogs also offer one advantage over books: they offer a chance to humanize scientists to the general public, and I think this is the area where, contrary to Blake’s thesis, they can change the world, in at least a small way.
One f the biggest problems we have as a society is that science, particularly the more mathematical sciences, is seen as the exclusive province of nerds and geeks– people who are somehow set apart from the rest of humanity. This makes it seem OK for Joe Sixpack to not understand science, or think about it much– science is something done by people who are Different, and normal folks don’t need to worry about it.
Blogs offer a small opportunity to get past this, at least for the segment of people who read blogs, precisely through the ephemeral posts that form Blake’s Category 0– ” Fun posts about random non-science stuff.” YouTube videos, cute kid stories, vacation pictures, whatever– these all make it clear that Scientists Are People, Too, and I think it’s hard to overstate the importance of this stuff. Blake dismisses it very casually, but I think this is one of the critical purposes that blogs can serve, and one of the areas where they’re really different than books. There aren’t a lot of books out there that present both the wonder of science and the humanity of scientists, mostly because it’s really hard to do either well, let alone both at once.
I’m not saying that those of us who have blogs should stop trying to teach science through our posts. If anything, I share Blake’s desire to see more basic-level blogging about science (I’d also like to see more popular books about science, enough so that I’m hip-deep in re-writing one…). But we shouldn’t kid ourselves into thinking that this will provide a means of really teaching science, as opposed to inspiring people to want to learn science. The blogosphere is a shelf full of popular books, not a virtual college, and I don’t think we need to change that.
Well said, Chad. I never realized that I was supposed to be using my blog primarily as an explicit educational tool to teach nanoscale physics to the lay public. Silly me.
I would advance that blogging is primarily a form of commenting. As such it is exclamatory rather than expository. In this vein, science blogging is useful for providing others with insights into the nature of things blogged about but not in teaching them the basics of that nature.
To extend your analogy, I’ve always thought of science blogs as a research conference lunch break. You won’t hear people trying to educate each other, but you’ll hear someone comment on a lecture, and someone else reply “I so agree with you”, and others will express their frustrations over the organisation or logistics, and yet others will share similar experiences… And everyone will be gossiping about colleagues in between. And all this serves, as you say, to make scientists appear like people. Of course, if you advertise your blog as a science blog, chances are you will only reach the readers who are already aware of this, being scientists (or science-interested) themselves. But then again, you never know. More people happen to stumble across science blogs without meaning to, than happen to stumble across science books without meaning to (or that’s my guess). That’s where they have a special function.
I would advance that blogging is primarily a form of commenting. As such it is exclamatory rather than expository. In this vein, science blogging is useful for providing others with insights into the nature of things blogged about but not in teaching them the basics of that nature.
I totally agree. If my blog was “basic concepts in biology” then that would be a good fit. But that’s not our goal.
Funny, it was reminding me of the chastisement during the Bayblab what-blogs-aren’t-doing-that-we-think-they-should drama.
I think of our blog as part journal club (with the researchblogging.org aspect), part water cooler, part “tips”, part help desk, part news and raising awareness, part stream-of-consciousness of whatever we want. The blogging license we got didn’t restrict us to anything….oh, wait, there was no licensing agency…
Well the solution space for “what blogs can do” is roughly as large as that for “what books can do”. Just about anything, really. I can imagine a blog that would teach physics. And there may even be a point to having such a thing. But frankly that’s much less interesting than what blogs are really doing.
As for the usefulness of ‘random non-science stuff’…? Even the phrase itself assumes a very limited idea of the goals of blogging. If I wanted that kind of experience, well, I’d go buy a textbook.
One writer who does manage this, in my opinion, is Mary Roach. See her books _Stiff_, _Spook_ and _Bonk_.
I hate to skim the blogs I read, but the excerpt you gave, and your response, all above the jump are good enough for me.
Calling BS when it’s needed is just fine, no need to elaborate.
Hmmm, in the fine tradition of punditry, I’ll post this then see if it makes sense later. Heck, I won’t even bother to care if it makes sense or not
-michael
I agree that trying to use blogs to teach science to non-scientists is a complete waste of time.
And if someone wanted to refute that thesis, they might well start with a description of what pipe wrenches are actually used for, but at some point they’d have to supply an argument as to why the wrench couldn’t be retasked for networking. You appear to have done the former and skipped the latter; I’ve read your post three times and I still can’t identify an actual argument anywhere.
So, what science blogs could be doing in the best of all possible worlds is exactly what science blogs are doing now? The ultimate point and purpose of science blogs is their state of being this morning?
I agree that demonstrating that Scientists Are People Too is a fine thing to do. I’m happy when scientists do it. That’s just not what I was talking about, because I already know we can do that. Writing a post about that would be like using a pipe wrench to fix an Ethernet port that isn’t broken in the first place.
Gee, I was able to bypass my college’s biology requirement thanks to what I had read in Isaac Asimov, James Gleick and Larry Gonick. (To be precise, I took the AP Biology exam cold in my senior year of high school, got a perfect score, and didn’t have to go through a semester of intro bio the next year.) Maybe I took from those books more than what was there? And I know plenty of professors who assign or recommend books like Soul Made Flesh or QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter to their undergrads. . . are they living in sin by encouraging students to extend their knowledge into new areas?
You’re saying, “They’re not the right tool for the job that they’re not doing.” My post looked at what I suspect are the reasons they’re not yet the tool for the job I think they could be doing. I’m not sure why we’re arguing here.
I devoted a section of my post, “Isn’t that the Schools’ Job?”, to summarizing why I think other venues of basic science education are failing. I’m sorry to see that overlooked, but so it goes.
Mary:
Bully for you. I mean that totally seriously. In fact, when people ask about how to get started blogging, I suggest just that: a mix of topics at a variety of technicality levels.
Funnily enough, in my post, I disavowed the intention of acting as a licensing agency. I thought I was fairly explicit in saying it was a pointless and stupid thing to try:
Now, I happen to think — and you, Chad Orzel and anybody else are welcome to disagree — that in principle, science blogs could be doing more things and having a greater benefit than they are today. (And given the sorry state of science education elsewhere, I’d really like to see blogs make whatever positive impact they can.) As I said, however, nobody died and made me King, and even a monarch couldn’t impose fruitful change in this situation.
Maybe someone/s can list one or a few best blogs that do live up to the ideal of teaching science, not just being fora for various ruminations and beefs? Much appreciated.
I already went over my thoughts in my own post (thanks for the link!) but I think that Blake’s thesis has been a little misinterpreted. (And he is, of course, absolutely welcome to point out if I have missed the mark.)
The way I looked at it was from the perspective of someone wanting to verse themselves in the basics of one particular science or another. Is there a way to do that, to get an understanding of the basics of certain disciplines from science blogs like you might in a college course? It would appear not, and that may be just as well. Whether we should aim for such a goal is an interesting question, even if we answer in the negative, but I think there is something more complex at work.
Many of us, myself included, write about relatively specific things in a way that makes posts easy to understand for non-specialists. In this way we are providing a kind of science education. It may not be complete but details or smaller studies are often used to illuminate larger concepts, much like many popular science books and essays do, and I think that such strategies do provide a kind of science education.
We each have our own motivation for writing but I think what this discussion concerns is the output. Looking at what we produce, could someone who doesn’t know much about science (but wants to know more) get a basic understanding of it? I definitely think so.
PhysioProf sez; “I agree that trying to use blogs to teach science to non-scientists is a complete waste of time.”
Perhaps writing specifically with the purpose of teaching people about science is something that would be too frustrating and uncertain to undertake. You could write great summaries but unless the person was already interested it might as well be irrelevant. This doesn’t mean, though, that by talking about science in an accurate and accessible manner that non-scientists won’t learn something. The motivation for science blogging and the goals are getting very mixed up here and muddying the issue; if we tease them apart we can better compare what we’re actually doing and what we mean to do. Like it or not I think any good science blogger is educating non-scientists about a particular area of science and the way science is approached in general, and it definitely isn’t a waste of time.
I’m pretty much in agreement with Chad’s take, with the caveat that science blogs can do pretty much anything you want them to do. If someone wants to have a blog that is nothing but technical discussions of research, that’s fine, and if someone wants to have a blog that really tries to teach science from the ground up, that would also be great. The only real mistake is to presume that there is one primary thing that science blogs “should” be trying to do.
One other thing that they are doing very well, other than the humanizing aspect, is giving people a glimpse of how the sausage is made — the real process of science, rather than what is cleaned up and presented in press releases or popular books.
One thing that they could be doing, but haven’t been as far as I can tell, is to promote an interdisciplinary discussion between different kinds of academics. That’s too bad, but it’s really hard to do.
To the point on the perception that math and science are the province of geeks and nerds, I’ve fallen for this myself. That’s why I was surprised to find a few people in my analysis class last quarter who didn’t fit any nerd/geek mold. The ways in which they varied from the stereotype are themselves unimportant, but they were numerous. This at once made me feel as if _my_ domain were being encroached upon (to be quite forthright), and inspired as it served to demystify the subject and give me hope, too.
I haven’t read all the comments, so this might be redundant; but I’ve experienced in the years reading _Uncertain Principles_ the very demystification and humanization of The Physicist that you describe. Initially, it was a little disconcerting, as there is some hero worship of The Physicist in some circles. The presence of that kind of reverence hasn’t changed, just it’s nature, e.g., the difference between admiration for the Holy Forefathers of America and a healthy, nuanced appreciation for the people, warts’n’all, who labored and fought and failed and cheated and proselytized and lied and ennobled themselves to start a new, complicated, messy freedom.
So, like, cheers and stuff.
Two quick thoughts (I’m loosing my morning caffeine buzz):
1) I think you can teach basic science concepts in blogs, if you pick one concept, keep the language straightforward, and throw in some good attributed pictures. Granted I haven’t tried it, but I am also on temporary blog hiatus until I finish getting married next week.
2) Geeks may be the science literatti, but thanks to CBS’ Big Bang Theory we now have our own sitcom. You don’t get one of those unles syou are coming up int the world.
I mostly agree with Chad, and very much enjoy Blake Stacey’s being “able to bypass my college’s biology requirement thanks to what I had read in Isaac Asimov, James Gleick and Larry Gonick” and Sean Carroll’s “caveat that science blogs can do pretty much anything you want them to do.”
For historical accuracy, I’d like to consider John Baez’s “This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics” as the first significant science blog, and arguably the first science blog of any kind, and even arguably the first blog of any kind.
That sets the standard. Chad and Sean usually meet that standard. Blake usually sets the standard for comments on those blogs.
I’m not good enough to meet that standard as a blogger, so I content myself with submitting comments to the best science blogs that I regularly visit, which include all those listed above, several other Seed-umbrella’d scienceblogs, plus Scott Aaronson’s “Shtetl-Optmized” and Peter Woit’s “Not Even Wrong” and Terry Tao’s “What’s New.”
I learned blog etiquette (perhaps too little, too late) from slashdot, boingboing, and “Making Light.”
My conjecture is that: in this 21st century Age of Wiki-science, the blog as collaborationware is both medium and message.
MartinM: And if someone wanted to refute that thesis, they might well start with a description of what pipe wrenches are actually used for, but at some point they’d have to supply an argument as to why the wrench couldn’t be retasked for networking. You appear to have done the former and skipped the latter; I’ve read your post three times and I still can’t identify an actual argument anywhere.
Blogs are ill-suited to teaching science, because blogs are distributed and asynchronous– nobody is coordinating various blogs to cover specific topics, and even if they were, the nature of blogs is that they only display the most recent entries, meaning that people discovering blogs are unlikely to see the relevant posts in any kind of sensible order.
Real science education is necessarily very hierarchical– you need to learn certain basic facts before you can tackle more complicated problems, and it’s extremely difficult to learn science by considering topics in random order. This hierarchical structure cuts directly against what blogs are best at, which is quick responses to new developments.
Moreover, learning science in any meaningful sense requires doing science– carrying out lab experiments, working through exercises, doing problems. The blog format is extremely ill-suited to this sort of thing in general.
You could probably put together good teaching resources on the web– something like HyperPhysics with automatically graded problem sets– but it wouldn’t be remotely like anything you would call a blog.
Blake Stacey: Gee, I was able to bypass my college’s biology requirement thanks to what I had read in Isaac Asimov, James Gleick and Larry Gonick. (To be precise, I took the AP Biology exam cold in my senior year of high school, got a perfect score, and didn’t have to go through a semester of intro bio the next year.)
To quote, well, you, “Bully for you.” This would probably be the place to trot out your favorite stories of mathematical prodigies re-inventing vector calculus in remote Andean villages, or whatever.
Ultimately, I’ve taught too many students who have AP credit for math but struggle taking derivatives to be impressed by AP scores.
You’re saying, “They’re not the right tool for the job that they’re not doing.” My post looked at what I suspect are the reasons they’re not yet the tool for the job I think they could be doing. I’m not sure why we’re arguing here.
As I said above, I don’t think they can be the right tool for the job, given the nature of how blogging works. You might be able to cobble something together from a variety of different blogs, but whatever you wound up with wouldn’t look very much like a blog– in fact, I would guess that its usefulness as an educational resource would be in more or less inverse proportion to its “blogginess.”
To the extent that blogs have any role to play in education, I suspect it’s from the student side, not the teacher side– having students write blogs seems more promising than having them try to learn from blogs.
I have tried to use my blog in one of my courses (quantum cryptography). It was marginally useful but I learned some things that I think I will change in the future. Primarily I used it much like one might use the Discussion Forum option in Blackboard or WebCT, but the advantage was that I could get posts and comments from colleagues at other universities without the hassle of getting them on our Blackboard site.
Do most people in condensed matter have this chip on their shoulder about the general lack of interest in their field compared to high energy physics, astronomy, etc?
Face it, condensed matter has about as much intrinsic interest as plastics, contract law or library catalog systems. Worthy subjects all, but not interesting ones to outsiders.
Do most people in condensed matter have this chip on their shoulder about the general lack of interest in their field compared to high energy physics, astronomy, etc?
I don’t know that many condensed matter physicists, so I couldn’t really say. My own background is in atomic physics/ quantum optics, not condensed matter.
Science blogs also serve as peer review mechanism for popular science journalism. Many science blog posts take the form, “Argh! I can’t believe how bad this article is!”
And for a non-scientist reader with a bit of science education, it’s really useful to see the limitations of the press.
I am probably the “special case” that, along with a million more just like me, deviates from your norm. I am 68 years old, retired and made my living outside of the field(s) of science. Now I have the luxury of seeking knowledge in fields about which I am naive. I do not expect an “education” from the several science blogs I read daily. I am looking for an introduction (or more appropriately, an invitation) to areas of thought I know nothing about. A science blog serves the same function as a club doorman. You can be totally rebuffed or directed inside for a look around. Most of the sites I visit are links I found on other sites. Each has given me a “…Hmm, this looks interesting…” chance to explore another unknown.