In an old NCIS episode (“Bikini Wax”, S2 E15, 3/29/05), the chief medical examiner Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard (played by David McCallum) recollects that he’d considered a career in teaching but didn’t find the idea of lecturing on esoteric subjects attractive. Chacun a son goût and all that, but (resisting every digression beckoning me to another profession) I happily signed up to do just that when I was a graduate student at MIT, and went on to appointments at three universities (UIUC, OSU, and Stanford), with visiting teaching gigs at dozens of other institutions over the years.
With the responsibility of teaching, my positions came with a parallel responsibility to engage in research — and to report on that research, not only in writing but also in public presentations, where work in progress can gather useful critiques, and where completed work can be broadcast to new audiences. Face-to-face interaction, in a classroom or in a lecture room, is irreplaceable for scholarly communication, because it’s interactive and can be adjusted on the spot to fit the needs of the moment.
For years now, these interactions haven’t been available to me, so I’ve had to find interactive forms of scholarly communication in different modes: blogging on the internet (inviting commentary) and using social media. More popular and less esoteric, but still in their own ways pedagogical.
Thanks to Ducky Mallard for spurring me to go back to my great big c.v. that has everything in it, to look at the summary of what I did by way of scholarly communication in my previous life. I find it incredibly hard to believe that I was that person, but here’s the evidence.
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