A Call (or, terrible/tragic/adorable actions)

Texts in mind: Professional Development seminar with Bill Turkel today on computers and technology for the work of history, everything else I've been reading to date.

I'm pretty sure that I read somewhere that everytime someone blogs about blogging (add terrible/tragic/adorable action) occurs... but here it is anyway. One of today's big events was the final professional development seminar for the year. Bill's presentation on the possible uses of computers and technology for historians - both for now, for the future, and even for the past (which I got a kick out of) - provided a healthy serving of food for thought.

Thing is, it's been a day of thought (in between TA duties and getting tapped to show a prospective PhD candidate around today) rather than a day of action, so it' s fairly natural that the thoughts I've had back-and-forth about the citizenship/science debate in my research have latched onto Bill's presentation. And, as a result, I'm blogging on it as part of my personal sense of citizenship. The seminar may not have been a call to arms, but there was a call there nonetheless.

Now, this blog's going to be the major centre for my research thoughts and developments due to the move I'm making after my residency's been fulfilled - and since it's not friends-locked or anything it is just out there. (I'm not expecting that this will lead to fame or fortune, of course - rather, the "famous for fifteen people instead of for fifteen minutes" that's been mentioned as the web paradigm is the most that I'm expecting. And I'll try to do that without relying on my extended family.)

The general discussion of the role that blogs can play for academia certainly made my colleagues and I realize that we've got to be more aware of what's out there. (And hammered home that some of us just don't know what's out there!) Looking at some of the blogs listed at this also helped me to realize that there's a fair number of people doing this sort of thing. Granted, some blogs are very new, some are very stale, and some have very many hobby discussions and not much history... but there's a lot of stuff there to be found nonetheless.

So I'll write about my further thoughts on citizenship and science as touchstones for youth in Cold War America at a later time, but I felt compelled to post on this topic first. It's the tricky fact of practicing what one preaches. If I'm going to talk about citizenship - either as a researcher or as an educator - then I'd better put it into practice. And if a community of historians is to continue to develop online, to be a part of the world, and to be accessible to the world... then I'd better try to be part of that, too.