I got a call from the marketing director of an architectural firm today. He had read about this blog’s off-spring, the Krasnow construction blog in the AIA magazine and decided to look around for himself. He thought that maybe a blog of this type might be a good idea for K-12 construction projects in his home town and I have to say, based on the experience here, I agree with him.
We also got to chatting about the larger utility of a web-instrument such as this. And that discussion dovetailed with a recent discussion I had, in another context, about academic-types and editorials. That discussion revolved around the complexities that often arise when the opinions of say…the chairperson of Dept X and Institution Y (signing as such) is mistaken for the official stance of Y. Needless to say, those complexities often lead to inboxes full of angry emails.
Blogs such as this one occupy a gray zone. They are neither the Op-Ed piece, nor are they an email listserv. The blog, writ large, still awaits the perspective that only some decades of being around will give it, in order for its place as a communication instrument to be fully understood. Until that time, we must settle on this: what’s here is not the official position of my institution–they are instead the open musings of an academic administrator, the internet equivalent of an open office door and a shared cup of java.
Jim
Discoverers and Discoveries 