My first blog post (at least as a scientist)

Today I set up three blogs that I am going to start using soon: Steve Koch Science (this blog), Steve Koch Research, and Steve Koch Teaching. I'm planning to use this science blog for posts about open science (aka Science 2.0), lab management, or other science professional issues which don't fall in the teaching or research areas. The research blog will be about our research, grant writing, etc. That leaves teaching for the teaching blog. I'm still not sure whether it will make sense for me to have three separate blogs, but I think it may...I'm modeling this after Rosie Redfield's research and teaching blogs. In addition to her blogs, I'm also inspired by some other people such as Maureen Hoatlin's lab twitter and friendfeed, Cameron Neylon's "Science in the open" blog, The Science Commons blog, Pedro Beltrão's Public Rambling, and many friends at OpenWetWare.

What are my goals with these blogs? Well, first, I hope that my opinions and ideas here will have a positive impact on science and issues facing scientists nowadays. Second, I'm looking forward to feedback and ideas from others who read and comment on this blog and making more connections with scientists and others. Finally, I think it will be fun and rewarding (I enjoy this kind of writing compared to, say, grant writing or tenure dossier preparation). I believe it's an amazing time to be a scientist, with the ability to rapidly and efficiently communicate and collaborate with anyone around the globe. As others have noted, scientists on average have tended to be very slow to adopt the new web tools that are available. I firmly believe that Science 2.0 and Open Science (I'm not exactly sure of any definitions of these terms) are by far the best way for science to impact humanity, but I too have been slow to adopt. Blogging is one of these tools, so I'm looking forward to finally taking this step!

I have a lot more to say, and much, much more to learn about open science. For now, I'll just mention that my lab participates in OpenWetWare, we're big fans of open science, and I think we're moving in the right direction to someday be truly open. Here are some of our shared protocols on OpenWetWare. Another thing I am very excited about on OpenWetWare is a course I teach at UNM: Junior Lab. When I first started teaching this in Fall of 2007, I took a (perceived) gamble and decided to teach the modern physics lab course almost 100% on the wiki. I'll talk more about this on the teaching blog, but I think it's been very successful, and has been a terrific introduction to open science for the young scientists in my course.

Finally, I'll just note a couple tools I've been shown in the past few days that are helping me get my s together, professionally speaking:

• Facebook. OK, I've known about this for more than a few days. Facebook, obviously, is great for reconnecting with people from kindergarten. That alone is worth it. But I'm lately realizing how useful it is for communicting with other scientists and / or about science. For example, I made a "page" for our lab, which we can use to communicate exciting results and events with our fans (aka groupies). I've also discovered the "event" tool for coordinating an outreach event.
  

• Friendfeed. I just found out about this the other day. So far I love it, especially as far as science goes. I'm still confused, though, as to why friendfeed and facebook are separate applications, or whether they're converging to the same thing? They have the same little "f" logo...I suppose I'll figure it out someday.
  

• Google Reader. Previously, I'd tried out RSS readers in browsers or in my email and just didn't succeeded in keeping up. I also tried some facebook apps which weren't what I needed. Google reader so far seems perfect for me. But on the other hand, I've had a bit more free time than normal, so we'll see how it goes. The key things for me about Google Reader are the abilities to tag and share (which is tied in with facebook and friendfeed).
  

• Oh, and also Blogger (which I already knew about). This is a really great application. It's funny, though, that the wysiwyg editor is really tough for me to use, having grown so accustomed to editing MediaWiki. Is there a way to use MediaWiki style code on blogger (I'm not good at pure html)?