Student Research at Duke

Well, this blog isn’t really dead, but that’s what we always called the wrap-up meeting in the newspaper business.

I think it went really well! More students than I would have expected turned out to be regular/compelling/entertaining correspondents. And the things they shared went way beyond what I would have hoped for in insight and candor.

We could have used more photos overall, but the Lyceum tool has been such a pain in that regard that I guess we should just be happy we got what we did. I especially enjoyed the images taken from the research and the ‘lab goes on a holiday’ shots.

The hit traffic shows we entertained more than 2,000 unique visitors in July, which is fairly respectable given how little marketing of the site we actually did.
This fall, we plan to launch a new online research magazine “research @ duke” that will have a “voices” section expressly for this sort of project. Blogs have popped up here and there on campus — especially this summer — but you really have to know what you’re looking for to find them.

Thanks for tuning in! If you loved this or hated it, feel free to drop me a line at karl.bates (at) duke.edu

The best/worst feature of blogging is probably the public comments. It’s just great to hear what people think and to share ideas, provided they aren’t incredibly rude flamethrowing trolls.

While our blog isn’t exactly ruling the world yet, we have had a few comments posted, mostly between members of the HHMI group. Unlike the posts, comments are moderated before they go up, just to avoid trouble. One student, however, was a little quick on the ‘approve’ button this week and got a rude surprise when she saw what the porno spam-bot had sent her page.

It’s all part of our grand learning curve…

I wrote a nice post yesterday afternoon about Priya Khatri watching movies of fruitflies and humans, complete with a screen grab of the video and links, etc. This morning? Gone without a trace. Not on the server, not in “drafts.” Just gone. Makes me pine for the days when I could write HTML and FTP the files to a server in confidence. This “user-friendly” blog interface is buggy and untrustworthy, kind of like “user friendly” windows XP.

We’re past the two-week mark, and though I’m waiting for hit-tracking data on how the blogs are actually being received out there, I’m more than satisfied with the results we’re seeing. These students are sharing openly their frustrations and triumphs, their wonderment and confusion. It’s just great. The pictures are wonderful, and some of the writing is really good.
There’s been a huge amount of traffic in the last two weeks about the often prickly relationship between science journalists like me and working scientists. While reading through some of it (it has grown huge), I stumbled across this wonderful article about a scientist who blogged his musings on an alternative hypothesis to a Nature paper and ended up sharing credit for that idea with another researcher he’d never met before.

So, we’re off to a better start than I think anyone would have expected. There are more than 80 posts now, great pictures, some great writing even. Who woulda thunk?

Consequently, we pulled the trigger on some publicity and cross-linking: Duke Today, HHMI, word-of-email. We’ll see.

I haven’t dared ask WeST for hit-tracking yet, but maybe tomorrow…

PS _ this is what I really look like: 

Though a blogging “tool” is certainly easier than writing HTML by hand and posting it to an FTP server, it’s not without its frustrations.

We’re all newbies, so this week has been pretty tough sledding. There have been a lot of messages back and forth about “this doesn’t work” and “how do I do this,” and we’re trying to get them all ironed out, with help from the excellent webbies at WeST — which is web-something something over at Arts and Sciences. They’re great folks, even if I can’t remember what their acronym means. (And WeST is on East Campus — who’s idea was that?)

Welcome to the Research Blogs at Duke University!

My name is Karl Bates and I’m the science editor at Duke University. We’ve assembled a group of students — rising sophomores — and asked them to blog about their experiences in the Howard Hughes Fellows summer research experience. Science is a process, not just a result, and we’d like to share that with you, dear reader. We hope you enjoy seeing the world of science through these fresh young eyes as they experience their first real laboratory experience.

I’ll be watching the blogs and collecting themes and ‘greatest hits’ here, but by all means feel free to bookmark your favorite, subscribe to his or her RSS or just browse through the collection at random.