Has anyone seen something like Scholarly Want Ads?
Examples
Teaching
Professor at American University in Cairo teaching Educational Game Design for undergrads is seeking another class to collaborate on Twitter during month of November. Possible topics of collaboration include education, games, game design, digital literacy.
(i got this with #TvsZ, but what if I could post a want-ad for it?)
Research
Professor at American University in Cairo seeking international collaborators who speak Arabic (native or fluent) from universities outside Egypt to collaborate on a Digital Humanities for Arabic language teaching website. Collaborators may be librarians, technologists (particularly familiar with Omeka and WordPress) or faculty who teach Arabic language or literature. Consultants who do not speak Arabic but have digital humanities expertise welcome
Learning
Professor with PhD in education wants to learn about educational game design. Hoping to find collaborators to suggest and discuss resources and consider potential classroom action research across different contexts
Other
Campus considering a Reclaim Hosting pilot. Would like to learn about experience of others who have done it.
—-
The kind of questions I regularly post on Twitter or Facebook or this blog. Where my PLN is big enough to usually have it covered. But:
A. What if someone doesn’t have a big PLN? What can they do?
B. Our PLN is only a subset of all people in the world. There are many outside our PLN who could be helpful for such things.
Does anyone know if there are want-ads like these? Not job ads but scholarly want ads? If not, how would you go about doing them?
Thanks
(note: this is an idea AMICAL is considering and came up during a call between Jeff, Alex and me)
There might be a SPLOT idea here. Not that I have time for it now. I can see drop downs for frequently used words terms like single ads have SWF or BMW. Maybe TP for Tenured Prof and DH or other discipline. Small ads. Like Craig’s List. Maybe Mahaslist
Lol. Mahaslist đŸ™‚ chez Maha đŸ™‚
How about “tags”? And folks can search by tag and there be pages per category or something? (my mind is thinking WordPress coz i’m a hammer)
I have one for you … professor of digital citizenship seeking people to leave comments on student blogs … I was thinking that I’d put a call out in about week 3 or 4 once my students have posted some more stuff … I thought it would be fun for the to get some comments from random people from around the world đŸ™‚
Thanks for casting the net on this, Maha!
The AMICAL Consortium has been thinking of doing something like these ‘want ads’ for a while, though for internal use among faculty and staff at member institutions of our consortium. One form of this idea was to create profiles advertising expertise, interest/willingness to collaborate, and need for collaborators, while providing mechanisms for indicating (& finding) disciplinary focus, specific methods or technologies for research/pedagogy, technical or professional skills/experience, etc.
Rebecca’s comment makes me wonder, though, if it might be interesting to make part or all of AMICAL’s scholarly/professional ‘personals’ open to the world, or at least to external colleagues interested in networking with members of our consortium.
And the idea of thinking in terms of ‘want ads’ instead of ‘profiles’ may be useful itself — keeping the system simple, less structured and with fewer requirements might actually be the key to getting people to actually use it!
Hi Jeff! Welcome to my blog! I wrote this post after that meeting with you and Alex. Agree it could have benefit beyond AMICAL. I guess we could have privacy levels or something. Rebecca btw is co-founder of Virtually Connecting