From Jeremy:
In many ways, this blog is an experiment in online education. Now that I have a blog, it’s not just my students who get to hear what I think about, say, r and K selection (they’re zombie ideas). But there are much more audacious experiments in online education out there. This Digitopoloy post is an interesting update on the state of play, and discussion of the incentives involved. Lots of food for thought here. The latest news is that the authors of a popular economics blog have just launched their own online education courses. Hmm…Dynamic Ecology University, anyone?
At Noahpinion, economist Noah Smith (who started a popular economics blog as a grad student, and who just got a faculty position) muses on whether blogging will hurt your career. Short answer: it’s hard to say, but there are reasons to think it won’t, as long as you don’t spend too much time on it. Also see the comments for some wise words for some tenured economics bloggers, for whom the risk-reward calculation for blogging is very different.
From the archives:
An old post I linked to last Friday suggested that community ecology isn’t inherently complex and contingent, it merely appears so when you insist on asking the wrong questions. Here’s a counterweight: an old post in which I suggest that there are indeed inherently complex ecological phenomena, phenomena we can never really understand no matter what questions we ask about them. We can see the trees, but we never see the forest, as it were. And there’s a fun analogy to chess endgames.
Dynamic Ecology 