Sunday, March 27, 2011

The Conversation: Australian Research Discussion Site

The following link (via Colm) is an interesting new Australian site devoted to discussions of research emanating from the university world in Aus. Their basic statement of purpose is below. Interesting idea. My experience of being one of the less frequent contributors to irisheconomy.ie is that there is definitely a demand in Ireland to debate research coming out of the universities. A blog post I put up about one of Kevin's papers on higher education generated nearly 150 comments and, while the most popular post deal with developments in the macroeconomy, people do debate research papers when they are put up. The format of the website below is an interesting model.

The Conversation is an independent source of information, analysis and commentary from the university and research sector – written by acknowledged experts and delivered directly to the public. As professional journalists, we aim to make this wealth of knowledge and expertise accessible to all.

We aim to be a site you can trust. All published work will carry attribution of the authors’ expertise and, where appropriate, will disclose any potential conflicts of interest, and sources of funding. Where errors or misrepresentations occur, we will correct these promptly.

Initially, our Content Partners include the Australian Group of Eight universities (Adelaide, ANU, Melbourne, Monash, NSW, Queensland, Sydney, Western Australia) plus University of Technology Sydney, CSIRO, and the Australian Science Media Centre.

Sincere thanks go to our Founding Partners who have given funding support. Those universities are ANU, Monash, Melbourne, UTS, UWA, plus CSIRO. See also our list of Strategic Partners.

We are based in Melbourne, Australia, and wholly owned by The Conversation Media Trust, a not-for-profit company.

This is a beta site in development. We have a program of additional features and functionality that we will be introducing over the next few months. In the meantime, we'd be keen to hear back from you on any suggestions.

If you have any comments or suggestions about our service, we’d like to hear from you. Email us at: feedback@theconversation.edu.au

2 comments:

Peter Carney said...

It would be great to see other academic disciplines engaging like many academic economists do on irisheconomy.ie

A good central portal like the Oz one would be an amazing resource, and besides some initial coordination costs, it could probably run itself.

Liam Delaney said...

The geography people in Maynooth run one called irelandafternama, which is very good. there are also blogs like ferdinand's blog and people like Stephen Kinsella etc., also are active. The ninth level ireland blog acts as an aggregator for material relevant to higher ed, but there is nothing like the Aus site in Ireland. It could be a good contribution alright.