How does iMechanica relate to Applied Mechanics Blogs?

One thing I learned from Modeling Place is that students are often shy to post at the beginning, especially when they know (or think) many important persons will read their post. I had to push a little and convinced them it is mainly for internal communications within the group - very few others would care. Over time they are feeling comfortable posting there. Now, with iMechanica, the world is wide open, and scary. Even I have to think carefully before posting anything. So I am thinking: maybe I should keep Modeling Place as it is now, where we bring up anything interesting from inside and outside the group. On the other hand, we participate in iMechanica by bring the good stuff from our group to share with the larger community. In a sense, the local, smaller blog serves as a filter, while iMechanica serves the big family that we belong to. 

RH

Rui, your suggestions are excellent. My students also have the same concerns.

First, we need to convince the students about the advantage of iMechanica over blogger, which is the much increased popularity and visibility. With their own photos uploaded, they could quickly introduce themselves into the mechanics community even if they do not post anything. Whenever they post some valueable information, it may be promoted to the front page and seen by hundreds of people, which could be considered as an honor for them. Moreover, with the powerful tag function, the students could easily find people working in similar areas and start to collaborate in research, as well as to build up their social network. Zhigang is also considering to add the "homepage" or "resume" function into the individual blogs. All these features are very useful for the career development of the students, especially for those who are looking for jobs or ambitious.

Even for "shy" students who do not wish their post to be seen by the public, they could still contribute to iMechanica by doing the following: 1) Post useful information such as job openings, conference, biography of mechanicians, recommending a textbook, etc., which would not cause any controversy. 2) Write something about their own research or just some opinion, with a tag that belongs exclusively to their own group, e.g. chen group or huang group -- this still keeps the student staying in a relatively small circle that is similar to the modeling place. In fact, Zhigang has recently disabled the "latest post" function on the sidebar of the front page, which is very useful to "protect" the "shy" students. If the new post written by the student is not promoted to the front page or the research page, that post is of equal status as those in the modeling place, and the student does not need to worry about anything. Once the student gains more confidence, he or she could start to add more tags to the post and thus make it more visible to people working in similar areas.

I fully agree with Zhigang's view that iMechanica is an ideal platform for everybody to communicate and contribute. The success of such platform relies on everybody's contribution and any contribution (big or small) counts. We certainly do not want to force the students to contribute, but we could encourage them to think about what they could do for the community as well as how to make themselves visible to the community -- with its interactive BBS-type of forum, iMechanica is much more efficient to get to know other people than attending conference, and it costs nothing.

So I would encourage my "shy" students to first draw more people to iMechanica, which is also a critical contribution. I would ask the "shy" ones to begin by posting non-controversial stuff and let them to get used to iMechanica gradually. Once they become the more "ambitious" students, they could start to introduce their research and opinion to the community, and to communicate with others working in similar areas. I am also considering to ask several ambitious undergraduate students to join iMechanica and to bring more diversity.