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June 20th, 2011

Academics and universities should embrace blogging as a vital tool of academic communication and impact

6 comments | 2 shares

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Blog Admin

June 20th, 2011

Academics and universities should embrace blogging as a vital tool of academic communication and impact

6 comments | 2 shares

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Improving academic communication will be a key part of the impact agenda. Writing for University World News, Geoff Maslen explores the world of academic blogging and suggests that there is a growing community of bloggers who see their online forums as optimal places to test their ideas, advertise their research and constructively interact with the wider world.

Tens of thousands of opinionated academics around the world have become internet bloggers while universities are increasingly establishing blogging sites on their web pages. Blogging has moved from being a nerdish undergraduate pastime to an accepted communication medium within the academic community.

James Farmer, creator of Edublogs, has noted that academics research and write and talk “and what better platform for reaching an audience and sharing your research than a blog?”

Universities obviously agree because increasing numbers are creating blogging home pages in their eagerness to have their staff blog, not only to inform other academics as well as outsiders of their research, but also to use blogging as a new pedagogical-teaching system.

Not that every academic is a practicing or potential blogger, as New York historian Stephen T Casper noted in a blog in the Neuro Times last month. Titled “Why academics should blog”, Casper wrote that every now and then he makes the mistake of confessing to a colleague that he blogs.

“They usually greet this confession with an uneasy smile and follow it with a look that says ‘do you really have time for that?’ I understand what they really mean: a serious tenure track assistant professor does not have time for blogging. With respect to my colleagues, they’re wrong: graduate students, postdocs, young faculty and senior faculty too, should do more blogging not less. And, moreover, institutions of high education ought to start recognising such work as an important component of a scholar’s profile.”

Likewise, Anthony Ridge-Newman, a conservative British academic and politician, describes on the History Blogging Project website how he gave a presentation on blogging last month to Oxford’s history faculty where he debated the role of blogging in academia.

“The use of blogs and social media is, generally, a fairly new phenomenon and is certainly viewed with some suspicion in academic circles,” Ridge-Newman said. But he concluded that “blogging is a tool for interactive discourse. A discourse that need not adhere to the conventions and rules of any other medium – whether academic in focus or not”.

A blogger at RMIT University in Melbourne, economics professor Sinclair Davidson, believes universities are ideal forums for blogging:

“They are important and broadly respected social institutions that exist to propagate and disseminate knowledge. Blogging allows people to get ideas out into the marketplace for ideas, to pre-test thoughts, to set down markers and generally converse with a wider audience of people than you’d otherwise encounter.”

Davidson wrote a commentary earlier this year on why academics should blog and says he started blogging in the early 2000s and now sees it as an appropriate academic pastime:

“Over and above anything else that academics do, they are observers: why, what, when and how is our bread and butter. It is unsurprising then that many bloggers are academics: those people already active in the market for ideas are likely to explore different avenues for communicating with different parts of the market.”

Academics wondering whether they should venture into cyberspace should consider its reach, says Adrian Miles, a senior lecturer in media and communications at RMIT. Miles has 1,000 readers a week for his VLOG 4.0 blog and although he describes it as “a very small blog”, he contrasts it with being published in a major international journal where he says “maybe 100 people would read my article”.

A rural Australian academic blogger is Dr Ben Habib, who lectures in politics and international relations at a regional campus of Melbourne’s La Trobe University. Habib decided to start a blog last September to follow the federal election and post online comments; since then the site has received more than 5,400 hits.

“I’m very conscious of the need for academics like me to remove ourselves from our ‘ivory tower’ and provide something of value to the community in media that are easily accessible,” he says.

“This is especially important for academics who work in regional universities so with that in mind, my blog serves three broad purposes: one, it provides me with a forum to write regularly on a broad range of topics within my research and teaching areas; two, it is a teaching tool, providing experiential learning opportunities for students; and three, it is a vehicle for community engagement.”

Meantime, Farmer says anyone wanting a successful academic career could use blogging “to impress a large number of readers and have a great deal of credibility – and that only comes from peer-to-peer review which is people reading and recommending and subscribing back to you”. He says tracking engines help bloggers map the number of readers and links to their blogs to confirm their level of blogging authority.

“On the technical front, it’s now much, much easier to track feedback – especially given the increasing use of social bookmarking sites such as Twitter and of course Facebook, although I’m not sure that many people share academic treatises on Facebook!” he says.

This post is an abridged version of an article that appeared on the University World News website on Sunday 29 May 2011. You can access the original piece here.

For an example of an academic blog,  you can visit the British Politics and Policy at LSE blog.

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