Blogging: a health warning!
The blog title ‘Blogging is like crack for academics’ certainly got my attention! It was referring to an article about the pros and cons of blogging by Bellman. Here are some of the main points:
• Blogging enables virtual communities but erases the social restraints enforced by real ones.
• The boundaries between reading and writing in the blogosphere is blurred
• There is a pecking order but it’s an abstract, intransitive kind of authority
• There is an inherent community based form of self regulation and peer validation commons-based peer production (CBPP) (Benkler)
• The argument against blogs for some: “easy kicks, fun in the short term and personal ruin in the end”
I am finding blogging useful on a number of levels: as a means of reflecting on things I am involved with - presentations I see, articles or blogs I read, but also as a mechanism for consolidating a lot of my work (my blog is increasingly becoming my central repository). When I was a Chemist, my central repository was my lab book – usually navy blue and A4 – it went everywhere with me. I used it to record data from experiments I was doing, jot down observations, annotate references, etc. Well my blog is becoming my modern digital equivalent.
Lorcan Dempsey adds to the argument about blogging vs. other forms of academic output. He refers to Dani Rodrik arguments in favour of blogs. Dani definitely feels that the time investment is worth the effort. He talks of a blog as a type of ‘intellectual journal’ but also notes the social benefits of blogging – being part of a community and as a means of extending the audience of your work.
One of the unexpected scholarly benefits of having a blog is that it is like keeping an intellectual journal. You get an idea, you jot it down in your blog. Some months later, you vaguely remember having had the idea and you google your own blog to recover it. I am not kidding: I google my own blog all the time…
I know others feel the same way – Tony Hirst said much the same when I was talking to him about this at the OpenLearn conference. Martin Weller as part of his one-man mission to ‘blogify’ the OU (keep at it Martin your doing a good job and have certainly converted me big time!) ends a recent post with:
…increasingly I’m finding that I prefer the blog for all my output. I may have been over-converted.
And it’s great to see more and more PhD students keeping reflective blogs as part of their evolving research practice, developing their own ‘intellectual journal’. It also provides them with an important dissemination channel for their work and an additional form of dialogue with their supervisors. It was great to see so many of our research students furiously blogging away at the OpenLearn conference, many of them are available from the Open Content Holistic Research Environmnet blog.
So if we accept the argument that blogs are a valid and important form of academic output, how safe is that output in the longer term? Lorcan ends his post by posing a question about curation
What, if anything, should the Open University or Harvard be doing to make sure that this valuable discourse is available to future readers as part of the scholarly record?
Hmmm haven’t got the answer to that one – but I think it’s a really important question that needs addressing.
November 4th, 2007 at 5:16 pm
In the ADD world of the blogosphere, nailing the title is half the battle!
I share your analysis of a blog as a mixture of repository plus reflection.
November 4th, 2007 at 9:47 pm
Thank you for this post-I am very interested in this discussion about the ‘value’ of academic blogging. I am still trying to get my head around why I blog and what I am trying to achieve by it. I started a PhD blog but was put off it by my supervisor. The rationale was that anything I ‘published’ on the net could not then be re-published in a journal. What do you think?
November 4th, 2007 at 11:10 pm
Yep agree a title is worth alot - it’s the make or break between someone skipping to another page or staying and reading the article!!
November 4th, 2007 at 11:15 pm
Interestingly that you were put off blogging by your supervisor Sarah. I disagree - I think nowadays blogs are a valuable and important academic output, plus look at the increasing momentum around ‘openness’ - the Open Educational Resources movement, Open Source, creative commons and increasing number of academics behind movements such as ePrints (led originally I think by Southampton Uni) to make as much academic output digitally available as possible. Furthermore I think the same rules of citation, fair play and ‘academic rules’ apply to blogs as they do to papers. Also I may well aggregate bits from across my blog into a paper at a later date but the paper will still be unique and have its own narrative and central focus.
November 5th, 2007 at 10:44 am
@Sarah: At one level or another, I think all academics are going through the blogging debate at the moment. Here’s my version, Why Blog:
http://www.microbiologybytes.com/AJC/whyblog.html
The truth is, until blogging, in some form, is accepted as “output” by universities, then RAE will rule the roost and academic bloggers are on thin ice.
November 6th, 2007 at 10:49 pm
Yes good observation - we have a long way to go to try and properly assess different forms of academic discourse - the blogsphere is just the tip of the ice berg - when you look at all the alternative ways of connecting knowledge, sensemaking, visualising arguments (as Simon Buckingham Shum amongst others talk about),, then we have a big issue and it comes back again to my rather pompously worded question ‘What is the nature of academic discourse’????