Academic Blogging
Blogs and Academics
While blogging is popular on both a personal and commercial level,
academics have been slow or reticent to adopt it since the birth of the
first blog in 1997. This disposition changed as a handful of scholars
began to adopt the use of a blog as an enhancement to traditional
research and citation methods. Today, academic blogging is making its
way into both traditional classrooms as well as online learning
environments.
Blogging Scholars
Scholars who are active bloggers extol the virtues of the medium because
of its fast and uneditable readability. Law Professor Glenn Reynolds,
author of Instapundit, one of the oldest and most popular academic blogs
to date states that, "What blogging offers is immediacy. On my weblog no
one can change what I wrote. In contrast, having written for
professional publications, pros have to prepare for their writing being
interfered with (Glenn, 2003)." Scholars are also fond of the global
nature of blogs in contrast with the relatively closed community
interested in scholarly publications.
Blogs and Web-based Instruction
Blogs are also being adopted for Web-based Instruction purposes. In its
infancy stages, the blog was used as a personal space for students to
develop a learning log (also known as a learning journal). Reece Lamshed,
Director of Binary Blue, an Australian company dedicated to creating
technology based projects for educational institutions, describes a
Learning Journal as "an analytical record of a person’s learning. This
may be tied to an individual subject in a course, or a particular topic
within a subject or it may be about the experience of learning in
general" (Lamshed). At the end of a given semester, the student would
integrate the journal into an electronic portfolio that illustrated
evidence of learning (Tansey, 2003).
Today, blogs are increasingly being integrated into courseware for WBI.
Tansey states that "Weblogs are an effective way for students to
collaborate on class projects. They find it easy to collaborate in this
environment, and the faculty can provide expert guidance and focus to
these collaborations as the process evolves. There are numerous examples
of blogs that capture research notes and references. Finally, a number
of institutions have added courses on blogging to the curriculum.
Several journalism programs now teach blogging as an emerging form of
journalism (Tansey, 2003)."
Benefits of Blogs in Academia
Blogs provide a wide variety of benefits to the academic
community, including:
-
Potential to compete with the current, commercial
media overflow on the Web
-
Immediately available for review and response
-
Unlimited potential for built-in peer review
-
Uneditable posts
-
Persistence of meaning
-
Documented evolution of learning
-
Inherently collaborative
Distinctions between Scholarly Blogging and
Traditional Research and Citation Methods
Scholarly blogging for research and writing purposes is
distinct from traditional methods. Some of the most notable differences
include:
-
Lack of formal organization - no specific rules
are followed
-
Posts are ordered by reverse chronology
-
Casual tone in writing
-
Immediate publication as opposed to
multi-month waiting periods for publication
-
Fragmented thoughts as opposed cohesive, planned
out writing
Bibliography
Reynolds, G., Instapundit.
http://instapundit.com/
Site Last Viewed on 24 April 2004
Lamshed, R., Experimenting with Weblogs in Education and Training.
The Electronic Learning Journal, RMIT University - Australia
http://binaryblue.com.au/elj/
Site Last Viewed on 24 April 2004
Tansey, F., Living in parallel worlds: Blogs and course management
systems. Syllabus News.
http://www.syllabus.com/news_article.asp?id=8499&typeid=155
Site Last Viewed on 24 April 2004
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