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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