Flipping the Question:"Why DON'T Academics Blog?". Liz Lawly recently shared a great collection of edublogger's explanations for why they blog:
I keep getting asked this question by colleagues here at
RIT and elsewhere, and I find myself sending them the same links over
and over again. So here’s what I give people who ask me this, in an
attempt to clarify the value of blogging to those of us in academia.
It’s not all about personal confessionals. Really.
These are great, useful, but in a way, like asking devout Apple
users "Why they use a Mac?" I am curious about the flip side, why
academics do NOT blog, what keeps them from it, what are the barriers, perceived or real?
I've been musing on this for a while, as I have created blogs for
teachers and techies in our system that have various life spans from
weeks to months. It is also curious in light of interests in our system
in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), sprouting from the Carnegie Foundation's movement-- where a central tenet is being "public with our work as scholarly teachers" -- what could be more than public than a blog?
And while the buzz is high among edu-techies for electronic
portfolios, the prospect of an easy to use, comprehensive, portable,
enterprise life long tool is on the 8 to never year horizon (don't bark
back about the ones in existence, I know about them, I know about the
successful systems in place, but they are not near mainstream). So you
can sit back and wait for the perfect tool or do something NOW which can catalog your accomplishments, projects, reflections, artifacts -- a blog.
Following is mostly my own conjecture and speculation on why the
blog updatke is slow, and is part of a later to be summary of how our
faculty leaders are doing with using the blogs+wikis+discussion boards
to document our Ocotillo project.
[cogdogblog]
9:14:26 AM  Google It!.
|
|
