(H817 - block 1, activity 3)
Myself not being engaged in any academic or scholarly environment, I was first surprised to learn that blogging is of only marginal significance as a means to assist the publication of research. Taking on the commonplace of the academic’s pressure to publish I would have expected that blogging would be the much sought after opportunity to publicize one’s ideas and findings. Furthermore, as convincingly described by Weller in his introduction to ‘The Digital Scholar: How Technology is Transforming Scholarly Practice’, blogging offers many more opportunities for researching and developing ideas: at any stage it is possible to share early thoughts with a community of peers who can provide feedback and link into an extended and creative debate or open up new sources of information, methods and technology (Weller, 2011).
About this reserve in blogging among academics I found Kirkup’s empirical study enlightening: in the statements the twofold face of blogging becomes apparent: the formally less restricted blog does allow for a more personalised and subjective content and language, in fact it encourages the creative play with different identities, but is at the same time perceived as not getting much academic credit, but moreover endangering the academic's reputation (Kirkup, 2010).
Though blogging might not (yet) be recognized as a valid form of academic publishing, its biggest potential I can see in the collaborative aspect as described in the example of Cloudworks by Conole (Conole 2010). At my own workplace we have been trying to getting a blogging platform off the ground to facilitate informal communication and collaboration. While some colleagues have been active in quite fruitful conversations, others did not really buy into it. The active ones were mostly those people who also act as opinion leaders in other environments while talking to some of the latter ones has revealed that even if they were maintaining a blog themselves privately, they did not feel comfortable blogging in at the workplace, very much for the same reasons stated by Kirkup (Kirkup, 2010).
References
Conole, G. (2010) ‘Facilitating new forms of discourse for learning and teaching: harnessing the power of Web 2.0 practices’, Open Learning, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 141–51. [Online] Available at:http://oro.open.ac.uk/21461/2/9735BAEE.pdf
(Accessed 8 Feb 2013)
Kirkup, G. (2010) ‘Academic blogging, academic practice and academic identity’, London Review of Education, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 75–84. [Online] Available at: http://oro.open.ac.uk/20714/1/Academic_blogging_ORO.pdf
(Accessed 8 Feb 2013)
Weller, M. (2011) The Digital Scholar: How Technology is Transforming Scholarly Practice London, Bloomsbury Academic. Available online at:
http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/DigitalScholar_9781849666275/book-ba-9781849666275.xml
(Accessed 8 Feb 2013)