(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)
Comments
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I found this summary really coherent, my own notes on this topic were far more disconnected.
Has blogging taken off in your workplace, are people valuing it and getting a sense of reciprocation from sharing posts and comments? (I've experienced so many times when workplace collaboration forums die out when the initial enthusiasm dwindles).
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Hi Patrick,
thanks for you feedback. I found it difficult to write a short blog post on a big topic like this and really needed to force myself to more or less randomely pick some thouhgts I found interesting. I guess that is what blogging is essentially about - being selective and subjective, and it was also reading your blog which helped me understanding this
.
Currently there is no blogging platform live at my workplace, but I am looking into the option for a project where I need to help building up a forum of superusers who will be setting guidelines and standards for a new application.
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David I was very interested to read how your workplace setting exhibits this same feature of reluctance to blogging. How much do you think this is due to people being wary of doing damage to their position/security by risking making an error in public, in writing? Do you think this is a feature of working environments not built on a tradition of the dialectic approach, where it is safer to express an opinion?New comment
Paige, it did not occur to me that the missing dialectic tradition in the workplace environment is causing this reluctance, this is very interesting and I'll ty to think about it. But is blogging not more a one-way channel? I know, I am contradicting myself this very moment
. but still, that's my idea of blogging, but then I am not really experienced with it.
The blogging (or chatting) was very much focused on specific (work-related) topics, so it was less about opinions than expertise, which of course also makes people reluctant to expose themselves.
What I think is also an important factor is that with blogging you can no longer differentiate to whom you speak in what way - you always address everybody in the same way. And I guess what makes elevater talks so fruitful - the need of people to show off with what they know - does not work with blogging, because of that.