The Role of Blogs in Higher Education

In our Digital Communication course, we have been focusing on the role that blogs have played, are playing, and will play in the realm of journalism, touching on topics such as ethics, economics, and competition. I thought it would be an interesting and worthy addition to our understanding of this communication medium by looking at the role blogs have taken in the world of academics.

We've all participated in the ongoing discussions on our class blog, and have experienced first hand the kind of discussion and intellectual interplay blogs enable. Everyone is provided with a voice and can benefit from the voices of others.

The title of this blog was inspired by an article entitled Scholars Who Blog by David Glenn, published in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2003, in which the author refers to blogs as "the soapbox of the digital age." I found this to be the perfect summation of one of the qualities inherent in blogs: they are a microphone for all the little voices who were before never able to reach an audience.

One set of voices that have taken advantage of this digital soapbox are members of the academic community. Here we will look at how professors and students have begun to use blogs, and the pros and cons of including this medium in the academic world.

First, let us look at the pros of using blogs in academics. These are discussed thoroughly in the aforementioned article, but I will summarize them below and support them with some of the more relevant quotes included in the original article (most bulleted items are pulled directly from the article and remain in the original wording of Glenn):

• Freedom of tone
• Speed: "What blogging offers is immediacy," says Eric L. Muller, a professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose four-month-old blog is titled Is That Legal? "Compared to what we're all used to in academia, where you submit something and then maybe when you have grandchildren you'll hear whether it's going to be published, the immediacy is something that we're all unaccustomed to. I think a lot of people feel sort of like kids in a candy store."
• Opportunity to interact with diverse audiences both inside and outside academe
• Freedom to adopt a persona more playful than those generally available to people with Ph.D.'s.
• Immediate feedback on works in progress
• Higher probability of receiving valuable and well-thought out information and opinions- “Scholars' entries "are instantly monitored and responded to by others as well-informed as they are.”
• Openness of communication between people of different academic ranks- "You do see some of the barriers of rank and hierarchy break down," says the woman who blogs pseudonymously as the Invisible Adjunct. (She granted an interview on the condition that her identity not be revealed.) "An undergraduate and an adjunct can speak to someone with tenure on a more or less equal footing."
  

Upon my own consideration, other benefits could include:

• Opportunity to distill longer academic works and put them into terms that learning students or people who are not fluent in the topic can understand

• Ability of those who cannot physically be in an institution of higher learning, such as a female professor on maternity leave, to continue to participate in the dialogue occuring between professors and students alike

Another source of interesting insight comes from an article printed in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2006 entitled Can Blogging Derail Your Career? In this article, members of the academic community discuss the roles blogs can play in academics and how they can affect a professor's career, in response to the then-current issue of well-known and widely read blogger and professor, Juan R.I Cole being taken out of consideration for a position at Yale, reportedly due to his blog postings. In the 7 blogger responses linked at the bottom of the article, one can find further benefits of blogs in academics, as well as possible drawbacks.

In his response, Siva Vaidhyanathan makes the important point that blogs allow members of the academic community to participate in more current discussions- They can "use them as outlets for issues that are changing too quickly to leave to academic publication."

J. Bradford Delong presents an interesting metaphorical representation of the world academic blogging creates in his response by stating that it creates an "invisible college"- "Over the past three years, with the arrival of Web logging, I have been able to add such people to those I bump into — in a virtual sense — every week. My invisible college is paradise squared, for an academic at least."

Some have found drawbacks to this new involvement with blogs, however. One of these drawbacks it that some worry that professors will focus on their blogs and online personae more than they would traditional research and writing. Mr. Balkin, quoted in Glenn's article, believes that this concern could be eased by simple self- awareness. He states, "My advice to junior faculty is to write on your blog only when you think you have something to say. You shouldn't allow this particular tail to wag the dog of your academic career."

Another drawback, which Daniel Drezner addresses in his response to the Juan Cole debate, is that blogs have yet to find definitive respect in the academic arena. He states that "today's senior faculty members look at blogs the way a previous generation of academics looked at television — as a guilty, tawdry pleasure that should not be talked about in respectable circles." This is a drawback that can only be changed, if it can be changed, by time as well as professors and students alike proving through online publishing that the medium has worth and can bring further depth and meaning to the academic world.

While the pros and cons of academic blogs can continue to be debated, they have undeniably become a very large part of the blogosphere. At http://www.blogscholar.com/ , one can find a list of scholarly blogs divided into realm of concentration.

Other blogs that I personally found an interesting mix of academic and personal opinion are:
http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/
http://www.tamaleaver.net/

Disclaimer: I did not, to the extent of my knowledge, break any copyright laws and I did attribute all information to the proper sources. If I somehow failed to do this, however, please don't sue me. :)