Pat Thomson (Nottingham) Inger Mewburn (ANU) SRHE December 2012

why look at academic blogging

Many universities now have official blog sites There is a league table of university social media use Academics are now being told how they must use social media,

including blogs: •  UK - how to do downloadable booklets, and workshops •  Australia - as above, but also some concerns about regulation

(a moral panic?) There are a lot of 'unofficial' academic blogs

What’s going on here?

Blogs communicate with others, right? Quote:

Why academics should blog 3. The point of academia is to expand knowledge!

If you believe that the reason academics publish is to expand knowledge, then expanding it beyond the few tens or hundreds of your colleagues that read the obscure journals you publish in should be a good thing. Your ideas should matter (if they don't you should try to come up with some better ideas). If they matter then more people should know about them, and right now almost all your ideas are locked up inside the walls of journals, academic conferences, and university quadrangles. Set them free, and the good ideas will spread, be built on by others, and knowledge as a whole will benefit.!

!

4. Blogging expands your readership!

Cross-pollination of ideas makes for a more healthy intellectual ecosystem, and blogging means that anyone, not just those in your discipline, will be likely to read your stuff. This includes other academics, as well as the rest of us (politicians, policy developers, artists, engineers, designers, writers, thinkers, kids, parents, and on and on). Anyone might have an interest in your work, or nuanced ideas about how it might be improved, or indeed thoughts on how your thoughts might improve their own thinking on a particular (perhaps nominally-unrelated) topic. More readers, from a more varied background, means your ideas will have a bigger impact.!

Hugh Maguire. Huff Post 28/10/2008

What to ask about blogs?

Weller (2012, p. 5) offers a set of quality oriented questions e.g. are they 'proper scholarship'? What is their impact on academic communities?

Hank (2012) looked at who was blogging - she collected 644 blogs, surveyed 153 bloggers, interviewed 24, codes 93 blogs, looked for motivation and preservation issues

Walker (2006) examined own practices over time Ewins (2005) looked at motivation, identity issues and potential work difficulties

and pay offs Gregg (2005) looked at blogs as support for doctoral researchers who have

inadequate institutional support and supervision, (b) as mentoring and job seeking support, and (c) as a space distinct from the parent culture of institutions, and (d) blogs as a form of individualized self-promotion.

There is research into blogging

There is research into blogs from subject specific interests eg journalism, linguistics and communications, cultural studies

There is research which looks at blogging with pedagogical purposes: how to use a blog as part of a course

There are of course a lot of blogs about blogging - advocacy and experience-based

But there is still very little research looking at academic blogging per se

Our questions about academic blogs:

What is going on? Who is blogging about what, and for whom?

And this means: Is there a way of categorising academic blogs?

…recognising that textual analysis is only part of 'seeing’ production-reception practice

Our sample We used three selection criteria for an 'academic blog':

•  A blog is published and read online •  A blog has sequential entries, published over time •  The blog entries are written by someone either working in or clearly associated with one or more universities

Selection process: modified snowball technique Total blogs in sample: 174 so far This is a preliminary analysis of 83 of these blogs

tag cloud from 'about' pages

Who is blogging? In the analysis presented here:

36% bloggers had no clear allegiance; 42% were Humanities scholars and 22% bloggers were from Sciences

The majority of blogs (66%) were written by academics; (23%) by professional staff members and the rest were unclear.

28% of the blogs had multiple authors.

49% of the blogs were from the UK; 39% from the USA and the rest from Canada and Australia.

Who was the intended audience? In most cases, the intended audience is implied in the topic and

tone of the post, not explicitly stated in the about section.

The vast majority of blogs (95%) appear to be oriented to an academic audience*

Only 5% of the blogs seemed to be explicitly aimed at disseminating research to the interested general public and 4% at students.

Most academic blogs seem to be written for an audience of the blogger's peers

What are they blogging about? So far we have identified 11 different categories of post (the

percentage shows the number of blogs such posts appeared on):

Academic culture Critique (41%) Research conversation (40%) Academic Practices (32%) Information (26%) Self Help (17%) Technical practices (15%) Personal reflection (8%)

Teaching advice (5%) Career advice (1%)

What 'voice' are they using? The last 5 entries of each blog were reviewed. Most

employed 'hybrid' genres; the three genres we identified were:

Pedagogic ('teacherly') Essay (formal and informal or reflective) Reportage

Informal or reflective essays were most common; reportage was least common, but more blogs (75%) employed mixed genre than single genre.

What does a typical academic blog look like? Based on these data, blogs with the highest cue

validity (Roche, 1978) would be those which are:

•  Single authored •  Written by someone in an academic position •  Engaged in commentary on academia itself and

research dissemination with an informal essay voice

•  Written for an audience of the blogger's peers

So what? (1)  Comparatively few academics blog. Many academic blogs,

like all others, are ephemeral. There are relatively few long-lasting blogs. Institutional commitment might be one way of creating sustainability, but long-life academic bloggers are creating a body of work and there needs to be some way of treating it as such, not just as a series of isolated posts.

(2) Pedagogic blogs can be seen as a gift economy. Critique is of course also a kind of 'gift'. There is sharing of information rather than collaboration.There is however certainly a lot of self-promotion which is congruent with practice in the wider academic field

And…more surprisingly

(3) Academic bloggers seem to largely talk to each other. This is not a place where there seems to be a lot of 'public engagement'. There are of course some areas of overlap with practice fields ( e.g. school education) and some from celebrity academics all of whose publications attract a wide audience. But there is less translation than might be expected if it was public engagement or dissemination to the public more generally. There is an assumption that the audience is 'like me'. Dissemination seems more like a conversation, with a lot of assumed knowledge. This is not dissimilar to the 'message' of a journal article, but blogs are journal-lite.

(4) But the presence of so much discussion about impact and changing work patterns in HE suggests blogs do exist in some kind of public sphere in which asynchronous debate could be said to exist. There is less evidence of 'dialogue'. However it is evidence of an inward looking practice.

We concur with Dean (2012) that there is a 'blogipelago' not a blogosphere. Academics seem to exist on their own set of islands, largely talking with each other. Their blogs are evidence of this. While this is still a public good, it raises questions about assumptions that blogging is a means of generating public debate.

We welcome comments: patricia.thomson@nottingham.ac.uk Please cite this as a conference paper “ Social media: an academic public good” Thomson, P and Mewburn, I ( December 14, 2012) SRHE conference, Newport, Wales.

tag cloud from 'about' pages