We've chatted (see e.g. here) about blogging and academia, and some of the scares associated to it, (largely due to ignorance which is hopefully short-lived). I've also told you about the meeting I was in last week where several interested parties brainstormed about the issue. Here's another article* about the matter, this time by Robert S. Boynton, in Slate magazine, sensationally entitled: Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs - When academics post online, do they risk their jobs? Looks like he's been chatting with Crooked Timber's John Holbo, who was one of my fellow brainstormers last friday. He's been thinking about several approaches to making academic blogging more accessible and more... acceptable. Some of his thoughts (many of which would be excellent to implement) are in the article. In my view, at the stage blogging is right now, it is primarily a matter of educating our colleagues about how powerful a tool blogging can be for research, teaching, and outreach, among other things that a university is supposed to be doing. (See thoughts on this here.) Your blogging should be no more frightening to our colleagues than you having a course website, or you giving a public lecture in the local bookstore or school. We need to help them realize this. In universities enlightened enough to have promotions committees that give serious consideration to that part of your tenure dossier that falls under outreach (teaching and research aside for the moment...), blogging activity should at least make a positive contribution there (I'm not talking mostly about pictures of your dog, or your trip to the museum, I'm talking about the other stuff blogging can be about - your work. Although...never mind, another time). If you can incorporate blogging into your teaching and research (more on this from me in a post to come very soon), then it fits into those parts of your dossier too. We need to educate our colleagues about its value, and get more of them to blog too, if they want to (for example, letting people know how easy it is to set up a blog.....and that it can take up however much time you choose it to take up, and no more). These things will change fast if we lead by example, show good practice, and demonstrate tangible benefits. Remember how short a time ago it was that the ArXiv was just an underground mailing list, and people were suspicious? They thought the world was going to collapse because they could read a paper from across the world that had not been refereed! I recall being one of the only people in the field who had LaTeX-ed transparencies, and with colour on them (I used coloured pens to shade stuff in...no colour printer available, you see), and then later again with projecting talks from a computer (which I refuse to call "powerpoint", since it is not). Now everyone's doing it, and it happened in a really short space of time -just a few years... (Now people think I'm a bit weird when I show up and give a chalk talk....!!) Remember back when you were the only person you knew in your department with a website? Or when you had that camera conencted to your computer, but there was nobody else to have a video collaboration with? (Oh, wait....that's still a problem...) Anyway, thing can change fast and new genuinely useful tools will find always their way into the academic workplace. I hope this will be the same for blogging very soon. Have a read of the article. What do you think? -cvj (*Thanks for the link, Nick Warner!)
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