There’s a neat article in the Australian’s Higher Ed supplement today by Bernard Lane, which should increase the profile of student and academic blogging. I’ll reproduce the bit where Ken Parish and I are quoted over the fold.
Update: Andrew Leigh writes on why academics should blog.
John Quiggin, an economist at the University of Queensland, and Ken Parish, a law teacher at Charles Darwin University, would be two of Australia’s earliest academic bloggers; both started in 2002.At Club Troppo, Parish shares space with, among others, Nicholas Gruen, an economics consultant. For Parish, who carries a heavy load of teaching and administration, a post is a chance to do some “considered writing”, and not just within his public law speciality.
He’s attracted by the immediacy of the blog form and sometimes irritated by the trivial turn of comment threads. He still hopes blogs might open up politics to wider participation: “(But) my actual experience of blogs suggests that won’t happen any time soon.”
He thinks it is obvious that academics should not post on workplace grievances, but he doesn’t see any need to seek permission from CDU for his blog.
“Academics are supposed to have community involvement, I would argue this is community involvement,” Parish says.
Still, there are no research points in blogging and academic time is precious. “I’m sure that every one of us reflects: is this a useful thing to be doing or is it a complete waste of time?” Parish says.
In the US, there’s an emerging view that blogs may be bad for academic careers; they will be seen as a negative by risk-averse appointment committees. Perhaps this question hasn’t arisen in Australia because academic blogging is still a marginal activity.
Larvatus Prodeo (a Descartes reference, apparently) is a group blog with an academic flavour, not least by virtue of its founder Mark Bahnisch, a Griffith University sociologist. “I think it’s a good way to get out of the isolation that a lot of academics have in relation to their work,” he says.
Thanks to his blog profile he’s collaborating on a Work Choices project with Quiggin, writing a youth politics article for The Griffith Review and has a chapter appearing in what’s believed to be the first academic book on blogs.
Bahnisch sees blogging as an opinionated variant of teaching: applying a theory, say, to current affairs and thereby bringing its significance to life.
“The other thing is that blogging is fun,” he says.
Ken sounds a bit downbeat:
Actually one question I wasn’t able to answer for the journo was why so many of the (not large) number of current academic blogs are run by law academics. They, along with computer science and cultural studies academics dominate the field. On the other hand, economists run some of the most high profile blogs, as we know. I don’t know of any other blogging sociologists in Oz.
I’m absolutely in favour of academic blogging (hell, it’s in my interest to promote blogging as it is effectively paying me now), but I’m also acutely aware that there are practicalities associated with calculation of appropriate time to be devoted to the act of blogging. It needs to be recognised as a legitimate and productive aspect of our workload. Plus there needs to be some understanding of the “value” of collaboration and negotiated understanding the arises from the act of blogging. The learning that occurs in blogging is just as much about process of research and idea engagement as it is about the content of a negotiation.
Oh and yes, I’m preparing a book proposal on “Informed Interaction”, based on this sort of theory, so anyone who wants to talk to me about this, please feel free to contact me! (joanne@joannejacobs.net)
Economst Dan Drezner thinks blogging robbed him of tenure.
http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/002353.html
Does Ken Parish read many other blogs, I wonder? Not asking in a cranky way, but I am wondering how broad his experience of blogland really is. I don’t recollect seeing remarks of his in too many places.
I think the cultural studies acka blogger network in Australia sets a pretty darn encouraging example – a model of rich and original productivity within the limitations of the blog format, and they network creatively and usefully, and some of them manage to open up their discipline to interested common readers. Big pat on the back to those people.
Perhaps there are a number of law academics blogging here partly because the law bloggers are numerous and vocal in the USA. And I guess the professional guild / network aspect is independently strong with law professionals.
Are there sociologist bloggers in other lands Mark?
There are a huge number of physics blogs. I got into blogging because my collaborators and PhD supervisor were getting into it as well. Let’s run through the list of physics blogs of prominent(ish) people in my field:
Michael Nielsen (though is blog is inactive at the moment his back catalogue is awesome)
Dave Bacon (one of my favourite blogs)
Scott Aaronson (another excellent one though Scott claims to be a computer scientist, a claim that is frequently refuted by the impact of his work on the physics community)
Ben Schumacher (the guy who invented the word “qubit”, look it up in the online Oxford Dictionary, subscription required)
These are just some heavy hitters in my field who blog. For the rest of us quantum bloggers try the Mixed States aggregator blog. It gets feeds from a huge number of quantum physics blogs, so many that I kinda stopped checking it a few months ago.
I also think that law academics are trained specifically to argue and tend to like a good argument – which is very compatible with blogging.
I have a comment that is waiting to be moderated that points out that there is a huge amount of blogging in the science community.
My experience is with physics and it is verifiably true that physcists have traditionally been fast to uptake new technologies that help to make the field move faster. A good example is, well, the internet. Another less debatable example is the pre-print arxiv. Blogs have been seen as a logical extension of things like the arxiv, some debates on blog threads are even being cited as references in reputable journals!
Comment retrieved Mick.
Looking at that post I can see why it was moderated. A few typos and lots of links! Obviously I need more coffee this morning before I’ll be my normal marginally coherent self. Thanks Cristy.
Mick, do you have an OPML file on physics blogs?