Chronicle Careers: 07/08/2005:
OK, I can’t help but chime in on this chronicle of higher education piece about the potential downfalls of academic blogging. Truth be told, it could be about any industry (there are examples of folks losing their jobs because of blogging). However, I feel it has two object lessons for folks in academia.
First: be careful what you put on your blog. It is a public document. I once assigned freshmen to set up a blog and comment on some articles. One student used her existing blog. I read her assignment, and then read some of the other posts…mostly about anxieties of coming to college. When, in class, I made a comment to something she posted, she looked at me surprised and said “you read that?” Yup, blogging is a public activity.
Bottom line the job candidates were at fault for any academic dishonesty, or spreading rumors and such. This is just good sense.
Second: to the author of the editorial…get over it. In particular his comments about self-publishing and lack of editorial control. I look at it as the new reality in academia. There are two parts to academic level discourse. There is indeed the vital peer review and final, summative, reporting of research. There is also, at least supposed to be, an ongoing dialectic of unformed ideas, questions and opinions that lead to more rigorous scientific investigation. This form of discourse is often even confrontational. Blogs belong to this later process.
In these days where journals are often more documentary than informative (meaning the gist of the research is often common knowledge among colleagues by the time the journal is printed), we must adopt open effort academia. In this more expansive approach, not only do we share results, methods and products, but the formative process as well. This adds to the transparency of the scientific method we hold dear. Also for the author, people can be interested and expert in technology and still think.
A final note of advice from one who has just leapt the tenure chasm. Keep blogging, but keep this in mind.
- It is still a good idea to separate out personal from professional.
- Know that potential reviewers, grant makers and hiring committees might well read this
- The potential benefits in building a professional network far outweigh the potential downfalls of luddites.
Excellent post. My sentiments exactly. I like the way you put it in your second point…blogs are a way to foment scholarship. I’ve tried that on my blog, anyway!