Why do academics blog? It’s not for public outreach, research shows
Blogging is touted as bridge between academia and the world but study finds it functions more like global common room
- by Pat Thomson and Inger Mewburn
“Academics are now urged to blog. We are told that having to write for ordinary readers will help us to write in plain English, clarify our ideas, enhance our reputations and expand our knowledge as well as our audience. Blogging is presented to us as a way to bridge the apparent divide between academia and everyone else.We both blog and unlike many of our colleagues we don’t need to be convinced that it is worthwhile. However we were less convinced that the academic bloggers we encountered were all in it for reasons of public outreach, or to refine their thinking, and we certainly weren’t convinced that they wanted fame. So we set out to have a preliminary look at what was going on in academic blogs.
We had a number of challenges in setting up this small-scale study. We had no funding so interviews were out; we had to rely on published blogs alone. And we had to decide what counted as an academic blog. This was not as easy as you might think, given the growth of professional and managerial roles offered inside universities today, which often involve some kind of research or teaching. We opted for the blogger who stated an institutional affiliation, had some kind of academic purpose and was connected to other academic blogs. We called the bloggers who weren’t professors, lecturers or fellows ‘para-academics’. We couldn’t get a representative sample as there is no handy index of blogs, the numbers change all the time, and frankly, there were just too many. And because we speak English, our choices had to be blogs we could actually read.
By using various online listings of academic blogs, we eventually compiled a list of 100 we could use as a sample set. Of these, 49 were from the UK and 40 from the US, five from Canada and six from Australia. 80 were by teaching and researching academics, 14 from para-academics and six from doctoral researchers” (read more).
(Source: The Guardian)
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