8 reasons why researchers should blog
February 22, 2010 at 3:59 pm Gareth_Morris 5 comments
This is a short video outlining some of the reasons why I think that blogging for researchers is a good idea. Drop in any comments, additions, agreements or disagreements as you see fit.
Entry filed under: Research, The blog, Video. Tags: blogging, blogs, public engagement, REF, Research, research impact, researchers.
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Gareth_Morris
1.
Cristina Costa | February 25, 2010 at 7:40 pm
I totally agree with all the reasons you have pointed out and sincerely can’t think of an additional one.
What I can say, from personal experience, is that through blogging the researcher shares a facet of his/her personality and professional practice that you will not find in their peer reviewed articles or published books. It is that human touch…someone who shares their personal views… and makes themselves and their knowledge available to others interested in the subject. The appeal is in the dialog and in the fact that the researcher is no longer enclosed behind the institutional walls.
I really like your blog. It is becoming quite a useful resource.
Keep up the great work
2.
salfordunigareth | February 26, 2010 at 9:58 am
Thanks Cristina. I think the issue of blurring professional / personal boundaries is a very relevant one when using a blog. I think there is a huge amount of knowledge that academics possess that, for one reason or another, they aren’t sharing with the wider world. We’re researching, attaining new knowledge, forming ideas and theories, and most of the time it goes no further than our own minds or our computers hard drive. What’s the use in that?
I also suspect that for many of us there is an element of anxiety in presenting our work (which we always know to be imperfect) to the scrutiny of an unknown audience. This could be due to the way we have been socialised over several years of education and training in which our survival and our credibility has depended on our ability to persuade others of our intelligence, knowledge and ability. Blogging opens us up to criticism on a scale we have not known previously – we may be challenged to justifying our positions as researchers, and our funding!
So there you have it – blogging is a difficult task, not only is it necessary to develop some technical competence in operating a blog, we novices must also learn a different style of communicating, and, overcome the psychological hurdle of presenting our work to a critical audience. My personal strategy is to remind myself that I am simply the messenger for my research and try not to succumb to the vanity of worrying how I, or my research team, will be perceived. Giving in to the anxiety encourages us to hide behind those institutional walls and blame the general public for not being smart enough or interested enough to understand what we’re doing.
I think that the general audience for this blog will be far more interested in the research findings (when I start posting them!) than ourselves personally.
An excellent, and classic, book on the subject of writing for academics (and not just for social scientists as the title suggests) is Howard Becker’s ‘Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book or Article’ – http://www.amazon.co.uk/Writing-Social-Scientists-Chicago-Publishing/dp/0226041328/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267174908&sr=1-2
Howard, if you’re reading, I’ll gladly write an additional chapter on writing blogs for a share of the royalties…
3.
Andy Coverdale | February 26, 2010 at 12:05 pm
Great overview of academic blogging. We discussed this at a recent session with PhD students and Early Career Researchers at Nottingham University: http://phdblog.net/social-media-jubilee-graduate-centre-session-two/
Two quick points I would add:
Blogging encourages a writing discipline that is consistent – particularly useful at stages in research where you are not writing regularly, such as during data collection or analysis, lab work or field work – and experimental – it’s a largely ‘risk-free’ environment for trying different writing styles and approaches. If you think about it, blog-type texts are actually quite prevalent in academic writing – abstracts, proposals for papers and funding, poster texts – anywhere research needs to summarised or disseminated to a wider audience.
Secondly, the informality and accessibility of blog writing and the connectivity of blogging technologies encourage discourse with domains on the periphery of your field of study or discipline. I would recommend looking at the work of Lilia Efimova, who suggests blogs can be thought of as boundary objects: http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2006/07/04/blogging-as-boundary-practice/
4.
salfordunigareth | March 2, 2010 at 8:31 am
Thanks for your input Andy, and I agree with your points. Also, one thing I didn’t talk about was being a consumer of other peoples research – it’s really useful to just be able to see what others are doing and how they’re getting on, thus reducing the isolation that many researchers/PhD students can experience.
5. Learning Journey » Blog Archive » Social Media in Higher Education and Beyond | July 23, 2010 at 11:21 pm
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