Laura at Geeky Mom sent this list of the "Top 100 Liberal Arts Bloggers" to the faculty at her college with a note that it makes good beach reading. She’s rather ticked off at the response that she got back from the faculty. "I got a response pretty quickly from someone saying that
he/she was disappointed that the blogs weren’t scholarship and that the
list just confirmed that blogs are worthless."
Laura says that academic bloggers recognize that their audience is larger than the handful of scholars who study their topics and that there’s more to life than scholarship. She also questions the usefulness of scholarship and speaks to the need for academics to get out of the ivory tower more.
Get a little sun on that pasty skin, already!
I personally think we need to expand what we mean by scholarship
anyway. I think we can still say that a certain kind of scholarship
needs to be done (maybe), the kind written for the narrow group of
people interested in a topic and published in journals reviewed and
read by those same people. But I think there’s room for much
more–critiques of the industry of higher education, discussions of
teaching and grading practices, discussions of news or of peer-reviewed
articles. I think blogs bring academics out of the ivory tower and I
think that’s a good thing for both the academics and for the people who
read their blogs. It ups the level of public discourse. I feel sorry
for those who feel they should remain ensconced in the ivory tower and
don’t engage with the world. Their work may become increasingly unknown
and irrelevant.
There are academic blogs that deal solely with scholarship, but they
die a lonely death. Nobody reads them. There are a handful of academic
blogs that tie in research with current events and they should get more
attention. However, mostly people turn to the blogosphere for a little
laugh. You can (and should) mix in some broccoli with the pudding, but
all-broccoli blogs aren’t going to be read.
Not only are blog readers looking for some pudding. So are the
bloggers. This is a hobby. While my job is more fun than most jobs,
it’s still a job. I don’t talk about APSR journal articles all day.
When I’m not wearing my professor hat, I’m making fun of Courtney
Love’s collagen lip injections and taking my kids to water slides. This
blog is a place for the non-professor me.
There are also a lot of obstacles to blogging about your research,
especially research that hasn’t been published yet. You could get your
ideas jacked. A few months ago, some commenters at Crooked Timber (I
can’t remember the post) said that they felt no obligation to cite
ideas found in blog posts.
I don’t think that academic bloggers have figured out how to bring the
two worlds together yet. I could probably do a better job bringing in
scholarship into this blog, while keeping a regular audience, but that
would require some thought and time. And $3 of revenue from google ads
doesn’t buy a lot of thought or time.
Apt. 11d 
Media folk like me also occasionally check out academic blogs, so there is a direct PR component.
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$3–retire already! 🙂
It’s funny because after I blogged that, I got another response that basically said these are stupid. I feel truly sorry for some of these people.
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Resepected Academic(tm) Kieran Healy’s latest post at Crooked Timber is all about Cookie Monster. It’s also impossibly cute.
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Couple of things:
1. Academic blogging can happen but the focus of the blog then has to remain on the actual subject matter at hand and that is it. I’d hate to get some troll throwing an annoying comment or a flame war starting over the minutua of a comment/statement rather than topical discussion.
2. You could aggregate feeds on a specific topic but given how much of a pain it could be to come up with a thesis it could seem to be the case that many just aren’t in the mood to blog their findings?
3. Aren’t academics by default Luddites? Papers can be discussed and it can be done well but my guess would be to do this effectively you would need somewhere with registration of users and what they want to post/publish. I;d also argue that people are short to present in the internet due to the ability for someone to rip off your work.
5. The same idea of why research in academic subjects is the same for fin services/manufacturing/engineering/pharma, where the average person has no access to research on many companies. Google is trying to get more exposure to see not just where we succeeded topics but also where did we fall miserably on our faces so that we can learn from them. I think it will take some time as there as so many egos to deal with. But this in itself removes the idea of a competitive advantage that we all have grown up thinking we have had. MIT opened up its courseware and I’d argue that more people are learning from MIT as a direct result. Maybe it makes the case for limited areas but not for everything.
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