conference paper presentation

1. Pat Thomson (Nottingham)
Inger Mewburn (ANU)
SRHE December 2012

2. why look at academic blogging
Many universities now have official blog sites
There is a league table of university social media use
Academics are now being told how they must use social media,
including blogs:
• UK - how to do downloadable booklets, and workshops
• Australia - as above, but also some concerns about regulation
(a moral panic?)
There are a lot of 'unofficial' academic blogs
What’s going on here?

3. Blogs communicate with others, right?
Quote:
Why academics should blog
3. The point of academia is to expand knowledge!
If you believe that the reason academics publish is to expand knowledge, then expanding
it beyond the few tens or hundreds of your colleagues that read the obscure journals you
publish in should be a good thing. Your ideas should matter (if they don't you should
try to come up with some better ideas). If they matter then more people should know
about them, and right now almost all your ideas are locked up inside the walls of
journals, academic conferences, and university quadrangles. Set them free, and the good
ideas will spread, be built on by others, and knowledge as a whole will benefit.!
!
4. Blogging expands your readership!
Cross-pollination of ideas makes for a more healthy intellectual ecosystem, and blogging
means that anyone, not just those in your discipline, will be likely to read your stuff.
This includes other academics, as well as the rest of us (politicians, policy
developers, artists, engineers, designers, writers, thinkers, kids, parents, and on and
on). Anyone might have an interest in your work, or nuanced ideas about how it might be
improved, or indeed thoughts on how your thoughts might improve their own thinking on a
particular (perhaps nominally-unrelated) topic. More readers, from a more varied
background, means your ideas will have a bigger impact.!
Hugh Maguire. Huff Post 28/10/2008

4. What to ask about blogs?
Weller (2012, p. 5) offers a set of quality oriented questions e.g. are they 'proper
scholarship'? What is their impact on academic communities?
Hank (2012) looked at who was blogging - she collected 644 blogs, surveyed 153
bloggers, interviewed 24, codes 93 blogs, looked for motivation and
preservation issues
Walker (2006) examined own practices over time
Ewins (2005) looked at motivation, identity issues and potential work difficulties
and pay offs
Gregg (2005) looked at blogs as support for doctoral researchers who have
inadequate institutional support and supervision, (b) as mentoring and job
seeking support, and (c) as a space distinct from the parent culture of
institutions, and (d) blogs as a form of individualized self-promotion.

5. There is research into blogging
There is research into blogs from
subject specific interests eg
journalism, linguistics and
communications, cultural studies
There is research which looks at
blogging with pedagogical
purposes: how to use a blog as
part of a course
There are of course a lot of blogs
about blogging - advocacy and
experience-based
But there is still very little research
looking at academic blogging per
se

6. Our questions about academic
blogs:
What is going on?
Who is blogging about what, and for whom?
And this means:
Is there a way of categorising academic blogs?
…recognising that textual analysis is only part of 'seeing’ production-
reception practice

7. Our sample
We used three selection criteria for an 'academic blog':
• A blog is published and read online
• A blog has sequential entries, published over time
• The blog entries are written by someone either working
in or clearly associated with one or more universities
Selection process: modified snowball technique
Total blogs in sample: 174 so far
This is a preliminary analysis of 83 of these blogs

8. tag cloud from 'about' pages

9. Who is blogging?
In the analysis presented here:
36% bloggers had no clear allegiance; 42% were Humanities scholars
and 22% bloggers were from Sciences
The majority of blogs (66%) were written by academics; (23%) by
professional staff members and the rest were unclear.
28% of the blogs had multiple authors.
49% of the blogs were from the UK; 39% from the USA and the rest
from Canada and Australia.

10. Who was the intended audience?
In most cases, the intended audience is implied in the topic and
tone of the post, not explicitly stated in the about section.
The vast majority of blogs (95%) appear to be oriented to an
academic audience*
Only 5% of the blogs seemed to be explicitly aimed at
disseminating research to the interested general public and
4% at students.
Most academic blogs seem to be written for an audience of
the blogger's peers

11. What are they blogging about?
So far we have identified 11 different categories of post (the
percentage shows the number of blogs such posts
appeared on):
Academic culture Critique (41%)
Research conversation (40%)
Academic Practices (32%)
Information (26%)
Self Help (17%)
Technical practices (15%)
Personal reflection (8%)
Teaching advice (5%)
Career advice (1%)

12. What 'voice' are they using?
The last 5 entries of each blog were reviewed. Most
employed 'hybrid' genres; the three genres we
identified were:
Pedagogic ('teacherly')
Essay (formal and informal or reflective)
Reportage
Informal or reflective essays were most common;
reportage was least common, but more blogs (75%)
employed mixed genre than single genre.

13. What does a typical academic blog
look like?
Based on these data, blogs with the highest cue
validity (Roche, 1978) would be those which are:
• Single authored
• Written by someone in an academic position
• Engaged in commentary on academia itself and
research dissemination with an informal essay
voice
• Written for an audience of the blogger's peers

14. So what?
(1) Comparatively few academics blog. Many academic blogs,
like all others, are ephemeral. There are relatively few long-
lasting blogs. Institutional commitment might be one way of
creating sustainability, but long-life academic bloggers are
creating a body of work and there needs to be some way of
treating it as such, not just as a series of isolated posts.
(2) Pedagogic blogs can be seen as a gift economy. Critique is
of course also a kind of 'gift'. There is sharing of information
rather than collaboration.There is however certainly a lot of
self-promotion which is congruent with practice in the wider
academic field

15. And…more surprisingly
(3) Academic bloggers seem to largely talk to each other. This is not a
place where there seems to be a lot of 'public engagement'. There are
of course some areas of overlap with practice fields ( e.g. school
education) and some from celebrity academics all of whose publications
attract a wide audience. But there is less translation than might be
expected if it was public engagement or dissemination to the public
more generally. There is an assumption that the audience is 'like me'.
Dissemination seems more like a conversation, with a lot of assumed
knowledge. This is not dissimilar to the 'message' of a journal article,
but blogs are journal-lite.
(4) But the presence of so much discussion about impact and changing
work patterns in HE suggests blogs do exist in some kind of public
sphere in which asynchronous debate could be said to exist. There is
less evidence of 'dialogue'. However it is evidence of an inward looking
practice.

16. We concur with Dean (2012) that there is a 'blogipelago'
not a blogosphere. Academics seem to exist on their own
set of islands, largely talking with each other. Their blogs
are evidence of this. While this is still a public good, it
raises questions about assumptions that blogging is a
means of generating public debate.

17. We welcome comments: patricia.thomson@nottingham.ac.uk
Please cite this as a conference paper “ Social media: an academic
public good” Thomson, P and Mewburn, I ( December 14, 2012) SRHE
conference, Newport, Wales.

18. tag cloud from 'about' pages