Found on Templedata, Georg Hibberd’s excellent tech blog for the University of Sydney, and crossposted to You Cried for Night.
This article from Online Opinion, an Australian site, is by James McConville, a Senior Lecturer in law at La Trobe University.
It is probably still the case that, at least in Australia, blogging is considered a distraction from true scholarship rather than an exciting addition to scholarship. This was the case also in the United States, but the attitude is rapidly changing…
In Australia, most academics are happy to pump out their one or two journal articles a year and the occasional book. Academics cannot be criticised for this, as it is what is expected of them – just as workers in the Cadbury factory are expected to pump out the Freddos and family-size blocks.But surely it is time to open up this traditional approach to examination. Surely things can be done better.
I admit I was tickled by the Cadbury factory allusion as I live down the road from it and have been tempted to contact their library in the past to ask for casual work. I feel an Oompa Loompa song coming on…
McConville’s piece is an admirably brief illustration of what he wants to see in academia – among other things, greater concision and improved writing skills.
Blogging is not a distraction from scholarship – instead it should be recognised as being one of the most effective mechanisms for scholarship. As University of Illinois law Professor Larry Ribstein recently commented on his blog, Ideoblog, “a blog that focuses on ideas can be no distraction at all, but rather part of what scholarship ought to be – the pursuit of knowledge”.
Blogging requires academics to sharpen up their writing skills – what is expressed in 10,000 words in a journal article, must be expressed in a maximum of 1,000 words in a blog post. This is do-able. If a novel idea cannot be expressed concisely in a blog post, I believe there is something wrong with an academic’s writing skills. Blogging will help improve these skills.
Blogging also allows for ideas to be circulated immediately. Having to wait months or even years for an article to be published in a journal takes the buzz out of jumping upon an emerging issue, and therefore probably deters many academics from having a go. Academics can also get instant feedback on their ideas through readers posting comments on the blog site.
He notes that the audience attracted by some academic blogs in the US numbers up to 20,000 visitors a day, and has other pithy things to say about academic publishing, finally quoting US academic Geoff Mann:
‘“The real question is why we are still encouraged to spend so much time flogging the cadaver of traditional scholarship.”’
Go man those cyber barricades, guys, and don’t forget to take librarians with you.
