When I think of blogging, I think of classroom teachers communicating with parents and other like minded classrooms in an effort to open up the conventional classroom walls and have fun showcasing learning. I have been blogging as a teacher and with my students for a number of years. It has been very successful in making students more engaged in their learning and in having more open communication with parents.

I have used my classroom blog as a platform to showcase students writing, having others critique and comment on their efforts to have a more authentic learning experience. Personally, I have also used blogs to get information on a subject or see someones opinion on something. For example, when I decided that I wanted to make my own French Macarons, I found a blog with recipes and tips and tricks. I had not previously thought of how blogging and research could go together. Blogging seems very informal, and research very formal. So I  decided to do some investigating around blogging and research.

I first found an interesting article published in the Guardian by Thomson and Mewburn (2013). The did a small scale quantitative research study to try and understand why academics blog and to see if their finding fit with the current description, that academics blog to “bridge the apparent divide between academia and everyone else”. This was not what their research confirmed. What they found, was that most academics were blogging for their peers as opposed to the general public. That seems to fit with the purpose of this blog, to reflect, connect and share ideas with other members of a learning community. From looking at some other academic blogs, and even blogs in general,  I related to the analogy the authors made of  bloggers “talking together in a kind of giant, global virtual common room”. They pictured a room of like minded individuals sitting at different sub topic tables and talking about issues that interested them within their given fields of research and interest. They also concluded that these were usually safe and friendly spaces where people felt comfortable sharing information in a platform that was not as formal. This seemed to correlate to what I had found in my informal investigation.

Interestingly, as I tried to look for further studies as to why academics blog I kept coming upon this same study (which was published in Studies in Higher Education in 2013) and could find no others to confirm the findings.

But then I came across an article that stopped gave me pause and reflection. The article, also in the Guardian, was from PhD student Lucy Williams and told about how she started academic blogging and the great benefits it gave her. She used her blog to share information about her current research, allowing her to discuss and debate her ideas with people around the world. But then, she goes on to describe when a friend sent her an article he thought she might be interested in. “When I opened the article, I was surprised and horrified, to find a post I had published on my blog just weeks earlier staring back at me, with somebody else’s name placed at the top. Worse still, I found the same post reproduced on other sites, under the name of more authors” (Williams, 2013). She tried in vain to have her work correctly acknowledged and eventually stopped blogging. She concludes by saying that although she likely will blog again, “until something is done to confront the shameless exploitation of the work of early career academics, it can’t be anything I mind losing” (Williams, 2013).

This story shows the potential negative side of blogging and sharing your research and ideas. There is very little ‘policing’ on the internet and it can be difficult to be confident that what you say won’t be used by someone else. This is just the beginning of what could be a much bigger discussion on this topic. Certainly it is an important discussion to have.

Sources:

P. Thomson and I. Mewburn (2013, December 2). Why do academics    blog? It’s not for public outreach, research shows. [Web log post] Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2013/dec/02/why-do-academics-blog-research

L . Williams (2013, December 4). Academic blogging: a risk worth taking? [Web log post] Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2013/dec/04/academic-blogging-newspaper-research-plagiarism